The paper investigates the syntax and semantics of an indirect causative construction, ‘make’ causatives, in Sason Arabic with a focus on the syntax of the embedded structure and the status of the implicit embedded agent. On the basis of several diagnostics, the study demonstrates that ‘make’ embeds an agentive VoiceP, which also manifests an active-passive alternation despite the absence of any morphological reflex. Regarding the nature of the implicit embedded agent, the paper argues that it is present as a free variable à la Heim (1982) generated on the Voice head itself. In so doing, it adds to the ontology of null arguments as well as suggesting that licensing of a grammatical object is dissociated from the projection of a specifier.

Although it has been proposed that all languages may have some lexical stress property, recent studies of (Standard) Indonesian have concluded, based primarily on perception, that lexical stress is not present in this language. While it is philosophically problematic to prove the non-existence of a phenomenon, we examine data from a large-scale production study for both direct and indirect evidence of stress, contributing to the growing body of literature in this field. In the first case, evidence is sought that indicates that a particular syllable in a word exhibits acoustic properties typically associated with prominence (i.e. fundamental frequency (f0), duration, intensity, vowel quality). In the second case, evidence of enhancement of these properties on a particular syllable under focus is sought, for a more abstract stress property that is not overtly manifested at the word level. Although we find no evidence of lexical prominence, we observe acoustic patterns consistent with a higher level prominence corresponding to focus, manifested by strong (Intonational Phrase) boundary properties. Overall, our findings reveal that there is strong support for a class of languages lacking lexical stress, and in the absence of a stressed syllable to enhance, focus may be manifested prosodically as boundary properties.

In north-western varieties of British English the historical process of ng-coalescence that simplified nasal + stop clusters in words like wrong and singer never ran to completion, with surface variation between [ŋ] and [ŋɡ] remaining to this day. This paper presents an empirical study of this synchronic variation, specifically to test predictions made by the life cycle of phonological processes; a diachronic account of /ɡ/-deletion has been proposed under this framework, but crucially the life cycle makes hitherto-untested predictions regarding the synchronic behaviour of (ng) in north-west England. Data from 30 sociolinguistic interviews indicate that these predictions are largely met: internal constraints on the variable are almost entirely accounted for by assuming cyclic application of /ɡ/-deletion across a stratified phonology. There is also evidence of apparent time change in the pre-pausal environment, which is becoming increasingly [ɡ]-favouring contrary to the life cycle’s predictions. It is argued that this reflects a separate innovation in the life cycle of (ng), with synchronic variation reflecting two processes: (i) the original deletion, overlaid with (ii) a prosodically-conditioned insertion process. These results have implications for theories of language change and the architecture of grammar and add to a growing body of evidence suggesting that the effect of pause on probabilistic phenomena can be synchronically variable and diachronically unstable.

This study examines the anaphoric status of the sequence et pourtant si/non in French. This sequence displays some properties not only of TP-Ellipsis but also of propositional anaphora. Consequently, the antecedent of this sequence can be recovered by means of either type of anaphoric process. I argue that the salient and relevant antecedent is constrained by the presence of a modalized environment. I claim that the discursive marker pourtant is assimilated to a modal operator (Jayez 1988, Martin 1987) expressing discourse contrast between two propositions anchored in two possible worlds that are not contradictory. Polarity Particles (POLPARTS) involved in this sequence are analyzed as emphasizing the truth of a proposition. As such, they are conveying semantic contrast between two polarities, that of a salient and accessible discourse antecedent and that of the missing part after et pourtant si/non. This is how POLPARTS upgrade the Common Ground. I develop a focus-based account for Verum Focus, building on alternatives along the lines of Hardt & Romero (2004). I suggest that the scope of an epistemic operator (Romero & Han 2004) and the conditions of use are relevant in order to reconstruct the adequate antecedent, which is not possible in an analysis based solely on lexical insertion and upgrading the Question Under Discussion (qud) by conditions governing the felicitous use of et pourtant si/non.

