This paper offers a unified analysis of the postmodal meanings of should and would. It proposes a semantic-pragmatic account based on how these modals function in contexts that yield mirative interpretations. The analysis begins with their use in content clauses under factive predicates and then examines a parallel use in why-interrogatives. It also explains why only would can produce a mirative reading in the assertive equative construction ‘That Would Be X’. The paper argues that these mirative extensions arise from the speaker’s knowledge state and their assumptions about the addressee’s expectations. The postmodal domain is therefore shaped by pragmatic strengthening within patterns that still preserve aspects of the modals’ core semantics. The shift from modality to postmodality marks a move toward the illocutionary level. However, this domain is not uniform: postmodal meanings may represent either the endpoint of grammaticalisation or the emergence of new discourse functions through constructionalisation, as in the TWBX construction.

I discuss two colloquial Italian idioms expressing respectively emphatic negation and objection, col cavolo (lit. ‘with the cabbage’) and un cavolo (lit. ‘a cabbage’). Despite superficial similarities, they represent two very different strategies at syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic level. Col cavolo belongs to a class of non-verbal polar predicates selecting a clausal complement and expressing the speaker’s degree of strength of sincerity towards the proposition (Repp 2013). Col cavolo expresses high commitment to ¬p: it is base-generated in the left periphery, as confirmed by its limited polarity-licensing abilities and impossibility of agreement with a TP-level negative PolP. Instead, un cavolo is a metalinguistic objector (Martins 2020), an echoic responsive move (Farkas & Bruce 2010); it originates as a vulgar minimiser and can function as an ‘utterance minimiser’, predicating minimal relevance of the associate and rejecting it globally rather than reversing its truth conditions. Finally, I compare col cavolo with similar cross-linguistic expressions, and offer a generalisation for left-peripheral negators: those participating in a movement or agreement chain with the TP-level PolP have full semantic and polarity-licensing capabilities, while base-generated ones, being non-local to the lower proposition, only license weak polarity items and yield double negation with a lower negative PolP.

This paper revisits the restrictive/appositive distinction with Mandarin relative clauses and argues against the commonly held view that their restrictive/appositive status directly correlates with their structural positions. We demonstrate that distinct uses of demonstratives constitute a relevant factor in establishing the correlation, such that the pre-/post-demonstrative position is relevant to the semantic status of a relative when the demonstrative is used deictically, but not when it is used anaphorically; and that this refined typology of RCs can be accounted for once existing analyses of strong definites (Elbourne 2005. Situations and individuals; Schwarz 2009. Two types of definites in natural language; Jenks 2018. Linguistic Inquiry 49. 501–536) are extended to Mandarin demonstratives.

The account of extraction using only generalized context free phrase structure (put forth in a series of papers by Gazdar in the late 1970s and early 1980s and then codified in Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar) used, slash as a feature to indicate that there was something missing in wh-extraction constructions. Although this was (deliberately) reminiscent of the slash of Categorial Grammar (CG) (which encodes argument selection), they treated it as distinct from the CG slash. Subsequent work by Steedman proposed to unite them. This paper argues first, that Gazdar et al. were correct to treat the two differently. Second, I advocate a natural view of syntactic categories under the CG world view. Thus, we take the function categories of CG to correspond to functions on strings, and with this we preclude what I call S-crossing composition, used in many CG analyses. With this in mind, we suggest that rightward extraction as in Right Node Raising really is function composition, while wh-extraction should be handled by something much closer to the account in Gazdar et al. The two behave differently under coordination chains involving a silent and or or. This behavior provides evidence that the two should be kept distinct (see also work by Oehrle for this poit), while providing striking evidence for the view of syntactic categories advocated here.

This paper uses Old Spanish as a case study to argue that verb-second (V2) syntax is not monolithic but instead involves a split between external merge (EM) and internal merge (IM) into the C-system. Building on Holmberg’s (2020) findings on Swedish, it demonstrates that the enclitic and proclitic patterns in Old Spanish finite main clauses serve as diagnostics for whether a V2 constituent reaches the preverbal field via EM or IM, reflecting a broader distinction between formal V2 and scope/discourse-related V2. The high frequency of enclisis in Old Spanish suggests a predominance of EM-driven V2, in contrast to Holmberg’s assessment of Swedish, where EM-driven V2 is claimed to be more restricted.

