In Mapudungun, the suffix -fu- typically indicates the unsuccessful realization of either an event or its expected consequences. As is the case for frustrative morphemes in several unrelated languages, when applied to a stative VP, the interpretation tends to be linked to non-continuation. Interestingly, in addition to these core readings, -fu- also occurs in conditionals conveying counterfactuality, and in a large subclass of deontic and bouletic constructions, such as the ones that express weak necessity and unattainable desires. Following recent developments in the study of both frustratives and conditionals, this article shows how a modal analysis of -fu- can integrate these different readings into a unified account.

The present article analyzes the meaning and form of onomatopoeias in Tjwao, a Khoe-Kwadi (Kalahari Khoe) language. Making use of a prototype approach to categorization, a corpus of 113 onomatopoeic lexemes were tested for their compliance with the semantic, phonetic, and morphological features associated with the prototype of onomatopoeias in scholarly literature. The evidence demonstrates that Tjwao onomatopoeias tend to instantiate the prototype fully. This signifies, in turn, that, as far as their phonetics and morphology are concerned, Tjwao onomatopoeias tend to be extra-systematic.

This article investigates the emergence of recursive DPs in child language. In certain languages, DP modification can be achieved via diverse structures and any number of different embedding markers (prepositions, particles, case-marker, etc.), each having to be learned; this diversity may impact the L1 development of recursive DP modification. Japanese, in contrast, relies on two uniform unrestricted strategies: the adnominal particle の (no) or a relative clause. We report the results of an elicited production study comparing the production of recursive DPs in Japanese-speaking children and adults. Our results show that Japanese children were much like adults in the types of semantic modificational relations that elicited the most target responses. Children were different from adults in that they were: a) much less successful overall, and b) they preferred no, independently of whether the condition was biased toward no. We review the implications of these findings for analyses of no.

This article aims to better understand how Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) come into existence and how they change over time. It argues that an expression can become an NPI if its semantics makes it pragmatically useful in negative or downward entailing contexts, often because the meaning leads to pragmatic strength, but sometimes because its semantics leads to pragmatic attenuation. Special attention is given to two patterns involving pragmatic strength that can emerge historically: Negative Concord (NC) and what I call NPI Dualization. Both patterns, I argue, involve a pairing between an NPI that has an existential-like or low scalar semantics with a homophonous but semantically different expression with a freer distribution; the homophone is semantically negative in Negative Concord but semantically universal in NPI Dualization. The article argues that pragmatic strength plays an important role in the history of NPIs, both in their origin and in NPI Dualization, but is not directly relevant for their licensing synchronically. Instead, it argues for a return to the view that NPIs are lexically marked by a semantically meaningless distributional feature that needs to be valued syntactically. On a conceptual level, the article argues that historical shifts may be matters of likelihood.

This paper provides the first detailed documentation of aspectual properties of motion verbs in Blackfoot (an Algonquian language) from the Kainaa dialect. In particular, the focus of the paper is to detail how a sentient subject in this language is associated with an inherent endpoint of motion events (i.e., delimitedness). I show that in Blackfoot, an event can have a delimited construal when a sentient subject is an agent (but not a theme). A language-specific requirement for event delimitedness is thus the presence of an external argument that is sentient, which I formalize as a feature [m(ental state)] on a DP, as in Ritter (2015). A major contribution of the current study is thus to show that event delimitedness can be constrained by formal features of the external argument, whereas previously only the internal argument was thought to be involved in event delimitedness.

This study examines the acquisition of kind-referring expressions such as The dodo is extinct. The objective is to investigate whether second language (L2) learners’ acquisition of nominal number marking and articles expressing kind-reference in English is affected by their first language (L1), their L2 proficiency in English, or the syntactic position of the kind-referring noun phrase (NP). L2 learners of English with Arabic, Chinese, and Turkish L1 backgrounds and a control group of native English speakers (NSs) participated in the study. The results from a Fill in the Gaps Task (FGT) and an Acceptability Judgment Task (AJT) demonstrated that L2 learners were more successful in their production and acceptability judgments when the expression of kind-reference in the target language was similar to that in their L1. The results also showed non-facilitative L1 transfer in the domain of bare singulars, as well as a positive effect of higher L2 proficiency on kind-referring NPs. Finally, the study revealed a subject/object asymmetry in the acquisition of kind-referring NPs in L2 English.