Adopting an Optimality-theoretic approach, this paper examines gemination in English loanwords in Ammani Arabic (AA). Data come from a corpus of 1200 loanwords as produced by 12 AA monolingual native speakers. Results show that gemination, which is not attested in the source input, is induced to satisfy AA structural constraints and to render the output better well-formed. Of particular interest, results show that the introduction of English loanwords into AA highlights the activity of a constraint that requires prosodic words in AA, and probably many Arabic dialects, to be left-aligned with a foot. This constraint enhances our understanding of many aspects of Arabic phonology such as stress assignment and foot formation. The study has important implications for Arabic phonology, loanword phonology and second language acquisition.

I propose a comprehensive analysis of what has been commonly referred in the literature to as split, discontinuous noun phrases or split topicalization. Based on data from Basaá, a Narrow Bantu language spoken in Cameroon, I partly capitalize on previous authors such as Mathieu (2004), Mathieu & Sitaridou (2005) and Ott (2015a), who propose that this morphosyntactic phenomenon involves two syntactically unrelated constituents which are only linked semantically in a predication relation in a small clause (Moro 1997, 2000; Den Dikken 1998). According to these analyses, split noun phrases are obtained as a result of predicate inversion across the subject of the small clause. Contrary to/but not against these views, I suggest that what raises in the same context in Basaá is rather the subject of the small clause as a consequence of feature-checking under closest c-command (Chomsky 2000, 2001), and for the purpose of labelling and asymmetrizing an originally symmetric syntactic structure on the surface (Ott 2015a and related work). The fact that the target of movement is the subject and not the predicate of the small clause follows from agreement and ellipsis factors. Given that the subject of predication is a full DP while the predicate is a reduced DP with a null head modifier, the surface word order is attributed to the fact that noun/noun phrase ellipsis is possible if the elided noun is given in the discourse and is recoverable from the morphology of the stranded modifier. This paper offers a theoretical contribution from an understudied language to our understanding of this puzzling nominal construction.

This paper discusses a type of wh-exclamative whose wh-component and degree component do not seem to go hand in hand. These are wh-exclamatives in Catalan whose moved wh-phrase is headed by the determiner quin ‘what, which’, and whose NP contains an optional DegP headed by tan ‘so’ or més ‘more’. By taking a closer look at these wh-exclamatives, we will be able to contribute to the debate on the role of gradability and of the wh-component in the semantics of wh-exclamatives. My claim is that the DegP in these wh-exclamatives leaves behind a degree variable that is ultimately bound by an expressive speech act operator. Following Castroviejo (2006) and building on Rett (2009), I adhere to the claim that wh-exclamatives in Catalan are necessarily scalar as a requirement of the expressive operator. Moreover, as a downward-monotonic operator, I show that it licenses upward-directed inferences, which ensures that wh-exclamatives express unexpectedness toward a high degree.

Sentences like They tricked him into believing them and They charged him with abandoning them raise interesting issues for selection and control. We show that these two sentences exemplify two distinct classes, subsuming P-gerund constructions that are formed with seven distinct prepositions: implicative vs. nonimplicative constructions. The first class displays a cluster of restrictions, both syntactic and semantic, which are absent from the second class: It resists partial control or embedded lexical subjects, and it bans object drop and movement of the P-gerund phrase. The existence of these two classes, as well as their empirical profiles, follow from Landau’s (2015) theory of control and challenge alternative approaches.

Stem alternation is present in the verbal inflection of all documented Kiranti languages, where it ranges from the straightforward phonologically conditioned (e.g. Athpariya and Chintang) to the purely morphological and baroque (e.g. Khaling and Dumi). This paper surveys stem alternation patterns across the whole family. Its main finding is that, unlike the morphological stem alternations of West Kiranti, the phonologically-conditioned stem alternations of East Kiranti are characterized by a very striking distributional similarity (often identity) across languages, even in the presence of quite drastic affixal changes. This and other findings suggest that these stem alternation patterns should be regarded as a (morphomic) grammatical phenomenon of its own right, despite being derivable from the forms of suffixes. Furthermore, comparison with West Kiranti suggests that this coextensiveness with a coherent phonological environment actually enhances some typically morphomic traits such as diachronic resilience and productivity.

