Volume 39, Issue 4

The variety of Basque characteristic of Getxo exhibits a form of coronal palatalisation that takes place intervocalically within and across words, triggered by a preceding [i] or [j]. This system in particular is interesting because it sets up a paradox as it both applies and does not apply at the word-level. The rule is sensitive to the leftward phonological context within the word-level and the rightward phonological context at the phrase level since in Getxo the trigger and target of palatalisation must come from the same word, yet the process only occurs if this sequence precedes a vowel-initial juncture: /in##V/, /il##V/. A previous solution involves stating palatalisation as a lexical rule and invoking a Duke-of-York Derivation to generate the masses of lexical exceptions attested largely in loanwords. This account misses a crucial generalisation, which is that, loanwords or not, there are no lexical exceptions across morphemes. We capture this generalisation and resolve the ordering paradox by relating palatalisation to the positional distribution of place features general in the language. This analysis involves positional underspecificaiton of nasals/laterals and a coronal default place of articulation. Underspecified nasals and laterals need place when they “become onsets” across word-boundaries, including through palatal spreading. In the reanalysis there are no “lexical exceptions” since these are underlyingly specified for place; neither is there need for word-level versus post-lexical phonology.

In Government Phonology and its descendants, there is a direct relation between representational complexity and lateral strength, as only melodically filled nuclei can discharge government and licensing. This relation is only broken in special circumstances, e.g. when lateral actorship is granted by a systemic parameter. In this paper, I provide a normalisation of lateral actorship by showing that the latter's correlation with complexity also holds for some silent nuclei without introducing a dedicated parameter. The hypothesis is that representational complexity does not necessarily correspond to some phonetic event: a non-empty nucleus can be unpronounced, without this impinging on its lateral actorship. Turbidity Theory provides the formal tools for distinguishing between empty and unpronounced nuclei. This follows from splitting the association between melodic and prosodic units into two independent relations - projection and pronunciation. Empty nuclei lack melodic content, whereas unpronounced nuclei only lack the pronunciation relation. This approach is shown to account for disparate phenomena, such as glide mutation in Classic Arabic, inflectional markers spell-out in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic and the apparently exceptional behaviour of muta cum liquida clusters in Hungarian and in the Italian dialect of Finale Emilia. This approach also allows for a refinement of our understanding of the so-called yers, as well as for constraining the use of floating melody.

The typology of subject omission in simple declarative sentences ranges from languages that simply do not allow it like English and French to languages that allow it as long as a minimum degree of topicality is guaranteed like Chinese and Japanese. In between there are various languages in which subject omission is licensed, for example by rich agreement like in Italian and Spanish, or by a particular set of grammatical features like first and second person in Finnish, or tense like in Hebrew. In other languages subject omission is only limited to expletive sentences like in German. This rich typology observed in spoken languages is also attested across sign languages, with one important exception: there is no known sign language disallowing subject omission categorically. The goals of this paper are twofold: first, we apply syntactic and semantic tests to assess the boundaries of subject omission in French Sign Language and characterize it within the typology; second, we discuss in light of some particular aspects of grammars in the visual modality this apparent anomaly of sign languages.

NP-deletion is an instance of movement involving a silent or pronounced resumptive pronoun.

German is a V2 language, i.e., a declarative clause has the finite verb in the position immediately after the first constituent. Traditionally, this order is derived by raising the verb to C and putting a single constituent into the so-called pre-field. Arguably, there are three options to fill the first position: (i) topicalization (A’-movement), (ii) formal movement, which raises the highest constituent in the ongoing derivation (A-movement), or (iii) merging a constituent which is only legitimate there (base-generation). Theoretically, any major constituent can occupy the pre-field. However, it has been observed that certain expressions cannot appear there. In its narrower focus, the paper argues that there are more pre-field-phobic expressions than standardly assumed, and that these expressions, although at first glance heterogeneous, fall into two classes. One can be defined structurally and is considered in the second part of this paper; the other class can be captured in terms of meaning and comprises a specific type of expressive adverbial (discussed in the first and main part). The paper’s message in a broader sense is that syntax restricts the occurrence of expressive expressions. It is shown that the sentence-initial position in German does not allow material which is exclusively use-conditional in the sense of expressive meaning.

In their recent paper on pseudogapping in Construction Grammar/HPSG, Kim and Runner (Kim, Jong-Bok & Jeffrey T. Runner. 2022. Pseudogapping in English: A direct interpretation approach. The Linguistic Review . https://doi.org/10.1515/tlr-2022-2094) suggest that the analysis of pseudogapping in Hybrid Type-Logical Grammar (Hybrid TLG) presented in Kubota and Levine (Kubota, Yusuke & Robert Levine. 2017. Pseudogapping as pseudo-VP ellipsis. Linguistic Inquiry 48(2). 213–257) does not explain certain complex patterns of pseudogapping for which their own proposal does offer an account. Though Kim and Runner’s (2022) remarks on Kubota and Levine (Kubota, Yusuke & Robert Levine. 2017. Pseudogapping as pseudo-VP ellipsis. Linguistic Inquiry 48(2). 213–257) leave room for interpretation, we take it to be reasonably clear that they simply mean that it is difficult to see how such data could be formally accounted for in Kubota and Levine’s proposal. The primary goal of our response is to refute Kim and Runner’s claim on this interpretation. After refuting their claim on this interpretation, we consider a different interpretation of their remarks, one which merely questions the conceptual plausibility of Kubota and Levine’s (2017) broader theoretical architecture. This latter discussion leads to some interesting and important cross-theoretical comparison of different approaches to ellipsis.