Linguistic Variation - Online First

This study examines the relationships between personal pronouns and their nominal antecedents, focusing on the phenomenon of backward binding. Drawing primarily on data from English, Polish, and Czech, it demonstrates that such coreference relations are governed by three key conditions: (1) linear precedence, (2) a structural constraint known as phase command (Bruening 2014), and (3) the information structure status of the nominal antecedent, which must be [+backgrounded/+topic] (Reinhart 1976, 1983; Bianchi 2009; Biskup 2011, among others).

The findings reveal that personal pronouns cannot occupy more prominent (commanding) syntactic positions than the nominals they refer to within a given sentence. Notably, even when pronouns are embedded within prepositional phrases (PPs) in English and Polish, they still trigger Principle C effects. This suggests that while PPs are legitimate constituents, their boundaries do not constrain the pronoun’s command domain. Instead, the command domain is delimited by the boundaries of derivational phases (e.g., vP, CP). Consequently, a nominal antecedent coindexed with a preceding pronoun is most natural when positioned in a separate clausal domain, such as an adverbial clause.

Additionally, the analysis shows that right-peripheral adjunct clauses fall within the command domain of the subject pronoun but not the object pronoun. Crucially, the antecedent nominal phrase must be [+backgrounded/+topic] to establish a coherent coreference relationship.

Fixed-VSO word order is understood to be a relatively recent innovation within the Mayan language family (England 1991), although it is a matter of recent debate whether this innovation is best understood as a prosodic (Clemens & Coon 2018) or a syntactic (Little 2020b) one. This paper adjudicates between these two proposals by closely examining the fixed-VSO Mayan language Mam. The data from Mam are consistent with Little’s (2020b) syntactic approach by which objects raise overtly in the narrow syntax, where they hold certain structural and interpretational properties consistent with their high position.

This study investigates the potential emergence of a fused lect in the Northern Kasaragod Variety of Malayalam (NKV-M), a speech variety shaped by prolonged contact with Malayalam, Kannada and Tulu. We examine verb-internal language mixing patterns using the exoskeletal framework with late insertion (originally proposed in Borer 2003), integrating sociolinguistic and formal approaches. Our findings reveal that the underlying syntactic skeleton of NKV-M is primarily derived from Malayalam. However, it incorporates agreement features into the T-projection, resulting in a fused T-Agr projection within the Tense Phrase. This fusion, which is absent in Standard Malayalam, reflects contact-induced retention of South Dravidian features. Morphological levelling among younger speakers and increasing conventionalisation of mixed forms indicate a trajectory towards a fused lect as defined by Auer (1999, 2014). This study demonstrates that NKV-M exhibits systematic, rule-governed variation rather than spontaneous code-mixing, and we argue that the exoskeletal model effectively captures this mixing pattern.

This paper investigates the morphosyntax of numerals. Based on Russian and Dutch, we show that a division into three subcategories is necessary: (i) numeral ONE; (ii) Cardinals ≥ TWO; (iii) Indefinite Numerals such as MANY (cf., Barbiers 2007). We introduce a bi-partite structure, in which a low Classifier projection is connected to a high Classifier projection by an (abstract) preposition. Building on Borer (2005), Barbiers (2007), Kayne (2019), Corver (2021) we argue that ONE is an underspecified lower classifier, exhibiting meaningful parallels with the underspecified anchoring head at the clausal level (cf., Ritter & Wiltschko 2009, 2014). Cardinals are phrasal. Indefinite Numerals are subject to variation in whether they head ClassP-low or ClassP-high. Based on the morphosyntactic properties of the three categories we conclude that in some environments the PP and ClassP-high layers are not projected.

This paper discusses the distribution of subject clitics in nominal copular constructions in the variety of Este (PD) which is a partial pro-drop language where null subjects alternate with subject proclitics: when a postverbal subject NP is present, no subject clitic is allowed with lexical verbs. However, subject proclitics are allowed with postverbal subjects in inverse copular sentences where the postverbal NP agrees with both the copula and the subject proclitic. This paper explores the available discourse semantic interpretations of inverse copular sentences resulting by this inflectional pattern: while the preverbal predicative NP is a topicalized intensional element that instantiates a description, the postverbal NP represents new information. The preverbal predicative NP does not refer to an entity, but to a property representing the subset that includes the postverbal subject NP which a focal element introduced, just in this configuration, by a subject proclitic.

