Volume 39, Issue 2

This research article offers empirical evidence from Standard Arabic (SA) that an existing structural case assigned on an element by one head can be overridden by a new structural case assigned by a different head as long as the element (or one of its copies) has not become part of any previous transfer domain defined by the Phase Impenetrability Condition (PIC) (see Chomsky, Noam. 2000. Minimalist inquiries: The framework. In Roger Martin, David Michaels & Juan Uriagereka (eds.), Step by step: Essays on minimalist syntax in honor of Howard Lasnik , 89–155. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press). Our main evidence comes from the patterns of case assignment of the overt complementizer ʔinna in SA. ʔinna can only assign case to elements that otherwise bear default case, including a topical object or a topical subject as well as elements that are assigned case by T 0 such as a contrastively focused subject. On the other hand, ʔinna never assigns case to a contrastively focused object (that is located in CP) which is argued to be base generated in its thematic position within the transfer domain of v*P. These facts are taken together as evidence that a structural case assigned to elements within a phase is temporary (as it can be overridden) until the transfer takes place. We attribute this to the workings of a transfer principle labelled as The Case-Chain Uniformity Principle (CCUP) that demands that a non-trivial chain (i.e., a discontinuous entity) be only assigned one case value in the interface.

Neasu (Tibeto-Burman: China) exhibits a prefix that derives new coordinators from existing ones by elaborately changing their subcategorial properties. Prefixed and unprefixed coordinators are distinguished by the complement they take (±verbal, ±CoP) and the possibility of being stacked up at least twice (±stackable). A prefixed coordinator has two of these three features switched from “−” to “+”, when compared with its unprefixed counterpart and thus see its ability to occur as the head of recursive coordination structures increased. The prefix ao - is an operator of recursion.

Contrary to the conventional three-way distinction of questions: polar questions, disjunctive questions, and wh -questions, we argue for a more revealing two-way distinction of polar versus constituent questions, the latter with two subtypes: disjunctive and wh -questions. Following Bhatt, Rajesh & Veneeta Dayal. 2020. Polar question particles: Hindi-Urdu kya. Natural Language & Linguistic Theory 38. 1115–1144 proposal that polar questions denote singleton sets of propositions and the standard view that disjunctive and wh -questions denote sets with multiple propositions, we further characterize this dichotomy pragmatically as confirmation-seeking (CS) and information-seeking (IS), i.e., polar questions seek confirmation of the proposition put forth, while constituent questions seek information specifically targeted by the interrogative constituent. This dichotomy is formally detected in Mandarin Chinese via the question particle ma versus ne , dichotomy of fragment questions, adverb nandao ‘don’t tell me’ versus daodi ‘after all’, respective (in)ability to serve as indirect questions, and an intervention effect on constituent questions. We then discuss the typological implications of this two-way distinction and demonstrate that the Changsha dialect of Xiang, another Sinitic language, has no CS polar questions as the alleged polar questions are all disjunctive questions. This fact suggests that, while there are two major types of questions cross-linguistically, CS polar questions are not universal.

Adverbs and Functional Heads: a Cross-Linguistic perspective (Cinque, Guglielmo. 1999. Adverbs and functional heads: A cross-linguistic perspective . New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press)—one of the founding works of “Syntactic Cartography”—combines some of the developments in Syntactic Theory from the 1980s and 1990s with insightful contributions from Linguistic Typology. This paper has two interrelated goals. First, it aims to review the fundamental theses of Cinque’s monography of 1999—which are far from controversial among scholars working in Cartography—; at the same time it provides conceptual support to them. Secondly, it aims to explore some methodological tools of Syntactic Cartography presented and discussed by Cinque, Guglielmo. 1999. Adverbs and functional heads: A cross-linguistic perspective . New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, namely the so-called precedence-and-transitivity tests —after a brief discussion on methodology used to recognise the functional categories, namely the criterion by Jackendoff, Ray. 1972. Semantic interpretation in generative grammar . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press—and the use of the hierarchies as tools to detect intra and interlinguistic variation. With regard to this latter issue, the paper gathers data from Brazilian Portuguese, Canadian English and Colombian Spanish on verb raising. The discussion of the data not only favours Cinque, Guglielmo. 2017. On the status of functional categories (heads and phrases). Language and Linguistics 18(4). 521–576 recent updates of his theoretical approach to the cartography of the clause but also shows how Cartography offers a natural scenario for a methodological approach to both micro and macro-variation.