The paper proposes a mixed model of V2 syntax, integrating EPP-driven merge into Spec-FinP (Haegeman 1996) with interpretively motivated Criterial movement (Rizzi 2006; Samo 2019). Residual V2 reflects the resilience of the interpretive component, with its assumed Spec-head configuration (Poletto 2000) reinterpreting verb movement to Fin0 as movement to the Criterial head. The model provides a new perspective on the interplay between formal and interpretive aspects of V2 syntax, with implications reaching beyond Old Spanish.

In this paper, we present two corpus-based case studies which cast doubt on the postulation of a distinction between complements and modifiers in pre-head position in the English noun phrase. Based on examples such as medical student, the paper focuses on ordering patterns as an easily observable criterion, rather than more difficult or less reliable criteria such as anaphoric replacement or stress patterns. The conclusion is that the pre-head dependents treated as complements in, for example, the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Huddleston & Pullum et al. 2002), should rather be treated as type-dependents. This conclusion, at least as far as ordering patterns are concerned, is in line with the postulation of a “classifier” function in approaches to English noun phrases such as Feist (2009).

An open question about cartography is whether one and the same functional head may iterate on the functional hierarchy. We demonstrate that the stackability of certain modals from the same semantic class in Mandarin offers clear evidence for such a possibility.

The question we tackle in this paper is why some indefinite nominal expressions are licit in Romance despite the absence of number marking on the determiner and on the noun, an unexpected option in Romance languages, which are number marking languages (Gil 1987). We focus on the invariable DE found in some Francoprovençal varieties and compare it with partitive articles (PAs) in French/Francoprovençal. We propose that invariable DE and the DE component of PAs explicitly express semantic number, more precisely cumulative reference, and that DE can hence satisfy the requirement of D° to encode number/quantification information (following Delfitto & Schroten 1991). DE combines with an overt or covert ILLE component in a separate functional head (Num°/#°; morphosyntactic number), resulting in PAs and bimorphemic-DE, respectively. As a result, DE is semantically and morphologically equivalent to PAs, except for a non-overt component with DE. Our analysis further shows that the mass/count distinction is not morphologically encoded in Romance but rather a byproduct of the two oppositions plural/singular (morphosyntactic number) and cumulative/atomic reference (semantic number).

Ideas about morphological complexity have been used to classify languages and to link complexity to language age and social structure. Creoles and sign languages are often framed as younger and structurally simpler than other languages. Concurrently, sign language morphology has been described as paradoxical, as both simple and complex. This paper is a critical examination of claims about morphological complexity and its relationship to language age and social structure. We show that the theoretical and empirical foundations of claims that sign language morphology is paradoxical are flawed. Specifically, argumentation and evidence supporting analogies between creole and sign language complexity adopt theoretically contested and ideologically problematic assumptions about creoles and uncritically apply them to sign languages. We identify four flaws in argumentation: (i) use of limited morphological data to generate claims about global complexity, (ii) association of binary language categories with categorical complexity differences, (iii) use of language age to motivate predictions about morphological complexity, and (iv) extrapolating from creole complexity to sign language complexity. Based on these flaws, we develop nine theoretical and practical recommendations for working with morphological complexity and discuss uncritical cross-disciplinary transfer of ideas.

This research article examines the licensing of complementizer agreement with nominals (namely thematic subjects and objects) in the left periphery, focusing on data from Jordanian Arabic (JA). It demonstrates that obligatory complementizer agreement with A-bar elements is evident in JA grammar due to the effects of the Agree Identification Condition, which enforces an agreement inflection on the probe when the goal is not phonologically overt (e.g., a pro). This enforcement also applies when the probe agrees with a chain consisting of two silent links (e.g., when the complementizer agrees with a wh- or a focused element). This finding supports the proposal that the morphological realization of Agree dependencies is ruled by interface conditions, which are also proven to be responsible for the presence of an obligatorily overt complementizer when extraction of the embedded nominal takes place.