The Aspect Hypothesis (AH) claims that L2 beginners use the perfective morpheme first with telic predicates (e.g., ‘arrive’, ‘build the house’) and only later with atelic ones (e.g., ‘know’, ‘work’). In contrast, the Lexical Underspecification Hypothesis (LUH) claims that beginners cannot represent the lexical aspect of L2 predicates (hence the telic vs. atelic distinction), because this distinction is a separate component of verb meaning. To investigate whether L2 learners distinguish between telic and atelic predicates, this study compares the responses from 299 L2 Italian learners (with different L1 backgrounds) and responses from 91 native speakers (NS) to the “for/in + time span” adverbial test (Dowty 1979). The analysis shows that native speakers and L2 learners’ responses to the adverbial test diverge significantly, with learners’ proficiency and – to a lesser extent – L1 modulating their ratings. The results suggest that native speakers and beginning-intermediate L2 learners might not represent telicity alike, either because L2 aspectual competence is still developing or because beginning learners rely on the semantic representations of their L1. These findings support the predictions of the LUH and suggest caution when trying to assess learners’ aspectual representations.

The present study investigates several linguistic factors that might be determinants of differences in the ease of acquisition of relative clauses (RCs) in L2 contexts, using the acquisition of English relative clauses by Kurdish Sorani native speakers. The analysis of 1440 subject and object RCs formed by Kurdish Sorani-speaking learners of English in a sentence combination task and a sentence translation task indicates that the syntactic functions of the noun phrase (NP) relativized in the RC, the position of the RC in the matrix clause (whether centre- or right-embedded), and the properties of RCs in L1 affect the acquisition and the formation of RCs in L2. The study also provides evidence that the syntactic functions of the relativized NP in the matrix clause, and the consistency/inconsistency of word orders in L1 and L2 do not influence the acquisition of RCs in L2.

This article addresses locality conditions on Negative Concord (NC) in Russian. We examine long-distance licensing of “negative” ni-pronouns in subject- and object-control infinitives. Existing theories of negative concord rely in one way or another on the movement of negative concord items (NCI): either as a direct licensing condition, or as a prerequisite for entering a local configuration with the licensor. Consequently, theories predict that ni-pronoun movement to the matrix clause (i.e., the local domain of the matrix licensor) would increase acceptability of ni-licensing. Using experimental data, we explore various linear positions available for ni-pronouns in the matrix clause and in embedded infinitival clauses. We show that movement is not required for long-distance licensing, and that derived positions of ni-pronouns are independent of ni-licensing. We argue that although ni-licensing and movement both obey locality constraints, they differ as to the type of locality required. This article presents evidence for recent proposals that movement and agreement have different properties with respect to locality constraints.

This article focuses on a non-canonical use of negation in historical and modern French, characterized by an apparent absence of meaning: expletive negation. In search of the lost meaning of expletive negation, via a diachronic investigation from Latin to French, we establish that expletive negation originates from prohibitive negation. We put forward an analysis of prohibitive negation within Krifka (2014)'s model of embedded speech-act and propose that expletive negation is the continuation of prohibitive negation, and that it is what remains of a long-gone embedded negative imperative in French. Along this line of analysis, the article brings historical evidence in favour of the hypothesis that languages can develop from speech-act embedding to proposition embedding. Our analysis of prohibitive negation as a clause-typing negation marker in Latin and as a verbal mood negation marker brings new evidence to the claim that sentential and verbal mood marking are two intimately related phenomena.

In Jordanian Arabic (JA), the complement of some motion verbs optionally appears without a visible preposition in what is known as (P)reposition-drop (Ioannidou and den Dikken 2009). This article offers a detailed description of P-drop in JA, showing that the common properties of P-drop found in languages with P-drop hold in JA. I argue that Gehrke and Lekakou's (2013) pseudo noun incorporation approach to P-drop cannot account for the P-drop facts in JA. I show, through different diagnostics, that the prepositionless noun in JA does not exhibit the typical properties of pseudo-incorporated nouns. Instead, I argue that P-drop in JA involves a full PP–DP structure with a silent P head (Ioannidou and den Dikken 2009, Myler 2013, Biggs 2014, Bailey 2018). The findings of this article add insights to the ongoing debate regarding the underlying mechanisms involved in P-drop.

