Greenberg’s Universal 42 states that all languages have pronominal categories involving at least three persons and two numbers. However, this characterization fails to capture the properties of pronouns in Japanese, which are not bundles of person, number and gender features (so-called phi-features); rather, they contain sociolinguistic information about the interlocutors. We propose that these properties are structurally determined. Following Ritter and Wiltschko, we assume that the highest layer of structure in nominals is interactional structure. As for phi-features, we adopt the standard assumption that they are represented internal to the determiner phrase (DP). We propose that the distinctive properties of Japanese pronouns follow from the hypothesis that they spell out elements of the interactional structure and not the DP. We show that the lack of phi-features in Japanese pronouns correlates with other properties of this language’s grammar. Support for this analysis comes from languages where pronouns with phi-features can optionally be used to encode formality (e.g. German and French). We propose that in these languages, formal pronouns originate within the DP but are interpreted in the interactional structure. Finally, we suggest that this analysis may extend to imposters and vocatives in that they may also be interpreted in the interactional structure.

Using data from the understudied language Gιsιɖa Anii, we provide a formal analysis of irrealis that builds on the framework of modality proposed in Giannakidou and Mari. In particular, we propose that Anii has an irrealis modal morpheme whose meaning is that the speaker does not believe that the proposition is true at a particular time. This gives irrealis, at least in Anii, a negatively biased meaning. Giannakidou and Mari propose that the subjunctive in European languages is a positively biased modal but find no evidence in their data for a corresponding negatively biased one. However, in expanding their approach to a completely unrelated language, we show that modal bias can also be negative, filling in the paradigmatic gap left open by Giannakidou and Mari’s work. We also illustrate the utility of analyzing irrealis (in relation to the concept of veridicality) as a morphosyntactic and semantic category with a status similar to tense and aspect. Our formal analysis accounts for the obligatory realization of irrealis in a wide range of semantic contexts in Anii, including future tense, negation, and wishes, and shows how irrealis can be composed with other clausal elements. We suggest that reality status, which we analyze as (non)-veridicality, is obligatorily present in the Anii clause and discuss the implications of this for other languages.

In this article, we describe and explain patterns of variation in acceptance of amn’t in varieties of Scots, drawing upon data from the Scots Syntax Atlas. Partly in line with findings from Bresnan (2001), we show that amn’t is much more widely accepted in inversion environments (amn’t I?) than in declaratives (I amn’t), but nevertheless, amn’t in declaratives is still accepted in certain regions of Scotland. We combine the productivity-based explanation of the amn’t gap in Yang (2016, 2017) with new insights into the syntax of Scots negation from Thoms et al. (2023) to provide a predictive account of the attested variation.

The English Preposing in PP construction (PiPP; e.g., Happy though/as we were) is extremely rare but displays an intricate set of stable syntactic properties. How do people become proficient with this construction despite such limited evidence? It is tempting to posit innate learning mechanisms, but present-day large language models seem to learn to represent PiPPs as well, even though such models employ only very general learning mechanisms and experience very few instances of the construction during training. This suggests an alternative hypothesis on which knowledge of more frequent constructions helps shape knowledge of PiPPs. I seek to make this idea precise using model-theoretic syntax (MTS). In MTS, a grammar is essentially a set of constraints on forms. In this context, PiPPs can be seen as arising from a mix of construction-specific and general-purpose constraints, all of which seem inferable from general linguistic experience.

I argue that more and less are always determinatives, contrary to the categorization in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL), which treats them as adverbs in analytic comparatives. Evidence is presented of contrasts between more/less and much/little in various contexts, challenging CGEL’s empirical claim that such contrasts never occur in analytic comparatives. The observed distributional patterns can largely be explained by the semantics of more/-er and much without positing a category distinction: more/-er establishes a salient scale-internal reference point, while much requires such a point to already be present. Furthermore, mere distributional differences should not be relied upon for category assignment, following arguments by Payne , Huddleston & Pullum (2010). For these reasons, analyzing more and less as adverbs in any context is unnecessary and unparsimonious. The determinative analysis can account for all the relevant data. Beyond the narrow point about categorization, the paper illustrates the contributions of semantic, pragmatic, and distributional evidence in resolving category assignment.