Does knowledge of language transfer spontaneously across language modalities? For example, do English speakers, who have had no command of a sign language, spontaneously project grammatical constraints from English to linguistic signs? Here, we address this question by examining the constraints on doubling. We first demonstrate that doubling (e.g. panana; generally: ABB) is amenable to two conflicting parses (identity vs. reduplication), depending on the level of analysis (phonology vs. morphology). We next show that speakers with no command of a sign language spontaneously project these two parses to novel ABB signs in American Sign Language. Moreover, the chosen parse (for signs) is constrained by the morphology of spoken language. Hebrew speakers can project the morphological parse when doubling indicates diminution, but English speakers only do so when doubling indicates plurality, in line with the distinct morphological properties of their spoken languages. These observations suggest that doubling in speech and signs is constrained by a common set of linguistic principles that are algebraic, amodal and abstract.

Never originated as a temporal adverb expressing universal quantification over time (‘Type 1’, e.g. he’s never been to Paris). As Lucas & Willis (2012) report, it has developed non-quantificational meanings equivalent to didn’t, starting with the ‘Type 2’ use which depicts an event that could have occurred in a specific ‘window of opportunity’ (e.g. she waited but he never arrived). Subsequently, a non-standard ‘Type 3’ use developed, where never can be used with other predicates (e.g. I never won that competition yesterday). To what extent does variation in the use of never in present-day English reflect the proposed historical development of the form? This study addresses this question by integrating syntactic theory into a quantitative variationist approach, analysing never vs. didn’t in Type 2 and Type 3 contexts using speech corpora from three Northern British communities. The results show how syntactic–semantic constraints on never in Type 2 contexts persist in its newer, Type 3 uses, e.g. it is used at higher rates in achievement predicates. While Type 2 contexts are associated with the expression of counter-expectation, never has become pragmatically strengthened in its Type 3 use, where it is often used to contradict a previously-expressed proposition.

This paper investigates the syntax–semantics interface within the domain of the realization of applied objects in Bantu languages, and I argue that the syntactic structure and semantic contribution of a given argument-licensing functional head (here, the applicative) do not covary. Specifically, I show that in principle, both high and low applicatives can (and should) be available with any type of applicative and not tied to a specific semantics (such as transfer of possession) or thematic role, as proposed in earlier work. Furthermore, I reject the centrality of thematic roles as a component of grammar that determines the grammatical function of applied objects, and I propose instead a typology of Bantu applied objects based on their semantic and morphological properties. This approach makes several predictions about applied objects: (i) syntactic and semantic diagnostics for high and low applicatives need not pattern together, (ii) syntactic asymmetry (such as c-command) can arise for applied objects which pattern symmetrically with other diagnostics (such as passivization), and (iii) the type of an applied object does not universally capture symmetry properties cross-linguistically. The view put forward in this paper provides a framework that can better capture this type of variation with object symmetry in Bantu languages as well as language-internal facts about applied objects; more generally, this paper sheds light on the nature of the syntax–semantic interface by showing that the meaning of a functional head is not necessarily determined by its syntactic position.

While much of the literature on recipe contexts has focused on English and the availability of null definite patients, this paper shows that both null agents and null patients are possible in recipes in a range of typologically and genetically diverse languages. It is proposed that null agents in recipes arise due to a variety of syntactic strategies, but null patients are uniformly licensed via a null topic in the left periphery in all the languages considered. These results indicate that while the recipe register does not directly dictate specific syntactic structures such as imperatives or null objects, the register can provide the pragmatic context necessary for certain syntactic processes, such as null topicalization.

This paper investigates the reason why aggressively non-D-linked items such as wh-the-hell (WTH) are allowed in swiping, but not in sluicing. Investigating the potential syntactic, semantic and prosodic licensors of WTH in sluicing and swiping in the British English variety, we conclude that syntactic or semantic constraints cannot be the source of the difference. Instead, we propose a novel prosodic account in which the WTH must satisfy the prosodic licensing condition that it cannot bear nuclear accent. We show that this is satisfied in swiping, but not in sluicing contexts. On the basis of the novel findings of an acceptability rating study of swiping, which reveal that both ‘given’ and ‘new’ prepositions are equally acceptable for British English speakers, we argue that the preposition is accentuated in this elliptical construction because it is structurally the deepest element. The licensing condition on WTHs in sluicing and swiping is therefore not mediated directly by the conditions on ellipsis, but by the particular prosodic distribution that a WTH happens to have in sluicing and swiping. We extend the account to similar constructions in Dutch.