This article compares the usage of commencer à ‘to begin’+Vinf. and se mettre à ‘to start’ + Vinf. in modern French. Using a corpus sample of 2000 observations, we examined the effect of Adverbial complementation, of Event type (aspect), and of Tense. Based on a mixed-effects logistic regression analysis, we found evidence for Event type, where se mettre à is associated with activities, and Tense, where se mettre à seems to be associated with passé simple, futur proche and subjonctif present. On the other hand, commencer à is associated with plus-que-parfait and indicatif imparfait. We discuss the results in the frame-semantic model of Croft (2012). We make the case that commencer à can have the profile of an achievement or that of an accomplishment, while se mettre à manifests only one profile, that of an achievement. Our results support a one-component approach to aspect in which the result of the interaction between grammatical aspect and lexical aspect can be attributed to the same aspectual contour.

This article presents research into derivational properties of onomatopoeias in English and in Slovak. Onomatopoeias are defined narrowly in our approach, being restricted to the direct imitation of sounds of extra-linguistic reality. Our sample of 40 onomatopoeic words consists of two sound types: the sounds of animals and the sounds resulting from various falls, strokes, and bursts. A derivational network was produced for each such word. The evaluation parameters comprise derivational capacity, maximum derivational network, saturation value, number of derivation orders, most productive semantic categories by order of derivation, typical combinations of semantic categories, and derivational processes. An evaluation of the networks enabled us to answer the question of whether onomatopoeias are productive word-formation bases, to compare the two Sound Types, and to compare onomatopoeia-based networks to those based on non-iconic vocabulary. These results contribute to a better understanding of the word-formation systems in the compared languages and of the status of onomatopoeias with regard to non-iconic vocabulary.

This article provides a description and an Optimality Theory (OT) analysis of contact-induced changes and variation in contemporary Yoruba syllable structure. The article claims that a major diachronic change has occurred in the syllable structure of Yoruba phonology due to its continued contact with English, resulting in the invention, preservation, and hypercorrection of clusters and codas. I characterize this change in terms of OT constraint re-ranking (Miglio and Moren 2003) and assess the resulting synchronic variation against the indexed constraint approach of Itô and Mester (1995a, b, 1999), the ranked-winners approach of Coetzee (2004), the partial-order co-phonology of Anttila (1997), and the Maximum Entropy (MaxEnt) model of Goldwater and Johnson (2003). I show that none of these approaches is able to account independently for the categorical, gradient, and lexically conditioned variation that characterize the contemporary Yoruba syllable structure, but rather that a MaxEnt model augmented with lexical indexation is the most economical model that fits the Yoruba data accurately.

This Commentaire bears out a prediction of Anand et al.'s (to appear) syntactic identity condition on sluicing. Identity is calculated over argument domains as small as small clauses. With extraction of a small clause subject, sluicing is possible where only a small clause predicate has an antecedent.

Based on facts of adjectival concord in Standard Arabic, this article offers evidence that upward probing (i.e., the goal c-commands the probe) is permitted only if downward probing (i.e., where the probe c-commands the goal) does not result in valuing the probe's uninterpretable feature. Such a constraint on upward probing allows us to account for several intriguing observations in Arabic grammar, including the fact that an adjective can agree in number and gender with one nominal, but in definiteness with another nominal. Hence, on the one hand, this article lends support to Agree proposals according to which absence of a match in the c-command domain of an unvalued feature (uF) is not fatal to the derivation. On the other hand, it speaks against Agree proposals that do not license downward probing or view it as parasitic on upward probing.

In this article, we explore whether hierarchy and linearity conspire to affect agreement. The data come from an experimental study of honorific agreement between verbal si and coordinate subjects in Korean. We focus on computing the mismatch driven by honorifically mixed conjuncts. Unlike South Slavic gender agreement, Korean has neither Resolved Agreement nor First Conjunct Agreement. Only Last Conjunct Agreement is attested in Korean honorification. We show that honorific agreement within coordinate subjects is triggered only when the honorific verbal si appears, which is substantially different from the case with the honorific nominal nim. We also show that acceptability significantly decreases when the last conjunct of coordinate subjects is incongruous with an honorific verb. We thus argue that verbal honorific agreement with Korean coordinate subjects is sensitive to linear order, mimicking South Slavic gender agreement.