The intervocalic position favors voicing in stops. Yet, some languages have been reported to feature the opposite (unnatural) process of intervocalic devoicing. This paper investigates two such case studies. Pre-Berawan intervocalic *b and *g have developed into Berawan k. Pre-Kiput intervocalic *g, *ɟʝ, and *v have developed into Kiput k, cç, and f, respectively. To account for the data, we invoke Beguš’s (2018, 2019) blurring process model of sound change. The model proposes that unnatural phonology derives from a sequence of at least three phonetically motivated sound changes. We argue that the steps involved in intervocalic devoicing are (i) the intervocalic fricativization of voiced stops, (ii) devoicing of fricatives, and (iii) the occlusion of devoiced fricatives. Each of the steps is independently attested and motivated. We demonstrate that our blurring process proposal explains aspects of the historical development unaccounted for by previous approaches, and present new evidence suggesting that a single sound change could not have operated in the prehistory of Berawan. Thus, we maintain the conservative position that unnatural diachronic developments arise from sequences of natural and phonetically grounded sound changes.

To bring linguistic theory back in touch with commonplace observations concerning the resilience of language in use to language change, language acquisition and ungrammaticality, Pullum and colleagues have argued for a ‘model-theoretic’ theory of syntax. The present paper examines the implications for linguists working in standard formal frameworks and argues that, to the extent that such theories embrace monotonicity in syntactic operations, they qualify as model-theoretic under some minor modifications to allow for the possibility of unknown words.

This paper deals with a construction, which we dub Non-Agreeing Degree (NAD) constructions, with the distinguishing property that the agreement pattern between subjects and degree predicates is optionally disrupted, even in languages (like Spanish) where verbs commonly agree with their subjects. We show that the agreeing versus non-agreeing alternation comes with important semantic differences for the interpretation of the degree construction. We provide a first systematic description of this type of constructions and postulate a formal syntactic and semantic analysis. We argue that NAD constructions are characterized by degree predicates that introduce a non-conventional nominal scale and by subjects that are interpreted as equally non-conventional units of measurement. We postulate an intensionalization process on the subject of NAD constructions, which we capture via a general nominalization function that allows a default as well as an ordinary agreement pattern between subject and copula.

Contrast, adversative and corrective can all be represented by er in Classical Chinese, but they are lexicalized respectively by er, danshi and ershi in Modern Chinese. The two lexicalization systems suggest that the opposition relations have commonalities as well as differences. In the framework of relevance theory and ‘three domains’, this study argues that the three opposition relations are in different cognitive domains, at different representational levels, and trigger different inferences, which accounts for their diverse lexicalizations in Modern Chinese. The opposition relations also have cognitive or metaphorical connections with each other, which justifies their unified actualization in Classical Chinese. The pragmatics-cognitive framework could also account for interlinguistic data.

In most of the literature on English phonology, historically prefixed words such as contain, respect or submit are seen as having no morphological structure synchronically. However, such words were treated as complex in the early generative literature and are still analysed in that way in part of the literature. In this paper, we seek to review the evidence for the claim that such words are simplex words, which predicts that they should pattern with words with no internal structure in their phonological and morphological behaviours and in psycholinguistic experiments. We show that the evidence does not support that claim and shows that these words should be treated as morphologically complex units, although they differ from words with productive morphology. As these words tend to be partly or entirely opaque semantically, this raises the question of how such structures may be learned. We argue that the recurrence of forms is the main factor leading to their identification and lay out a possible order of acquisition of various morphological structures. Finally, we argue that theories of phonology may account for this by allowing the reference to morphological constituents whose semantics are impoverished.

In the present article, we describe what we call Intransparent-Gap Relatives (IGRs) in Japanese. In IGRs, a gap is located within the relative clause, and the head noun appears outside the relative clause. Unlike the standard head-external relatives, the gap in IGRs is not transparently associated with the head noun, but they are mediated through a metonymic relation. We propose a formal account of IGRs in terms of incremental parsing in Dynamic Syntax: an IGR string is processed in a left-to-right manner, and a semantic structure is progressively built up. This account unifies the standard head-external relatives and IGRs, relegating their differences to the ways in which the head noun is parsed and construed against the relative clause structure. Confirmation of this analysis comes from cross-constructional and cross-linguistic considerations. First, the analysis predicts that a metonymic reading is available in relatives but not in other rightward-displacement constructions, such as clefts and postposing. Second, the analysis suggests that IGRs are possible in languages such as Japanese and Korean, where the relative clause is processed before the head noun, but not in languages such as English and French, where the head noun is processed before the relative clause.