Implicatures serve as an important testing ground for examining the process of integrating semantic and pragmatic information. Starting with Bott & Noveck (2004), several studies have found that implicature computation is costly. More recently, attention has shifted toward identifying contextual cues that modulate this processing cost. Specifically, it has been hypothesized that calculation rate and processing cost are a function of whether the Question Under Discussion (QUD) supports generating the implicature (Degen 2013; Degen & Tanenhaus 2015). In this paper, we present a novel elicitation task establishing what the relevant QUDs are for a given context (Experiment 1). In Experiment 2, a sentence-picture verification study, we extend earlier findings about the effect of QUDs on scalar inference to a different kind of pragmatic inference: it-cleft exhaustivity. For both inferences, we find that under QUDs that bias toward calculation, there is no increase in reaction times, but under QUDs that bias against calculating the inference we observe longer reaction times. These results are most compatible with a constraint-based account of implicature, where QUD is one of many cues. Additionally, we explore whether our findings can be informative in narrowing down precisely what aspect of the inferential process incurs a cost.

This study compares the prosodic properties of French wh-in-situ echo questions and string-identical information seeking questions in relation to focus. Thirty-six (12 $\times$ 3) wh-in-situ questions were embedded in dialogues designed to elicit (A) echo questions expressing auditory failure, (B) information seeking questions with broad focus or (C) information seeking questions with narrow focus on the wh-phrase, i.e. a focus structure similar to the one of echo questions. Analyses regarding the F0, duration and intensity of the utterances produced by 20 native speakers of French show clear prosodic differences between the three conditions. Our results indicate that part of the prosodic properties of echo questions can be attributed to the presence of narrow focus (A and C vs. B) while another part is truly characteristic of echo questions themselves (A vs. B and C). In combination with known differences regarding their pragmatics, semantics and syntax, this sets echo questions apart as a separate question type. At the same time, our results offer evidence for prosodic encoding of focus in French wh-in-situ questions, confirming and adding to existing claims regarding the prosody of focus marking in French on the one hand and the presence of focus marking in wh-interrogatives on the other.

This article examines a turning point in the history of the theory of phonological distinctive features. In Morris Halle’s (1959) The Sound Pattern of Russian, features are organized into a contrastive hierarchy designed to minimize the number of specified features. Redundancy rules, however, ensure that the resulting underspecification has no real phonological consequences and, in subsequent generative approaches to phonology, contrastive hierarchies were largely abandoned. We explore how Halle’s hierarchy would have been different if it had been based on phonological patterns such as voicing assimilation, and show that this reorganization makes plausible predictions about other aspects of Russian phonology. We conclude by pointing to recent work in which the concept of a contrastive hierarchy has been revived, illustrating the range of phenomena that this theoretical device can account for if minimizing specifications is not the primary concern.

Recent research on the acoustic realization of affixes has revealed differences between phonologically homophonous affixes, e.g. the different kinds of final [s] and [z] in English (Plag, Homann & Kunter 2017, Zimmermann 2016a). Such results are unexpected and unaccounted for in widely accepted post-Bloomfieldian item-and-arrangement models (Hockett 1954), which separate lexical and post-lexical phonology, and in models which interpret phonetic effects as consequences of different prosodic structure. This paper demonstrates that the differences in duration of English final S as a function of the morphological function it expresses (non-morphemic, plural, third person singular, genitive, genitive plural, cliticized has, and cliticized is) can be approximated by considering the support for these morphological functions from the words’ sublexical and collocational properties. We estimated this support using naïve discriminative learning and replicated previous results for English vowels (Tucker, Sims & Baayen 2019), indicating that segment duration is lengthened under higher functional certainty but shortened under functional uncertainty. We discuss the implications of these results, obtained with a wide learning network that eschews representations for morphemes and exponents, for models in theoretical morphology as well as for models of lexical processing.