This squib presents new data involving adjective orders that are problematic for analyses of adjectives as merged in the specifiers of fixed sequences of functional heads. Evidence is presented from Naasioi to suggest that adjectives in this language a…
A number of languages have been argued to establish basic word order by means of VP-fronting (e.g., Kayne 1994, Massam 2001). However, many such analyses overgenerate: some material thought to be VP-internal never appears fronted and must apparently al…
The Person-Case Constraint (PCC) is a family of restrictions on the relative person of the two objects of a ditransitive. PCC effects offer a testing ground for theories of Agree and of syntactic features, both those on nominals and those found on agre…
Kučerová (2018) puts forward a novel theory of the morphology and interpretation of nominal gender in Italian. Here, we take issue with this theory from both empirical and theoretical standpoints. We first show that several generalizations presented as…
The mechanism of subcategorization has been used for decades to account for many sorts of idiosyncratic behaviors of lexical items. We home in on the use of subcategorization for regulating the behaviors of individual exponents (morphs, vocabulary item…
In this article, we analyze five reduced structures in Italian that display morphological agreement between their past participle and their internal argument. Three of the five structures have full illocutionary force despite lacking the middle field a…
I apply the model of semantic universals in terms of informativeness/complexity trade-off (Kemp, Xu, and Regier 2018) to Boolean connectives. The model explains the crosslinguistic absence of the connective , once theoretical insights from Horn 1972 an…
Replacive overwriting by morphological tone has been used as major evidence for cyclic construction approaches to phonology (Hyman 2013, Inkelas 2018, Rolle 2018). In this article, I show that this argument is unwarranted: tonal overwriting can be deri…
On the basis of revised syntactic structures for the French faire-causatives, this article argues that the placement of various clitics in these causatives can be accounted for by making reference to the feature defectivity/completeness of clitics and …
Wei and Walker (2020) and Zymet (2018) claim that derivational lookahead effects are attested in the interactions between reduplication and other phonological processes in Mbe and Logoori, respectively. On the basis of this evidence, they argue that re…