Agreement with coordination has been a topic of much discussion in the syntactic literature for decades. This is due to its significance in deepening our understanding of key issues, such as the way primitive syntactic operations such as Merge and Agree operate and interact with hierarchical/linear distance, the location of agreement in the grammar, and whether or not narrow syntax, just like the PF

This paper presents the results of an experimental investigation that looks into the acceptability and interpretation judgements that Basque native speakers give to sentences with multiple i-/bat ere indefinites in declarative sentences. It is argued that Basque i-/bat ere indefinites are Polarity Items (PIs) rather than Negative Concord Items (NCIs), as they are consistently associated with an existential

In Gua, an underdocumented Tano Guang language spoken in Ghana, regressive ATR vowel harmony applies within words and non-iteratively across word boundaries. Although vowel harmony is known to cross word boundaries in some languages, little is known about the domains and extent of such harmony. We show that ATR harmony in Gua operates within phonological phrases that preferentially consist of two or

Predicate fronting with doubling (also known as the predicate cleft) has long been a challenge for theories of syntax that do not predict the pronunciation of multiple occurrences. Previous analyses that derive the construction via syntactic movement, including those attributing verb doubling to the formation of parallel chains (e.g., Aboh 2006; Kandybowicz 2008), are incompatible with remnant movement

Models of nominal structure in Japanese and Korean (JK) are commonly built on the assumption that the nominal domain must be head-final because JK clauses show head-final ordering, rather than being directly supported by observable empirical head-final patterns. In order to produce the surface orders that are found in JK nominals, all head-final analyses require massive hidden movements from underlying

In German, complement clauses embedded by the wh-word wie (‘how’) have two different readings. The first is a manner reading expressing a manner or method of doing something. The second is called eventive in this paper because it expresses an event in progress instead of a manner. Ruling out ambiguity of wie, the question arises of why a manner word is used to express an event in progress. The basic

Rolle (2020) identifies an apparent morphophonological conspiracy in serial verb constructions (SVCs) in Degema. He argues that it constitutes evidence for a partly-unified postsyntactic module, in which morphology and prosody are built in parallel (by ‘Optimality-Theoretic Distributed Morphology’). We argue that the pattern Rolle identifies in Degema SVCs instead results from the simultaneous interaction

A subset of Mayan languages feature “prosodic allomorphy,” a phenomenon involving morphological alternations at certain prosodic boundaries. In previous work, Henderson (2012) proposes that prosodic allomorphs in K’iche’ provide evidence for non-isomorphisms in the correspondence between syntax and prosody. In this paper, I argue against this view by building on a related extraposition analysis in

Extraposition is the non-canonical placement of dependents in a right-peripheral position in a clause. The Austronesian language Malagasy has basic VOXS word order, however, extraposition leads to VOSX. Extraposed constituents behave syntactically as though they were in their undisplaced position inside the predicate at both LF and Spell Out. This paper argues that extraposition is achieved via movement

The relationship between syntactic structure and prosodic structure has received increased theoretical attention in recent years. Richards (2010) proposes that Japanese allows wh-elements to stay in situ because of a certain aspect of its prosodic system. Specifically, in contrast to some other languages like English, Japanese can prosodically group wh-elements together with their licensers. This prosodic

This paper explores the learnability of English indefinite any, Dutch modal verb hoeven, and Mandarin Chinese (WH-)indefinite/pronoun shenme. These three expressions, belonging to different syntactic categories in different languages, have been referred to as Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) in the literature, as they are all restricted to contexts that in some sense count as negative although there

The control dependency in grammar is conventionally distinguished into two classes: exhaustive (i→i) and non-exhaustive (i→i + (j)). Here, we show that, in languages like German and Italian, some speakers allow a new kind of “proxy control” which differs from both, such that, for a controller i, and a controllee j, j = proxy(i). The proxy function picks out a set of individuals that is discourse-pragmatically

This article focuses on Clitic Left Dislocation of XPs in French and Greek. By examining the interpretive properties of these XPs, primarily reconstruction properties, it concludes that they have been displaced from their first merge position via movement into (sometimes) a succession of hierarchically organized middle-field positions first above vP then above T and on to the left periphery via standard

In this paper I review the locality domains of contextual allomorphy, contextual allosemy and morphophonology with a special emphasis on compounds. I show that when the applications of these processes within compounds are compared, we observe a distinction between the domain of contextual allomorphy and contextual allosemy, on one hand, and morphophonology on the other. I argue that the mismatches

Pesetsky (1995) argued that both objects in the double object construction must be selected arguments of the lexical verb, based on patterns of optionality. A closer examination shows that this is not correct. The second object of the double object construction and both the NP and PP of the PP frame behave like selected arguments of the lexical verb: the lexical verb determines both whether they can