The experimentally backed and hitherto overlooked empirical observation of the paper is a contrast among indefinite Positive Polarity Items regarding their possibility of being rescued under certain operators with different rescuing potential. If/surprise/only/don’t think can rescue some-indefinites, suspending their anti-licensing (i.e., their impossibility to occur in the scope of a clausemate negation): while some-pronouns (in English and French) and des-indefinites in French exhibit the expected rescuability, English some-NPs remain unexpectedly degraded. Our account relies on the hypothesis that ‘rescuing’ is due to sentential negation being interpreted as ‘external’ (vs. nullified as in most literature). The definition we propose for external negation is syntactic: rescuing operators allow sentential negation to raise to an illocutionary functional projection above Tense Phrase (TP). Thus at LF (Logical Form), the negation takes that higher projection (rather than TP) as complement and becomes harmless for some-indefinites. The semantic correlate of this syntactic proposal is the interpretation of external negation as a propositional operator. As it involves the illocutionary periphery, rescuing is pragmatic in nature. The different rescuing potential between some-pronouns and some-NPs arises from the interplay between their distinct LF-representations and a minimal-event pragmatic constraint on rescuing.

Homophonous morphs have been reported to show differences in acoustic duration in languages such as English and German. How common these differences are across languages, and what factors influence the extent of temporal differences, is still an open question, however. This paper investigates the role of morphological disambiguation in predicting the acoustic duration of homophones using data from a diverse sample of 37 languages. Results indicate a low overall contribution of morphological affiliation compared to other well-studied effects on duration such as speech rate and Final Lengthening. It is proposed that two factors increase the importance of homophony avoidance for the acoustic shape of morphs: crowdedness (i.e. the number of competing homophones) and segmental make-up, in particular the presence of an alveolar fricative. These findings offer an empirically broad perspective on the interplay between morphology and phonetics and align with the view of language as an adaptive and efficient system.

The analyzed data provide evidence for sound changes that involve cumulative effects in the phonologization of phonetic duration. The data come from Kashubian, an understudied, endangered language spoken in northwestern Poland, and illustrate two historical processes: preservation and loss of ultra-short vowels (jers) and compensatory lengthening. The unified analysis of the two processes hinges on a reinterpretation of phonetic vowel duration as phonological length. Phonetic duration is contextual: Vowels in head syllables, in open syllables, and before voiced consonants tend to be longer than vowels in non-head syllables, in closed syllables, and before voiceless consonants. The effects are cumulative in the sense that all three conditions must co-occur on a single vowel. The discussed changes provide support for phonological models that (i) allow phonological constraints to access fine-grained phonetic information and (ii) are capable of deriving cumulative effects. The data contribute to the typology of cumulative processes by providing novel evidence of alternations that are simultaneously conditioned by the prosodic and segmental context.

Semantic transparency is usually defined as the extent to which the lexical meaning of a morphologically complex word can be inferred from its structure and constituents. Recent studies have emphasized the need to distinguish two aspects of transparency: relatedness (i.e. the degree to which the meaning of lexical constituents is retained in that of a complex word) and compositionality (i.e. the degree to which the meaning of a complex word is determined by the meaning of its constituents and the way they are combined). In this paper, we investigate the influence of a variety of linguistic factors on both relatedness and compositionality. Our objective is twofold, as we seek to (i) determine more precisely the impact of lexical and morphological properties on transparency and (ii) better understand the distinction between relatedness and compositionality based on their respective determinants. The study focuses on deverbal nouns in French and estimates relatedness and compositionality based on human judgments and computational methods. The results indicate that the frequency and ambiguity of bases and derivatives, as well as the productivity and polyfunctionality of nominalizing suffixes, have different effects on relatedness and compositionality. They confirm the relevance of the distinction between the two aspects of transparency.