Generative approaches to syntactic control have traditionally viewed it as a distinct component of the grammar, one that governs the interpretation and distribution of the empty category (EC) PRO. However, the Movement Theory of Control (MTC) proposes that control should instead be conceived of as a form of raising, with both sentence types involving the EC DP/NP Trace. In addition to theoretical arguments, some behavioral research on antecedent reactivation has demonstrated that different ECs reactivate their antecedents to different degrees and at different points in the time course of comprehension. In this study, we used a cross-modal repetition priming paradigm to examine antecedent reactivation in Brazilian Portuguese. We found significantly greater activation at the gap position in raising sentences and in those with overt pronouns as compared to (exhaustive) control sentences, consistent with the standard account of raising and the traditional view of control as involving a distinct EC. Additionally, we found some evidence for a differentiation between exhaustive and partial control structures. Overall, our results suggest that 1) similar linguistic mechanisms are employed in the processing of sentences that involve overt pronouns and DP/NP traces, and 2) different mechanisms are employed in the processing of raising and control structures, a finding we view as inconsistent with the MTC.

This paper provides evidence that the inveterate way of assessing linguistic items’ degrees of analysability by calculating their derivation to base frequency ratios may obfuscate the difference between two meaning processing models: one based on the principle of compositionality and another on the principle of parsability. I propose to capture the difference between these models by estimating the ratio of two transitional probabilities for complex words: P (affix | base) and P (base | affix). When transitional probabilities are comparably low, each of the elements entering into combination is equally free to vary. The combination itself is judged by speakers to be semantically transparent, and its derivational element tends to be more linguistically productive. In contrast, multi-morphemic words that are characterised by greater discrepancies between transitional probabilities are similar to collocations in the sense that they also consist of a node (conditionally independent element) and a collocate (conditionally dependent element). Such linguistic expressions are also considered to be semantically complex but appear less transparent because the collocate’s meaning does not coincide with the meaning of the respective free element (even if it exists) and has to be parsed out from what is available.

In this paper, we compare the comprehension of the speech act meaning of non-canonical speech acts (i.e., rhetorical questions and surprise-disapproval questions) with the comprehension of indirect speech acts (i.e., indirect requests). Both speech act types are ‘mixed’ in the sense that they involve secondary and primary illocutionary forces, but our hypothesis is that they differ in their degree of how salient their primary illocutionary force is: On the one hand, the primary illocution is signaled by non-contextual cues (non-canonical speech acts); on the other hand, it is derived via pragmatic inferencing (indirect speech acts). We thus expect their comprehension processes to be different. We conducted a judgment experiment to test whether both speech act types differ regarding how accurate the primary illocutionary force is identified and regarding how fast that force can be identified. Our results suggest that non-canonical speech acts and indirect speech acts are indeed two distinct pragmatic and psychological phenomena: While non-canonical speech acts are more accurately identified with their primary illocutionary force than indirect speech acts, participants need more time to perform this identification for non-canonical speech acts than for indirect speech acts. Our findings shed new light on the mapping between linguistic form and illocutionary force and on the pragmatic typology of speech acts in general.

Expletive subject clitics (ESCs) are pronominal elements that occur in impersonal contexts with which no individual reference is associated. Their presence strikingly distinguishes northern Italo-Romance varieties from standard Italian. We target this structural incongruence by studying the occurrence of ESCs in present-day Opitergino, a virtually unstudied Venetan variety. We explore the question of whether, in the wake of a profound transformation in the sociolinguistic environment that occurred between the first half of the 20th century and early 2020 years, the contact between Opitergino and now-dominant Italian has induced change in the Opitergino ESC system. To test whether change has occurred and to what extent, we compare the results of an extensive online survey we conducted in 2022 with the baseline rules we extracted from speakers born before 1942. We observe that while the system is overall stable, a thread of change is ongoing and manifests in (a) rule weakening in declaratives and (b) erosion of the obligatoriness of ESCs in interrogatives. We argue that this change is likely to be an effect of contact, resulting in structural convergence but not in loss, and affected the part of the ESC system that features more optionality, namely, the domain of declarative clauses.