This paper presents a study of a split absolutive-nominative agreement pattern in Gitksan (Tsimshianic) which co-occurs with ergative agreement. The split is conditioned on the basis of nominal type: alongside ergative agreement, a second type of agreement targets absolutives (S, O) when the subject is a participant or third-singular pronoun, or nominatives (S, A) when the subject is a full DP or third-plural

This paper proposes a new diagnostic for the detection of stative sub-events in the decomposition of verbal predicates. The diagnostic is based on a certain type of presupposition triggered by additive operators like Greek ke ‘also’, which we call Stative Presuppositions. It is argued that the generation of such Stative Presuppositions requires the existence of a syntactically accessible constituent

Current phasal models of words differ from one another in two main ways: which heads are phasal and whether a phase head allows higher heads to access its complement. Through an investigation of verbs in Muskogee, this paper argues that in some languages, words have functional phase heads that divide them into two domains and that block all higher heads from access to morphemes. Specifically, Muskogee

Rutooro is a Bantu language of Uganda that lacks lexical tone. Instead, prominence in Rutooro is marked with a High tone (H) on the penultimate syllable of the phonological phrase (φ-phrase). Like many languages in the family, syntactic XPs reliably correspond to φ-phrases; however, we find a previously unattested pattern in the prosody of Rutooro adnominal phrases. Head nouns are marked H when they

Nilo-Saharan languages are well-known for their complicated system of nominal number marking, which features a variety of singulative and plural affixes (Dimmendaal 2000). Even though these systems have received some attention in the typological literature, there has been limited theoretical work on their implications for the morphosyntax of number cross-linguistically. The goal of this paper is to

The literature on resumptive pronouns (RPs) has given rise to a rich taxonomy of the phenomenon. Despite the fact that RPs invariably have the morphosyntactic form of ordinary pronouns, they vary widely in distribution and function. In some languages, RPs are grammatically licensed; depending on the language and the syntactic context, they might or might not realize traces, compete with gaps, exhibit

Higgins (1973) famously distinguished between predicational and specificational interpretations of copular sentences. Since then, the literature has debated whether specificational interpretations exist and, if so, what they are. This paper contributes to this debate by providing three new arguments for recognizing specificational interpretations, and against the view, prevalent in the syntactic literature

The ability root in Palestinian Arabic (PA) licenses actuality entailments under perfective-marking, but not under imperfective-marking. In this, the root mirrors the behavior of similar expressions in other languages. However, further morphosyntactic environments that are unique to PA provide empirical arguments against certain theoretical accounts of actuality entailments, and show a robust correlation

We argue that some parenthetical-like clauses in ASL can take both intermediate and maximally wide scope outside of if-clauses and attitude verbs. Specifically, we investigate embedded coordinations, of the form … SAY [IF Clause-1 Clause-2 PLUS Clause-3, …], and argue that Clause-2 may in some cases be interpreted with wide and intermediate scope (above SAY, or between SAY and IF). The key to our paradigm

In Xining Chinese, especially as used by older people, free nouns are always reduplicated, as a purely formal condition without any semantic effects. We argue that the reduplication takes place when an acategorial root is merged with a null nominal categorizer which copies the phonological matrix of the root, as an effect of a condition ruling out free monosyllabic nouns. When the condition is not

Phonological processes are often sensitive to morphological, prosodic, and derivational structure. In terms of derivational structure, a common factor are strata or levels, as in Lexical Phonology (Kiparsky 1982) or Stratal OT (Bermúdez-Otero 2018). Two commonly argued strata are the stem-level and word-level cophonologies which are morphologically triggered. In this paper, I argue that Armenian has

Recent literature has debated the nature and robustness of distinctions between pronominal tenses and existential tenses, between absolute tenses and relative tenses, and between perfect aspects and relative tenses. In this paper, we investigate anteriority markers in Javanese and Atayal, two distantly related Austronesian languages. On the basis of a range of empirical diagnostics, we propose that

In this paper, we provide an in-depth study of the morphosyntactic behavior of negative verb clusters in the Finno-Ugric languages Udmurt and Mari. We argue that the standard treatment of negation as an auxiliary is inadequate for these languages as it does not explain its morphosyntactic and morphophonological behavior, which presents a challenging morphology-syntax-semantics mismatch: Despite taking

This paper contributes to recent lines of inquiry addressing the nature of indices in definite expressions. The primary language of investigation is Washo, a North American isolate spoken in the western United States. Building on previous claims about the structure of anaphoric definites, I propose a unified analysis of the Washo DP that lends novel evidence to the claim that indices are best thought

