Addressee in syntax

• Applicant: Professor Hedde Zeijlstra, Ph.D.
• Subject Area: General and Comparative Linguistics, Experimental Linguistics, Typology, Non-European Languages
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 462000466

In view of two empirical phenomena: (i) allocutivity, and (ii) imperatives with a 2nd person (2P) subject, recent literature argues that the utterance addressee is represented syntax-internally. However, the addressee representations underlying each of the phenomena differ. Allocutivity, defined as verbal agreement with the addressee, underlies an argumental representation of the addressee located in the speech act phrase labeled as the Adr (Miyagawa 2012). In contrast, imperatives host a Jussive Phrase, which encodes the addressee via a 2P feature and is restricted to imperative clauses only (Zanuttini 2008). This project aims to understand why these two phenomena, both of which involve syntactic reference to the addressee, should be analyzed differently. With the goal of providing an account of the addressee in syntax, this project asks the following question: how specific is the notion of addressee in imperatives, and can it be unified with the freely available Adr, also responsible for allocutivity? To this end, we begin with examining subjunctive directives. Subjunctive directives challenge the syntactic-encoding of the addressee in at least two ways: first, they can occur with 1P/3P subjects, which do not provide any (binding/agreement related) syntactic evidence instantiating the addressee, and secondly, they manifest so-called ‘wish’-readings, which do not require the addressee to act or even be present. The limited empirical and theoretical coverage received by these directives warrants an extended survey to determine if all directives encode a construction-specific Jussive Phrase in syntax. If the above examination signals weakened support for the Jussive Phrase, it would also require an alternative analysis of addressee-related properties of 2P subject imperatives. It is therefore essential that we understand the constraints on variation with respect to the position and nature of the clause-type-free Adr in syntax. Since allocutivity is directly indicative of the Adr, we plan to conduct a cross-linguistic examination of allocutivity with focus on its (i) featural composition, (ii) relation with 2P pronouns in the main clause, and (iii) distribution in embedded clauses, to build a theory of allocutivity, and through this, of the Adr. These findings will be employed to explain addressee-restriction in imperatives, which in turn allows us to provide a (unified) account for the addressee in syntax.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants