Lowest theme vowels or highest roots? An ‘unaccusative’ theme-vowel class in Slovenian

This paper focuses on the e/i theme vowel class of verbs in Slovenian to bring together two seemingly unrelated debates; (i) the debate on the status of derivational affixes as roots within the framework of Distributed Morphology and (ii) the debate on the correlation between theme vowel classes with certain argument structures in Slavic. Focusing on Slovenian, our core data will come from active l-participles that are used adjectivally as an unaccusativity diagnostic. We take these l-participles to create a list of 109 unaccusative verbs. We show that (i) no unaccusative verbs belong to the two largest theme vowel classes in Slovenian (a/a and i/i), whereas (ii) the two big theme vowel classes tend to get accusative arguments quite frequently. Most importantly, (iii) the e/i-class stands out since more than one half of the unaccusative sample falls into. The e/i-class is furthermore the only theme vowel class whose theme vowel surfaces in adjectival l-participles, the theme vowel class to which inchoatives belong and behaves uniformly with respect to stress. Based on the uniform behavior of the e/i-class which sets it apart from other theme vowel-classes, we will argue that the vowel of this class is better analyzed as a root.

Internally-headed and doubly-headed relatives in Japanese -- How are they related to each other?

Grosu & Hoshi (2019:20), in their rejoinder to Kitagawa (2019), propose that apparent violations of island constraints in the so-called internally-headed relative clauses are accounted for by considering them as reduced doubly-headed relative clauses. This paper shows that this claim by Grosu and Hoshi is not empirically sustainable, and further that it misses the discourse function of doubly-headed relative clauses. A discussion of gapless light-headed externally-headed relative clauses is also presented so as to identify how this construction type interrelates with internally-headed relative clauses and doubly-headed relative clauses.

Mechanisms of sub-phonemic change in prescriptive bilingualism: The case of Mexican Plautdietsch

This paper investigates the relationship between loanword adaptation and phonological borrowing by looking at the Mexican Plautdietsch speech community. Plautdietsch borrowings from Mexican Spanish sometimes undergo loanword adaptation to fit the native phonological system (e.g. Spanish [peso] > Plautdietsch [pəɪzo] 'peso'), but some community members exhibit a borrowed pattern of deaffrication that targets native lexical items (e.g. [dit͡ʃ ]) 'German' > [diʃ]). I show that the output of /t͡ʃ/ deaffrication in Mexican Plautdietsch follows the phonological pattern of northern Mexican Spanish deaffrication, rather than an inherited pattern that adapts loanwords from High German and Russian. I propose that while some mechanisms of phonetic and phonological interpretation are similar for both loanword adaptation and phonological borrowing, the novel Mexican Spanish pattern could have only entered the community due to the unique structure of phonological representation associated with advanced bilingualism. This prediction is borne out in the social distribution of deaffrication wherein men, who are expected to become advanced bilinguals, exhibit the innovation more than women. By adding a dimension of phonological representation to our models of loanword adaptation, we can expand the model's behavior to also account for outcomes involving the restructuring of the heritage language.

On Agree without agreement as a source of reflexive voice constructions

Switch-reference has recently been argued to be the result of clausal functional heads entering into Agree with two nearby noun phrases, creating pointers to those noun phrases but not actually copying their morphosyntactic features. Instead, the semantic component interprets the pointers as referential dependency holding between pointed-to noun phrases. This article applies this analysis to reflexive voice constructions in which a feature-invariant affix appears on the verb to indicate that the (highest, direct) object is referentially dependent on the (thematic) subject of the same clause. First it surveys the properties that such constructions should have if reflexive voice is maximally like switch-reference. Then it argues that the Bantu language Lubukusu has just such a construction, the verbal affix i partnering with the overt anaphor omweene to create reflexive clauses. Dravidian reflexive voices are presented as another possible case. Finally, it turns to reflexive and reciprocal voice constructions in Shipibo (Panoan), which seem to have a detransitivizing effect. However, no major detransitivizing account fits all the facts. Rather, reflexive voice in Shipibo is like Lubukusu, except that the anaphor is phonologically null and deficient in phi-features, failing to trigger ergative case on the subject for that reason. True detransitivization may happen in some languages with reflexive voice, but not in all, and it will take considerable care to sort out which are which.

French missing object constructions

This paper discusses a class of French à-infinitival constructions, where the missing direct object corresponds to an external argument, either being the antecedent noun in an attributive use, or else a raised argument in a subject or object predication or in the tough construction.  We investigate the internal and external properties of these constructions and show that (i) the construction displays passive-like properties and (ii) control and raising verbs may intervene between the marker à and the missing object verb, as shown on the basis of a corpus study. We observe that while the construction as a whole behaves like a passive where the erstwhile logical object ends up being promoted to external argument, the logical subject is still accessible for control, both from within the à-infinitive and from outside. Building on Grover (1995), we analyse these double subjects by way of a two-step passivisation, where the direct object valency is lexically promoted to subject without concomitant subject demotion. Raising of the missing object as a secondary subject will make it available on the marker à, which finally promotes it to external argument, thereby completing the passivisation effect. The present analysis thus captures the full set of à-infinitival missing object constructions in a unified fashion, capturing its passive-like properties and the extended domain of locality.

