Volume 42, Issue 1

Passivization and non-active voice in Iranian languages are so challenging that it has led some researchers to deny the existence of passive voice in Farsi as the most studied modern Iranian language. In this study, various Kurdish, Bakhtiari, and Farsi data confirm the existence of non-active voices, including passive structures, in the family of Iranian languages. This paper examines the derivation of synthetic and analytic non-active constructions in these neighboring Iranian languages. Studying various non-active structures in the light of Alexiadou and Doron (2012. The syntactic construction of two non-active voices: Passive and middle. Journal of Linguistics 48. 1–34), as well as the constructivist approach (Alexiadou, Artemis, Elena Anagnostopoulou & Florian Schäfer. 2015. External arguments in transitivity alternations: A layering approach . Oxford: Oxford University Press; Hale, Kenneth L. & Samuel Jay Keyser. 1993. On argument structure and the lexical expression of syntactic relations. In Ken Hale & Samuel Keyser (eds.), The view from building 20: Essays in linguistics in honor of Sylvain Bromberger , 53–109. Cambridge: MIT Press; Marantz, Alec. 2013. Verbal argument structure: Events and participants. Lingua 130. 152–168 and others), we argue that it is plausible to account for these seemingly different structures uniformly. In our view, synthetic and analytical non-active voices share the same underlying structure and derivation, and their morpho-syntactic differences results from the combination of roots with different heads. To account for the observed diversity in non-active formation, the paper adopts the Concatenation Rule (Embick, David. 2015. The morpheme: A theoretical introduction . Berlin, München, Boston: De Gruyter Mouton: 178) and labels it as the Affixation Rule. To comply with the Affixation Rule, there can be no phasic head between the roots and non-active heads. Accordingly, the synthetic non-active voices result from the locality of [+ v ] roots and non-active heads. In the formation of analytic non-active voices, on the other hand, n or a heads act as blocking phase heads and prevent the affixation of the non-active heads with the roots.

This paper is concerned with a special use of the negative indefinite pronoun nuddu in Sicilian. Alongside its normal use as a negative pronominal quantifier (‘no one, nobody’), this element can be employed as a floating quantifier (‘none of us/you/them’). In this function, nuddu is not the subject of the sentence and, despite the semantic similarity, it cannot be analysed as the pronominal head of a partitive configuration. After presenting data on the diachronic development of this pronoun, which has resulted in inflectional loss, I discuss both syntactic and semantic arguments in favour of an adverbial analysis of this floating quantifier, according to which nuddu involves predicate modification.

This paper examines the syntax of perfective adjectives in Catalan. These adjectives coexist with participles created from the same root, typically manifesting a complementary distribution, e.g., net - netejat (‘clean - cleaned’). The study shows that perfective adjectives can be divided into two groups in Catalan: purely resultative adjectives, which always express a result, and resultative/I-level adjectives, which can express a result but may also convey a non-resultative meaning, namely the expression of an individual-level predicate. This exploration prompts a revision of stage-level adjectives that shows that these adjectives are always resultative in Catalan. A formal proposal is presented to analyse the syntax of perfective adjectives, in alignment with the discerned contrasts between stage-level and individual-level predicates. Furthermore, the analysis also delves into the distinction between resultative adjectives and resultative participles, confirming the existence of target and resultant states in Catalan.

In some languages, the distribution of occlusion is highly restricted and interacts with bipositionality. Ulfsbjorninn and Lahrouchi, henceforth UL, (Ulfsbjorninn, Shanti & Mohamed Lahrouchi. 2016. The typology of the distribution of Edge: The propensity for bipositionality. Papers in Historical Phonology 1. 109–129) present a typology of this distributional restriction. UL demonstrated that in order to capture the typology of the feature restrictions, one requires Melody-to-Structure Licensing Constraints (MSLCs). These are a ‘prosodic licensing’-type mechanism that express grammatical statements dictating the distributional co-occurrence of a feature/melody <M>, against a certain state of syllable structure <S>. Crucially, to get the typology right, MSLCs must be stated bidirectionally: Bottom up (M must be contained by S), or Top down (S must contain M). This is theoretically significant because it excludes any analysis where occlusion and bipositionality are simply equated. We note, however, that the typology proposed by UL looks more symmetrical than it is; only two of the four predicted possibilities are discussed. Here we will fully expand the MSLC analysis, showing that each predicted type is attested. The bidirectional nature of MSLCs is critical since a simpler statement such as: ‘feature sharing is strength’ is not elaborate enough to account for the typology. We will also show that a completely unattested system, where the occlusion feature is systematically restricted to monopositional structures is excluded. This is because (a) MSLCs cannot formulate the statement, and (b) there is no other contributor to phonological strength that will generate it either, since bipositional structures are always positionally strong (Ségéral, Philippe & Tobias Scheer. 2001. La Coda-Miroir. Bulletin de la Société de Linguistique de Paris 96. 107–152) and sharing-strong (Honeybone, Patrick. 2002. Germanic obstruent lenition: Some mutual implications of theoretical and historical phonology. University of Newcastle upon Tyne. PhD thesis).