Volume 27, Issue 1

Judgments about the grammaticality/acceptability of sentences are the most widely used data source in the syntactic literature. Typically, syntacticians rely on their own judgments, or those of a small number of colleagues. Although a number of researchers have argued that this is problematic, there is little research which systematically compares professional linguists' intuitions with those of linguistically naive speakers. This article examines linguists' and nonlinguists' judgments about one particular structure: questions with long distance dependencies. Linguists' judgments are shown to diverge from those of nonlinguists. These differences could be due to theoretical commitments (the conviction that linguistic processes apply ‘across the board’, and hence all sentences with the same syntactic structure should be equally grammatical) or to differences in exposure (the constructed examples of this structure found in the syntactic literature are very unrepresentative of ordinary usage). Whichever of these explanations turns out to be correct, it is clear that linguists' judgments are not representative of the population as a whole, and hence syntacticians should not rely on their own intuitions when testing their theories.

This paper deals with the so -inversion construction in English, as in John can speak French, and so can Ann , where the second conjunct is the construction in question. Arguing against Toda's (Linguistic Inquiry 38: 188–195, 2007) analysis, which involves ad hoc assumptions and theoretical and empirical problems, we propose the valid derivation of the so-inversion construction. Especially, we claim that the so-inversion construction allows a marked operation, amalgam head movement, which yields such sentences as Bill must be a genius and so must be Ann . An important implication of our analysis is that it is necessary to carefully distinguish between peripheral and typical examples in order to construct valid syntactic structures.

Double Negation languages like Dutch and German still exhibit constructions, such as Dutch niemand niet ‘nobody not’ or nooit geen ‘nothing no’, that seem to have a Negative Concord reading. Since these constructions normally have an emphatic reading, they are called Emphatic Multiple Negative Expressions (EMNEs). In this article I discuss the difference between so-called EMNEs and plain Negative Concord constructions. I demonstrate that EMNEs are fundamentally different from Negative Concord constructions, and that for this reason EMNEs should not be taken to be instances of Negative Concord in Double Negation languages. Instead, I argue that EMNEs are best analyzed as lexical items that consist of two semantic objects, of which only one is semantically negative. By applying overt movement, followed by partial reconstruction at the level of Logical Form both semantic objects can take scope from a different position in the tree. I argue that the single negation an EMNE consists of is the result of the disappearance of Negative Concord in Dutch: after the loss of the preverbal negative marker en/ne , strings containing two n-words or an n-word and a negative marker niet could no longer act as a cue for NC and therefore had to be stored in the lexicon. The death of Dutch NC, so to speak, led to the birth of EMNEs.

In Modern European Portuguese the adverb sempre can have two different interpretations: a confirmative, non-temporal, and a temporal/aspectual interpretation. In the confirmative interpretation sempre means ‘after all’, and in the temporal/aspectual interpretation it means ‘always’. Each interpretation correlates with the position sempre occupies in the sentence. In this article we compare the behavior of sempre in modern varieties of Portuguese and in Medieval Portuguese (MP). Modern European Portuguese (MEP) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP) behave differently as to the placement and interpretation of sempre . This situation is assumed in the literature as deriving from aspects of clause structure, such as verb movement and licensing of null subjects (Brito, Clause structure, subject positions and verb movement: About the position of sempre in European Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, John Benjamins, 2001; Ambar, Gonzaga and Negrão, Tense, quantification and clause structure in EP and BP, John Benjamins, 2004, among others). In MP, however, sempre is always temporal/aspectual and can be placed before or after the verb. Therefore, we argue that the variation found in MP does not relate to structural differences of the kind that exist between MEP and BP, but rather to the inherent semantics of sempre . We propose that somewhere during the history of Portuguese there was a specialization of the adverb sempre , that resulted in the fact that its syntactic placement derives its meaning. In fact, we show that the first occurrences of non-temporal sempre appeared during the Classical Portuguese period.