Stages rather than ages in the acquisition of movement structures: Data from sentence repetition and 27696 spontaneous clauses

This study explored the order of acquisition of various types of syntactic-movement and embedding structures in Hebrew, using a sentence-repetition task, in which 60 children aged 2;2-3;10 repeated 80 sentences (with a total of 4800 sentences), and an analysis of the spontaneous speech of 61 children aged 1;6-6;1 (27,696 clauses). The sentence repetition task revealed a set order of acquisition of the various types of syntactic movement: A-movement is acquired first, then A-bar-movement, and finally movement of the verb to C. The analysis of spontaneous speech revealed the same order: A-movement of the object of unaccusative verbs to subject position appears first, together with simple SV sentences; then, wh-questions appear, then relative clauses and topicalization, which appear together with embedding of finite clauses, and lastly, V-to-C movement. Previous studies have shown that Hebrew speakers under age six have difficulty comprehending and producing sentences with A-bar-movement in which a lexically-restricted object crosses over a lexically-restricted subject. And indeed, whereas children produced A-bar structures very early (wh-questions from age 1;6, relative-clauses and topicalization from age 2;6), until age 5;8 these structures never included a lexical DP crossing over another lexical DP. Both tasks indicated that the order of structure acquisition is fixed, creating Guttman scales between structures, but different children acquire the same structure at very different ages. It seems that whereas the syntactic path and the stages of structure acquisition along it are constant between children, each child walks this path in their own pace.

The prosody of French ambiguous multiple negative sentences.

While it has long been assumed that prosody can help resolve syntactic and semantic ambiguities, empirical evidence has shown that the mapping between prosody and meaning is complex (Hirschberg & Avesani, 2000; Jackendoff, 1972). This paper investigates the prosody of ambiguous French sentences with multiple potentially negative terms that allow two semantically very distinct interpretations—a single negation reading involving so-called negative concord (NC), and a double negative reading (DN) with a positive meaning reflecting a strictly compositional interpretation—with the goal to further research on the role of prosody in ambiguities by examining whether intonation can be recruited by speakers to signal distinct interpretations of these sentences to hearers. Twenty native speakers produced transitive sentences with potentially negative terms embedded in contexts designed to elicit single-negation or double-negation readings. Analysis regarding the F0 and the duration of the utterances revealed distinct prosodic profiles for the two readings, confirming previous evidence that speakers can produce characteristic acoustic cues to signal intended distinctive meanings (Kraljic & Brennan, 2005; Syrett, Simon, & Nisula, 2014). Our results reveal that NC readings feature a focused subject and a deaccented object, in contrast to DN readings where both the subject and the object were independently focused. They do not relate DN to contradiction but link negative meaning with focus on French negative concord items (NCI). The paper discusses the implications of these findings for theoretical approaches to NC and outlines further questions for the syntax-prosody interface of these constructions.

Not only size matters: limits to the Law of Three Consonants in French phonology

Grammont’s (1914) influential Law of Three Consonants (LTC) states that French schwa is obligatorily pronounced in any CC_C sequence to avoid three-consonant clusters. Later works have shown that schwa presence is also sensitive to the nature of the consonants involved, at least at the word and phrase levels. However the LTC is still generally considered as accurate under its original formulation to describe schwa-zero alternations at the stem level. The goal of the paper is to test whether the LTC should be relaxed even in this context. The paper presents two studies using judgment data to compare the behavior of schwa in derived words (stem-level phonology) and in inflected words (word-level phonology). The results of the two studies show that the nature of consonants involved in the CC_C sequence plays a role at both stem and word levels. Moreover, the same phonotactic asymmetries among consonant clusters are found in both contexts. The data therefore support a weaker version of the stem-level vs. word-level divide than what is usually assumed for French. This conclusion is strengthened by the results of a modeling study showing that a constraint-based grammar with the same phonotactic constraints across stem- and word-level phonologies provides a better fit to the judgment data from Study 1 and Study 2 than a grammar with different phononotactic constraints in the two morphosyntactic domains. The paper also replicates a number of earlier findings on the role of morphosyntactic domains, clash avoidance, and dialectal variation in schwa-zero alternations.

Quoi-sluices in French

Sluicing has traditionally been analyzed as an operation involving wh-movement and deletion (Merchant 2001). French is a language that has both fronted and wh-in situ strategies; on the surface, however, it seems that French sluices do not involve (overt) movement, in spite of this being an available option. For nearly all wh-words, the in situ and moved forms are the same; the exception is que/quoi ‘what’— que is found in fronted wh-questions alone, while quoi is found in situ. In sluicing, only quoi surfaces, suggesting that French may be a challenge for the movement-and-deletion approach (Dagnac 2019). By formalizing an analysis within a late insertion approach to the syntax-morphology interface, I argue that not only do sluices in French involve full structure, but that they involve movement as well. I assume that the wh-word is initially represented in the syntactic derivation as an abstract feature bundle. The morphological form is determined in the mapping of syntax to morphology by locality-dependent Vocabulary Insertion (VI) rules that are sensitive to C. These rules apply only after ellipsis occurs. Following Thoms (2010), I argue that C is targeted in sluicing, and as a result destroys the context that would trigger que. This analysis is able to capture sluicing in French, while explaining the behavior of quoi more generally.

(In)felicitous use of subjects in Greek and Spanish in monolingual and contact settings

This paper focuses on subject distribution in Greek and Chilean Spanish, both null subject languages, as evidenced in the oral production of monolingual and bilingual speakers. Narratives elicited from 40 monolinguals and 76 bilinguals of different types, namely, first-generation immigrants, heritage speakers and L2 speakers, were analysed to explore potential differences in expressing subject reference between the groups in monolingual and contact settings. The qualitative analysis of contexts of topic continuity and topic shift showed no overextension of the scope of the overt subject pronoun, expected to be found in the bilingual performance according to the Interface Hypothesis (Sorace, 2011, 2012) and previous research. The findings also show that the redundancy of lexical subjects observed in topic continuity contexts mostly involved felicitous (pragmatically appropriate) constructions. Moreover, while null subjects in topic shift were also found to be felicitous in both monolinguals and bilinguals, cases of ambiguity were observed in the bilingual performance in this discourse context.