This paper defends the analysis of Scandinavian ‘pancake sentences’ as semantic or referential agreement (Enger 2004). Alternative analyses assuming that pancake sentences are to be analysed as syntactic agreement (Josefsson 2009), have some drawbacks. Notably, the distinction between different kinds of gender is not well motivated; the connection between different uses of the neuter is lost, and the use of ‘light verbs’ and of invisible elements is problematic. The referential agreement analysis, in combination with the Agreement Hierarchy, yields diachronic predictions that turn out to be correct; the syntactic analysis does not yield anything equivalent. Furthermore, the agreement pattern for very ‘general’ nouns follows more naturally under the referential agreement analysis.

This paper deals with syntactic ellipsis in clauses in Finnish Sign Language (FinSL). The point of departure for the paper is the observation, confirmed by several studies, that clauses in FinSL are often syntactically incomplete. Building on this, the paper first describes how all core-internal clausal material may be elided in FinSL: core arguments in clauses with a verbal nucleus, core-internal NPs in clauses with a nominal nucleus, and even nuclei themselves. The paper then discusses several grammatical contexts which especially favor ellipsis in FinSL. These are question–answer pairs, two-clause coordinated structures, topic–comment structures, blend structures, and structures containing gesturally indicating Type 2 verbals. Finally, the paper argues that FinSL conforms to the main characteristics of a discourse-oriented language, and that FinSL clauses are not highly governed units syntactically.

In this paper, we argue for a view of case marking that does not treat case as the passive realisation of other morpho-syntactic properties of a construction but as independently bringing information to a clause. This different view of case entails that precise functions of case-marked expressions may be determined by the interaction of the case marking, the meaning of the host noun, the semantics of any predicate of which it is an argument and other contextually given factors. With respect to Estonian, it is argued that there is only one ‘structural’ case, the genitive, and this case marks non-subject, or oblique, dependency on some head. The partitive case, we argue, is semantically partitive in all its uses, except that the partitive meaning can be obscured or even eliminated depending on contextual factors. The nominative is merely the absence of case, associated with no specific positions or semantic effects.