The paper presents an argument for structural case in a Bantu language, Ndebele. Bantu languages notoriously lack typical signs of case licensing, which has led to the proposal that they lack case altogether. A recent claim to the contrary, put forth in Halpert (2012, 2015), has been challenged by Carstens and Mletshe (2016), who argue that the patterns Halpert describes fall under the umbrella of

This paper addresses two long-standing issues concerning focus: first, the question of whether the focal interpretation is directly read off the prosodic structure of a sentence, or it is rather mediated by a [focus] feature encoded in the syntactic representation; second, whether interrogative wh-phrases are inherently endowed with a [focus] feature. We provide evidence from two prosodic experiments

Plurals in the native stratum of German nouns exhibit a complex interlacing of arbitrary lexical classes and virtually exceptionless generalizations across them. Thus while it is not fully predictable phonologically or semantically which suffix allomorph a plural noun takes and whether it undergoes umlaut (vowel fronting), specific suffixes consistently trigger or block umlaut (Augst 1979; Wurzel 1998;

Why are some linguistic inferences treated as presuppositions? This is the ‘Triggering Problem,’ which we attack from a new angle: we investigate highly iconic constructions in gestures (speech-replacing gestures or ‘pro-speech gestures’) and in signs (classifier predicates in ASL) and show that some regularly trigger presuppositions. These iconic constructions can be created and understood ‘on the

McCarthy (2013) asks whether there are phonological systems necessitating irreducible parallelism in grammar—systems requiring that multiple changes to the input apply in parallel, in a single derivational step. Such systems would necessitate a framework with lookahead: the ability to see from a given derivational step the results of applying multiple changes to its input. This article makes the following

This article revisits the long-standing issue of the alternation between wh-in-situ and wh-ex-situ questions in French in the light of diglossia and cross-linguistic data. A careful preliminary examination of the numerous wh-structures in Metropolitan French leads us to focus on Colloquial French, which undoubtedly displays both wh-in-situ and wh-ex-situ questions. Within this dataset, wh-ex-situ questions

Some propose that loanword adaptation is at its core non-native perception of foreign input (Boersma and Hamann 2009; Peperkamp et al. 2008; Silverman 1992). It has also been noted, however, that cross-language correspondences in loanwords are far more consistent than expected based on on-line perception by naïve monolinguals. There is also evidence that cross-language perception itself differs depending

I argue that a range of morphological phenomena sensitive to features of multiple arguments in Georgian (South Caucasian)—including Anti-Superiority ef- fects (Béjar 2003), and omnivorous number effects (Nevins 2011) – receive a unified account if spellout targets contiguous spans of maximally simple heads, in a fixed hierarchy. I introduce new data from a related language, Laz, and show that a close

Empirical evidence is provided for the existence of a discourse-related area between TP and vP in Jordanian Arabic (JA), a finding which is in line with Belletti’s (2004, 2005) model of the low IP area in natural languages. A two million-word corpus of naturally occurring data from JA, supported by grammaticality judgements from 50 JA speakers, reveals that the subject in VSO clauses of JA is mostly

In the paper we argue that the English VP/NP structures in (i) a-d have exact counterparts in the i(ranian)Persian PP/NP structures in (ii) a-d, where P1-P3 are three different classes of iPersian Ps and where -EZ is the so-called “Ezafe” morpheme. (i. a) John [VP destroy the evidence] “Pure VP”; (i. b) John -’s [NP destroying the evidence] Nominalized VP; (i. c) John -’s [NP destroying of the evidence]

Samoan is an ergative-marking, (reportedly) non-tonal Polynesian language in which ergative case is marked segmentally, but absolutive case has been said to be unmarked. This paper shows that in fact, a high edge tone co-occurs with absolutive arguments, based on converging evidence from the phonetic and phonological analysis of intonational patterns in the spoken utterances of a systematically varied

This paper explores morphologically-conditioned alternations in Mbat (Jarawan Bantu) verb stems. Some inflectional affixation in Mbat results in resyllabification. The singleton coda of a CGVC verb stem will become the onset of a new syllable following the addition of a vowel-initial suffix (e.g., Perfective -am). What is surprising is that this, in turn, triggers onset simplification in the stem itself

Hungarian adjectival sluices show agreement characteristics of predicative adjectives, even though the correlate of the adjective is in attributive position. This has been taken as evidence for the existence of non-isomorphic (i.e. copular/cleft) sources for the ellipsis site. However, such an analysis could only capture the distribution of apparent case-mismatches by positing copular sources for a

This paper presents evidence that tone well-formedness patterns share a property of melody-locality, and shows how patterns with this property can be learned. Essentially, a melody-local pattern is one in which constraints over an autosegmental melody operate independently of constraints over the string of tone-bearing units. This includes a range of local tone patterns, long-distance tone-patterns

