Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

published_or_final_version / Linguistics / Master / Master of Arts

published_or_final_version / Community Medicine / Master / Master of Philosophy

Towards a Unified Treatment of Modality (abstract) Sumayya Racy, Ph.D. The primary claim of this thesis is that despite the numerous forms modality may take, both within and across languages, there are relatively few features, structures and operations which give rise to these numerous forms. For example, in English the modal notion of obligation may be expressed by a verb (He must go), but an adverb (He obligatorily goes), by an adjective (He is obliged), by a noun (He has an obligation), and even by a preposition (It's on him to go) or by no clear modal marker (He is to go). In other languages, we find still more ways in which modality may be expressed, such as through affixes (Garo), through evidentials (Tuyuca), through modal particles (Norwegian), and through mood (Latin). It is shown in this thesis that by adopting Cinque's (1999) hierarchy of functional projections, Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993), the semantics of Kratzer (1991) and Hacquard (2006) and a limited feature set, we may account for many of these expressions of modality within a single unified framework. In particular, it is argued that modal roots are acategorial (accounting for the many parts of speech we find in modal expressions) and it is proposed that head movement and fusion may take place among modal functional heads (accounting for the fact that modality may be expressed through other categories like evidentiality). Along the way, several interesting facets of modality are pointed out, including the fact that modal nouns may only be used with unusual abilities, and the fact that in English intonation and ASL repeated movement we may find phonological correlates of epistimicity.

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The new urban left in local government from the early 1980s aimed to change the way in which local councils operate so that the users and providers of council services and the local community could gain greater control over the development and provision of council services. Material is produced and analysed to show that the aims of the new urban left Labour councils in this area were, at best, only partially successful. The findings of a comparative case study into industrial relations in Sheffield City Council and Doncaster Borough Council will show that the commitments of Sheffield City Council, on the industrial relations front, as set out in District Labour Party election manifestos, council documents and statements by ex Leader of the Council David Blunkett, have been unfulfilled. Theoretical insights into the relationship between socialism and trade union praxis, the position of professional workers in advanced capitalist society and the theory and practice of new urban left councils will be advanced to help explain the lack of progress. The argument that Labour councils need to think more strategically in order to overcome the structural and institutional obstacles to radical change is advanced. A number of issues highlighted in the literature on the new urban left are considered. Original material affecting the understanding of the relationship between different council trade unions and Labour councils is produced. Arising out of the case study, the role played by senior council officers and leading councillors in the policy making and policy implementation process and the relationship between councillors and senior officers in two different Labour councils is explored. New insights into those areas are produced. Important issues and areas requiring further research are highlighted.

This thesis investigates the functional categories in the vP domain, including aspect, modality, and focus. For this research initiative, five constructions were examined: the Mandarin temporal adverbial, the Mandarin excessive ta, the Mandarin de/bu, the Turkish question particle –mI, and the Armenian auxiliary constructions. These constructions involve functional categories that are expected to appear at the C/IP periphery; however, they surface inside the vP domain. The existence of these low grammatical elements raises non-trivial questions such as how functional categories should be mapped out in the structure, and whether a unified structure can be proposed to account for the cross-linguistic phenomena examined in this thesis. The investigation of these constructions showed that there are cross-domain interactions between low and high functional categories. While Mandarin temporal adverbial constructions showed interactions between viewpoint aspect and lexical aspect via the distributions of the temporal adverbials and various co-occurrence restrictions, the other four constructions demonstrated interactions between the low and the high categories via intervention effects. I argue that low functional categories must be licensed by their counterparts in the C/IP domain, and that the licensing relation and the structural conditions imposed on this relation can be captured if an Agree relation is established between the functional categories in these two domains. The analysis also reveals that low functional categories are the result of feature lowering from v* to some functional projection below it, and the formal features of the low functional categories must assign their values to their counterparts in the C/IP domain via Agree to provide a meaningful input to LF. I propose a parallel analysis between CP and vP to account for the existence of the low grammatical elements in two respects: (1) C and *v, as phase heads, have an edge feature (EPP) and Agree features that need to be valued and/or checked at a functional projection lower than the each phase head; (2) the formal features of C can appear at *v if they are licensed by an associate feature present in the C/T domain for the purpose of Full Interpretation (Chomsky 1995, 2000).