This article offers a comparative survey of the distributional and interpretive properties of the adverbial particles po/pa across the Dolomitic region. By comparing the syntactic behaviour and the semantic contribution of this lexical item in different but closely related dialects, I try to better characterize the diachronic process of grammaticalization the Latin adverb post has undergone in the relevant geographic area, showing that it amounts essentially to a successive upward reanalysis along the functional spine of the clausal hierarchy. In this particular case, an erstwhile temporal and locative adverb takes up a discourse-related functional value, turning eventually into a marker of (canonical or non-canonical) interrogative force. The structural portion involved in the process seems to correspond to the highest functional projections identified by Cinque (1999).

This paper focuses on the Occitan varieties spoken in Italy from the perspective of language contact. The study investigates the Gallo-Romance colony of Guardia Piemontese (Calabria), examining this minority and endangered language. The methodology involves comparing data from two corpora, representing opposite ends of the continuum between a stable, conservative stage (older generation) and a stage involving younger speakers with strongly influenced by Italian. Current measures of language endangerment typically rely on external factors such as intergenerational language transmission, number of speakers, and linguistic domains of use. To explore changes in the internal structure of endangered languages, this study examines two marked syntactic structures: subject clitics and negation. The comparison aims to verify the mechanisms of “microcontact” and assess the stability of the morphosyntactic structures under external pressures.

In a series of papers, Calabrese (2012ff) has convincingly argued that there is a link between the (a)thematicity and the (ir)regularity of verbal forms, cf. the regular and thematic past participles amato ‘loved’, battuto ‘beaten’ and partito ‘left’ vs. the irregular and athematic forms perso ‘lost’, corso ‘run’ and chiuso ‘closed’. While we completely agree with Calabrese’s observation that the presence of a Theme Vowel (ThV) has a direct effect on regularity of the respective verbal forms whereas its absence may cause allomorphy, in this paper, we will show that his analysis is far too complex and can be simplified by assuming Spanning (Svenonius 2012, Merchant 2015) for Vocabulary Insertion. We argue that Theme Vowels function as a kind of intermediate domain delimiter and we show, following the Vocabulary Insertion-Only Model (Haugen & Siddiqi 2016) within the framework of DM (Distributed Morphology), that many of the context-specific rules and processes proposed by Calabrese can be reduced to Vocabulary Insertion.

In this article we analyze how the Arbëresh variety spoken in Piana degli Albanesi, in Sicily, has changed its original strict Negative Concord system (as seen in Albanian) to a non-strict one under the influence of Sicilian and, more recently, Italian. After describing the peculiar language contact environment which is found in Piana, we propose an account of the variation based on the idea that Negative Concord, i.e. the presence of sentential negation with negative indefinites, is a Last Resort type operation, and that interlinguistic differences are based on the interaction between parameters regulating the position where negation is expressed and a hierarchy of relevant grammatical features. In our particular case, we claim that the change is a consequence of contact with varieties with adverbs with independent negative meaning merged higher than T, and without systematic Nominative/Accusative distinction.

In this paper, we examine the distribution and syntactic properties of two types of nominal modifiers in Mandarin Chinese: de-less modifiers and deP-modifiers. This paper proposes a model for labeling nominal phrases, including relative clauses treated as deP-modifiers. These nominal modifiers exhibit distinct syntactic properties. Under a framework based on labeling, deP-modifiers are analyzed as being merged into a labeled structure, whereas de-less modifiers give rise to an unlabeled structure. Adhering to Labeling Algorithm, our model systematically derives several basic nominal structures in Chinese. In terms of labeling a phrase-phrase merge, feature-sharing may occur between two matched unvalued features. Moreover, we also address ungrammatical sequences in Chinese nominals, ascribing them to either labeling failures or Antilocality. Considering the implications of Antilocality in the derivation, this model suggests a universal syntactic D-layer in Chinese nominals.