In this paper, we compare the properties of dative and genitive objects in Classical vs. Modern Greek. Based on the difference in behavior of dative/genitive objects of ditransitives and monadic transitives in the two periods of Greek which correlates with a range of systematic alternations in the case realization of Modern Greek IO arguments depending on the presence and category (DP vs. PP) of lower

We distinguish between two types of interrogative particles, (regular) question particles and polar question particles. The first, canonically exemplified by Japanese -ka, occurs in all interrogatives, in matrix as well as embedded contexts. The second, the object of the present study, is exemplified by the Hindi-Urdu particle kya:. Polar kya: occurs in polar questions but not in wh questions, and

We argue that some properties of sign language grammar have counterparts in non-signers’ intuitions about gestures, including ones that are probably very uncommon. Thus despite the intrinsic limitations of gestures compared to full-fledged sign languages, they might access some of the same rules. While gesture research often focuses on co-speech gestures, we investigate pro-speech gestures, which fully

We show that the same Universal Grammar mechanism of Agree can have two quite different grammatical effects: normal agreement in person-number-gender features, or inducing a referential dependency between two designated DPs. As an instance of the latter, we study the switch-reference systems of two Panoan languages, Shipibo and Yawanawa. In addition to the fairly widespread distinction between same-subject

Projective content is heterogeneous, with classes of projective content differing in several properties (e.g., Potts 2005; Tonhauser et al. 2013). Recently, Tonhauser et al. (2018) found that projective content in English varies in its projectivity both between and within classes, and also that there is by-participant and by-lexical content projection variability. This paper shows that projection variability

The existence of negative descriptions denoting events is controversial in the literature, since it implies enriching the semantic ontology with negative events. The goal of this article is to argue that the readings that have been called ‘negative events’—in contrast to sentential negation reading—should be analysed as inhibited eventualities. We will argue that the inhibited eventuality reading emerges

Baker (2015) suggests that the dependent theory of case (Marantz 1991, a.o.) is a formulation of the intuition that morphological case functions to differentiate nominals. This paper presents novel evidence for this idea from the agreement system of Yimas. Departing from previous characterizations of the language, this paper argues that the Yimas agreement morphemes are actually doubled pronominal

We present a series of large-scale formal acceptability judgment studies that explored Norwegian island phenomena in order to follow up on previous observations that speakers of Mainland Scandinavian languages like Norwegian accept violations of certain island constraints that are unacceptable in most languages cross-linguistically. We tested the acceptability of wh-extraction from five island types:

Expletive Negation is widespread in human languages. Although many semantic, pragmatic and syntactic hypotheses about it have been advanced, it still remains puzzling. Two questions, particularly, need to be faced: (i) what are the contexts, mainly syntactic, where negation receives its vacuous interpretation? (ii) Is EN a phenomenon grammatically distinct from standard negation or are they the same

This paper investigates case and agreement patterns in Iranian languages, mainly focusing on Zazaki and Kurdish varieties. Empirically, the paper discusses the typologically rare double-oblique pattern, along with a novel way of splitting the oblique. On the basis of the syntactic behavior of oblique-bearing arguments, the paper argues that the term ‘oblique’ corresponds to distinct cases, ranging

We argue that Asante Twi has a process of tonal overwriting on verbs that are crossed by an A’-dependency. It is shown that this view captures the distribution of the process across ex-situ focus constructions, relative clauses and adverbial clauses, which are all contexts involving operator movement. Furthermore, we illustrate that this process is unbounded and applies to each verb in a long-distance

West Circassian displays prominent polysynthetic morphology both in the verbal and nominal domains and both syntactic categories are subject to the same morphological ordering constraints. I argue that despite these similarities, nominal and verbal wordforms in West Circassian are in fact constructed via two distinct word formation processes: while the verbal root and any accompanying functional morphology

Spanish comparatives have two morphemes that can introduce the standard of comparison: the complementizer que (‘that’) and the preposition de (‘of’/‘from’). This paper defends the idea that comparatives introduced by the standard morpheme de are phrasal comparatives that always express overt comparison to a degree. I show how this analysis derives the key properties of de comparatives, including the

This paper shows that a postalveolar co-occurrence restriction (Obligatory Contour Principle, OCP) is a productive component of Slovenian phonology. We first examine whether an apparent OCP-based restriction on derived palatalization, previously observed in corpus data (Jurgec 2016), extends to novel forms via a goodness-rating task. We then explore the generality of the restriction across the lexicon

Phrasal idioms have been used as evidence in syntactic theorizing for decades. A common assumption, occasionally made explicit (e.g., Larson 2017), is that non-literal phrasal idioms differ significantly from completely literal collocations in the kinds of syntactic structures they can be built from. I show with a detailed empirical study that this is false. In fact, the syntactic constraints on idioms