Syntax and Semantics

Nez Perce is a language with a dedicated comparative morpheme and crisp judg- ments in its comparatives, but with no means to express differential measurement in its com- parative. These data can be captured by two different types of analyses: either Nez Perce has a negative setting of the Degree Semantics Parameter ([±DSP]) (Beck et al., 2009), along with a comparative operator that allows manipulation of context (Klein, 1980), or it has a positive setting of said parameter, but the comparative operator does not provide a slot for a differential degree argument. We show that the “...

To what extent are countability distinctions subject to systematic semantic variation? Could there be a language with no countability distinctions—in particular, one where all nouns are count? I argue that the answer is no: even in a language where all NPs have the core morphosyntactic properties of English count NPs, such as combining with numerals directly and showing singular/plural contrasts, countability distinctions still emerge on close inspection. I divide these distinctions into those related to sums (cumulativity) and those related to parts (divisiveness, atomicity, and...

Surface SAuxOV orders abound in West Africa. We demonstrate that apparent examples of this word order have important structural differences across languages. We show that SAuxOV orders in some languages are due to mixed clausal headedness, consisting of a head initial TP and head-final VP, though this order can be concealed by verb movement. Other languages are more consistently head-initial, and what appear to be SAuxOV orders arise in limited syntactic contexts due to specific syntactic constructions such as object shift or nominalized complements. Finally, we show that languages which...

There is a longstanding debate in the literature about if, and where, recursion occurs in prosodic structure. While there are clear cases of genuine recursion at the phrase level and above, there are very few convincing cases of word-level recursion. Most cases are—by definition—not recursive and instead best analyzed as different constituents (e.g., the Composite Group, Prosodic Word Group, etc.). We show that two convincing cases of prosodic word-level recursion can easily be reanalyzed without recursion if phonology and prosody are evaluated cyclically at syntactic phase...