Linguistic Variation - Online First

The paper presents an analysis of the Afrikaans degree modifier baie ‘very/much/many’. Baie appears to be a single lexical item with a wide distribution in terms of the categories of gradable predicate with which it can combine. However, the paper shows that two syntactically distinct instances of baie should be distinguished. These instances of baie portion out the modification of different grammatical categories between them: one, a head, exclusively modifies gradable adjectives, and the other, an adjunct, modifies the remaining categories of gradable predicate.

I examine the set of environments in which KA-type quantifier particles appear crosslinguistically. These environments include interrogatives, disjunctions, indefinites, all of which arguably involve elements with Hamblin-type ‘alternative’ semantic values. I show that if KA-particles are assigned a uniform denotation as variables over choice functions we can account for their appearance in what otherwise appears to be a set of heterogeneous environments. Crosslinguistic and diachronic variation in the distribution of Q-particles – including, in some cases, the appearance of multiple morphologically-distinct Q-particles in different contexts – can be handled largely in terms of differing formal morphosyntactic features and/or pragmatic components of specific KA-particles. This study focuses on tracking the evolution of KA-type particles in the history of Sinhala, with comparison to other languages of the Indian subcontinent (including Malayalam and Tamil) as well as to Japanese, Tlingit, and English.

In this paper, we focus on the syntax of question particles in Basque and provide an account that draws new parallels between the syntactic behavior of discourse particles in Basque and some recent findings that have been reported for the German language, perhaps the most studied language of all when it comes to discourse particles. In particular, after having argued for a syntactic perspective on discourse particles for German, we deal with Basque particles in both wh-questions and polar questions. For wh-questions, we provide evidence for the claim that the particle ote occupies an IP/TP-internal particle position and, when attaching to a wh-element, can serve to form emphatic questions of the type that have also been observed in German. In the context of polar questions, we demonstrate that there are two distinct positions for discourse particles in central and eastern dialects of Basque: one inside the IP/TP-domain and one in the left periphery of the clause. Again, we indicate relevant cross-linguistic parallels, thereby dealing with Basque discourse particles from the perspective of a cross-linguistic syntax of particle elements.