In this chapter, the contributions of teams working together on South Slavic and Southern Bantu languages, many of which began specifically as new research partnerships forged after the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia and the end of apartheid, provide compelling evidence that syntactic processes must include reference to linear order. Syntax may not be just a spinning Calderian mobile: Agreement in gender for cases of conjoined NP subjects (and possibly objects) refers to the NP linearly closest to the verb.

This chapter summarizes the main results stemming from the double-Headed analysis of relative clauses proposed in this volume, with particular reference to the unification of all the attested relative clause types.

Extends discussion of ambiguity with adverbs in infinitival constructions to a similar ambiguity involving relative clauses, where a single linear order can be assigned two distinct hierarchical structures that support distinct interpretations. Another adverbial ambiguity involves verb phrases where the verb is modified by two adverbs, one to the left and one to the right of the verb – a single linear order with two distinct hierarchical structures. Displacing an adverb to the front of a clause eliminates the potential ambiguity. This constraint on displacement applies also to direct yes/no-questions where the displaced auxiliary can only be interpreted as modifying the main clause verb. The syntax of direct yes/no-questions requires an auxiliary do when the corresponding indicative contains only a finite main verb. This auxiliary occurs also in tag questions, verb phrase ellipsis, and wh-interrogatives, with an interrogative pronoun at the front of the clause. A syntactic analysis of yes/no- and wh-questions discusses wh-displacement in other constructions (clefts, pseudo-clefts, and headless relatives).

Demonstrates how scope ambiguities involving modifiers used in coordinate structures that contain conjoined nouns correlate with different hierarchical structures that can be assigned to the same linear string of words. These different hierarchical structures, which can be clearly represented as tree diagrams, correspond to distinct interpretations, thereby showing how distinct hierarchical syntactic structures reflect a unique interpretation. This analysis is extended to layered coordinations, containing two conjunctions and three conjuncts, where one of these conjuncts is itself a coordinate structure. In these cases, one unique hierarchical structure will correspond to four distinct linear orders, where the interpretation is determined by the hierarchical structure of the construction, and not its linear order. These ambiguous constructions can be disambiguated by employing both with and and either with or.