The principal objective of this article is to establish a direct relationship between the structural height of the base position of the applied argument and the case and promotion-to-subject patterns observed in applicative constructions, with particul…
Many languages have words that can be interpreted either as question words or as existentials. We call such words quexistentials. It has been claimed in the literature (e.g., Haida 2007) that, across languages, quexistentials are (a) always focused on …
This article demonstrates that abessive PPs impose the same type of definiteness restriction on their complements that existential predicates impose on their subjects. The definiteness effect (DE) in PPs is accounted for in the framework of the DE theo…
Linguistic processes tend to respect locality constraints. In this article, we analyze the distribution of conjugation classes in Armenian verbs. We analyze a type of tense allomorphy that applies across these classes. We show that on the surface, this…
Bruening and Al Khalaf (2020) deny the possibility of coordination of unlike categories. They use three mechanisms to reanalyze such coordination as involving same categories: conjunction reduction, super-categories, and empty heads. We show that their…
Traditional approaches to verbal periphrasis (compound tenses) treat auxiliary verbs as lexical items that enter syntactic derivation like any other lexical item, via Selection/Merge. An alternative view is that auxiliary verbs are inserted into a prev…
In seminal work, Potts (2005) claimed that the behavior of “supplements”—appositive relative clauses (ARCs) and nominals—offers a powerful argument in favor of a multidimensional semantics, one in which certain expressions fail to interact scopally wit…
The anaphor agreement effect (AAE) is the crosslinguistic inability for anaphors to covary with φ-agreement (Rizzi 1990, Woolford 1999); languages use various strategies that conspire to circumvent this effect. In this squib, I identify and confirm a p…
This squib argues for the role of correspondence in reduplication by examining the vowel length alternations in Rapa Nui reduplication. The analysis shows that vowel shortening in the base after reduplication is due to the enforcement of vowel length i…
This article replies to Ackema and Neeleman’s (2018) claim that 1st person singular pronouns are grammatically blocked from having impersonal uses. In connection with this claim, they argue that the impersonal use of German 1st person singular ich desc…