Speech perception is influenced by language-specific phonological knowledge. While phonotactics has long been established to play a role, the study of how phonological alternations influence perception is still in its infancy. In this paper, we make a case for the latter by investigating the role of regressive voicing assimilation (RVA) in the perception of obstruent clusters in Emilian dialects of Italian. We provide empirical evidence from a phoneme-detection task, in which Emilian listeners reported to have heard [b] significantly more often in stimuli with a /p/ before a voiced obstruent (RVA context) than before a vowel (non-RVA context). Our experimental findings add to recent work on the influence of phonology on speech perception. In addition, we provide an explicit formalisation, which bolsters the need for a rigid distinction between phonetic, surface and underlying representation, and an explicit mapping between all three, both in the process of speech production and comprehension.

In Gévaudan varieties of Occitan (Gallo-Romance), exceptionless syncretism between preterite and imperfect subjunctive forms arises in the first and second person plural (e.g. faguessiám [faɡeˈsjɔn] ‘do.pret/ipf.sbjv.1pl’, faguessiatz [faɡeˈsjat] ‘do.pret/ipf.sbjv.2pl’). Reconstructing the historical emergence of this syncretism pattern reveals that it is crucially dependent on multiple and diverse implicational relationships of form, inferred and productively exploited by speakers: in particular, inherited identity between preterite and imperfect subjunctive stems, and identity between imperfect indicative forms of èstre [ɛsˈtʀe] ‘be’ and preterite or imperfect subjunctive desinences. The observed developments support a view of inflectional analogies as informed by intricate paradigmatic and implicational structure of the type proposed within ‘abstractive’, word-based theories of inflection.

This paper investigates the properties of a particle, lǝ, in Yixing Chinese that invariably denotes telic reading, obligatorily fronts definite and bare NP objects to the topic position, and imposes past event reading in most situations. It is argued that lǝ is a functional item bearing a quantity feature in the sense of Borer (2005b) and is hence responsible for telicity. Following Partee et al. (1987), Partee (1990), Filip (1997) and Borer (2005b), we propose that lǝ functions as a verbal quantifier, and more specifically, as a verbal universal quantifier, which needs to bind a variable in its quantificational domain. The fronting of definite and bare NPs is compatible with this variable-binding requirement because a trace, and hence a variable, is left as a result of the movement. It is further argued, following the analysis in Lin (2000, 2003, 2007), that lǝ bears a perfective feature. When there is no specific reference time, speech time is taken as default reference time, resulting in the past event reading. lǝ, therefore, bears both an inner aspectual feature and an outer aspectual feature. This paper exhibits how telic items can behave differently across languages and shows the possibility of bundling two temporal features (inner and outer aspectual features) on a single functional item.

Using a constructional approach to morphosyntax, this study describes a triclausal construction (a type of anankastic conditional construction) and related constructions in the history of Chinese. It demonstrates that the triclausal construction constitutes a context of morphosyntactic vagueness where category boundaries between modals and conditional protasis connectives are underdetermined; consequently, bidirectional rather than unidirectional developments occur. Morphosyntactic vagueness is defined by properties shared between two morphosyntactic categories: distributional and functional similarities. Therefore, changes enabled by morphosyntactic vagueness are argued to be regular processes of change mediated by grammatical equivalence. If grammaticalization is defined as the development of morphosyntactic categories, but not in terms of non-equivalence such as unidirectionality or increased grammaticality, grammaticalization may be systematically bidirectional when enabled by morphosyntactic vagueness.

Spanish verb-complement (VC) compounds, one of the most common compound types in Spanish, raise interesting questions, because they are inflected, prototypically containing a verb in the third-person singular of the present indicative. This complexity seems paradoxical, given the strong restrictions of Romance languages on word compounding.

Based on a self-compiled corpus of over 1,400 VC compounds, we show that the compound’s verb may display different persons and illocutionary forces. We claim that all Spanish VC compounds can be parsimoniously accounted for as involving a grammaticalized perspective-indexing structure, setting up a non-actual enunciation. We identify three subtypes of nominal VC compounds according to whether they refer to: (i) the fictive addresser of the non-actual enunciation it is composed of (e.g. metomentodo [I+put+myself+into+everything], ‘meddler’), (ii) the fictive addressee (e.g. tentetieso [hold+yourself+upright], ‘tilting doll’), or (iii) the fictive conversational topic (e.g. pintalabios [paints+lips], ‘lipstick’). We further argue that, despite undeniable morphological constraints, Spanish VC compounds involve a similarly complex semantic and morphological structure as English multi-word compounds like ‘wanna-be(s)’, ‘forget-me-not(s)’, or ‘bring-and-buy sale’. This reveals that intersubjectivity can be central to word formation.

It is controversial which idioms can occur with which syntactic structures. For example, can Mary kicked the bucket (figurative meaning: ‘Mary died’) be passivized to The bucket was kicked by Mary? We present a series of experiments in which we test which structures are compatible with which idioms in German (for which there are few experimental data so far) and English, using acceptability judgments. For some of the tested structures – including German left dislocation, scrambling, and prefield fronting – it is particularly contested to what extent they are restricted by semantic factors and, as a consequence, to what extent they are compatible with idioms. In our data, these structures consistently showed similar limitations: they were fully compatible with one subset of our test idioms (those categorized as semantically compositional) and degraded with another (those categorized as non-compositional). Our findings only partly align with previously proposed hierarchies of structures with respect to their compatibility with idioms.