Collins and Postal (2014) postulate that English NPIs represent two distinct structures: a unary NEG structure and a binary NEG structure. Some NPIs, such as any and ever expressions, can instantiate either of these two structures in different contexts. Others (such as one use of jackshit) have only unary NEG structures. The present article seeks to provide cross-linguistic support for this hypothesis by showing that the two series of NPIs in Serbian/Croatian (Progovac 1994) should be analyzed in terms of the two structure types postulated for English NPIs.

A complete text-to-speech system has been created by the authors, based on a tube resonance model of the vocal tract and a development of Carré’s “Distinctive Region Model”, which is in turn based on the formant-sensitivity findings of Fant and Pauli (1974), to control the tube. In order to achieve this goal, significant long-term linguistic research has been involved, including rhythm and intonation studies, as well as the development of low-level articulatory data and rules to drive the model, together with the necessary tools, parsers, dictionaries and so on. The tools and the current system are available under a General Public License, and are described here, with further references in the paper, including samples of the speech produced, and figures illustrating the system description.

Using the Criterial Freezing approach to movement and chain formation (Rizzi 2005, 2006, 2014; Rizzi and Shlonsky 2006, 2007), this study explores the strategies Jordanian Arabic makes available for subject extraction. I argue that subject extraction in this variety of Arabic is constrained by the postulated D-linking condition of the Subject Criterion – i.e., [spec,SubjP] is filled by an element with the same D(iscourse)-linking status as that of the subject wh-word (D-linked vs. non-D-linked). In case of questions with a D-linked wh-word, [spec,SubjP] can be filled by the D-linked particle illi or a deictic (time-point/place-point) adjunct. Unlike time-point adjuncts, the use of place-point adjuncts to fill [spec,SubjP] is subject to the effects of the Phase Impenetrability Condition (Chomsky 2001), given their low base positions. In contrast, in case of questions with a non-D-linked wh-word, I assume that [spec,SubjP] is filled by an expletive pro.

The present paper is concerned with a historical puzzle: the changing position of the marker si in the extant Baltic languages, Lithuanian and Latvian. Si appears before the root in prefixed verbs and verb-finally in prefixless verbs in Lithuanian and dialectal Latvian, as opposed to a consistently verb-final position in standard Latvian and in Slavic languages, specifically Russian. This ordering is examined within a larger picture of morpheme linearization – focusing primarily on Lithuanian, but also bringing in Latvian and Latgalian data – to account for the Baltic paradigm. Historically a pronoun, si is argued to have incorporated into the verbal structure, and to maintain nowadays a binding relation with the subject of the sentence. The placement of si within the verb is shown to depend on two factors: the type of the antecedent and the morphosyntactic composition of the verb. The findings presented here also provide new evidence against the Lexicalist Hypothesis.