In this article the behaviour of participant deverbal nominalisations preceded by the negative particle no in Spanish is addressed. It is concluded that these nouns are compatible with no and that, in this context, two interpretations can arise: the (non-)belonging to a group reading and the non-prototypicality reading. With the former the presence of negation entails the creation of two opposed sets of entities, so that a participant that falls into one set is necessarily excluded from the other set; with the latter, the participant is evaluated as a bad exemplar of the class it belongs to, given that it lacks (some of) the properties considered prototypical. Finally, a syntactic analysis that accounts for the availability of these two readings is proposed. This analysis is primarily based on the interaction of negation with certain nominal projections that make up the syntactic configuration of nouns.

This paper studies the unexpected gender/number inflection of degree adverbs (demasiado and poco) in non-standard Spanish: demasiada.F.SG inteligente.INV.SG jefa.F.SG (lit. too intelligent boss), poca.F.SG satisfactoria.F.SG actitud.F.SG (lit. not-very satisfactory attitude). These inflected forms contrast with the standard invariable forms without any semantic differences: demasiado.INV inteligente .INV.SG jefa.F.SG, poco.INV satisfactoria.F.SG actitud.F.SG. Based on a corpus study, it is shown that inflected forms are systematic when the sequence appears in a prenominal position within the DP/NP [(D) Adv A N] (context a). When the adverb modifies predicative adjectives in other syntactic positions, the inflected forms are non-systematic and statistically random (context b). To account for this pattern, we propose that the adverbs demasiado/ poco, which diachronically originate from adjectives, retain within their structure syntactically inactive phi-features in standard Spanish. These features can be manipulated by post-syntactic operations of exponent insertion, giving rise to the inflected forms in context (b). The pattern observed in context (a), however, derives from a process of reanalysis of the adverbs, by virtue of which the phi-features are activated and are subject to syntactic Agree.

This study investigates the early parsing of subject–verb agreement in German-acquiring infants, focusing on whether morphosyntactic dependencies are parsed in real time when φ-feature morphology is the only available disambiguating cue. German offers a stringent test case due to the syncretic nature of the third-person pronoun sie (‘she’ / ‘they’) despite the language’s obligatory subject expression. Using a preferential-looking paradigm adapted from Gavarró & Keidel (2024), we tested 19 monolingual German-learning infants (17.5–22 months) on sentences containing either lexically specified Determiner phrases or ambiguous pronominal subjects. Eye-tracking results revealed that infants reliably identified referents based on subject–verb agreement morphology in both full-DP and pronominal conditions, although effects were more robust with overt subjects. These findings challenge claims of a production–comprehension asymmetry and support models that posit early syntactic competence, including the computation of agreement, not contingent on input frequency or semantic salience, but reflecting universal, structure-sensitive operations.

In this review article we discuss the main arguments in support of the hypothesis that in Contemporary Catalan and Italian nominal ne is neither a prepositional clitic, nor a partitive clitic nor a quantitative clitic. While the item from which Romance ne originates (Latin inde) pronominalized PPs with locative meanings, similarly to what happens with de, following a grammaticalization cline, ne comes to pronominalize different layers of nominal structure, and in contemporary Romance also expresses non-specific indefiniteness. We maintain that, syntactically, whereas partitivity is characterized as being a birelational category that necessarily connects a subset to a maximal superset, the indefinite use of ne is not birelational in the same sense. We support the hypothesis that nominal ne is a property-type anaphora that resumes a non-specific weak indefinite nominal expression. We review a number of syntactic and semantic arguments in support of the non-partitivity of nominal ne in Catalan and Italian, from which we conclude that it is a pro-NP, unmarked for gender and number, whose antecedent cannot have a unique or maximal reference.

The main goal of this paper is to provide a unified analysis of de nominals in French and noncanonical genitive nominals in Russian. Unlike previous literature that relies on partitivity, quantification and case assignment, we argue that a unified formal account can be substantiated by guaranteeing a uniform syntactic analysis of weak indefinite expressions not based on quantification, a semantic dependency of de nominals and non-canonical genitives to non-veridicality, and different linearization operations at Spell-out that guarantee concatenation of words or subwords (French de*n, Russian n⊕gen).

In this contribution, I present new evidence against any attempt to unify pseudo-partitive/quantificational and qualitative binominals (e.g., un grupo/montón de estudiantes ‘a group/lot of students’, una mierda de departamento ‘a shit of an apartment’). The observation is that pseudo-partitive/ quantificational nouns, unlike expressive nouns, license NP-ellipsis of the de-phrase (e.g., A: Vinieron estudiantes? ‘Did students come?’, B: Un montón (de estudiantes) ‘a lot (of students)’). Assuming that the codas of pseudo-partitive and quantificational nouns are NPs realized as primeval genitives (Pesetsky 2013), NP-ellipsis of the usual type is correctly predicted under wellknown licensing and identity conditions. In turn, the de-phrase in qualitative binominals is the specifier of an Equative Phrase, which relates the de-NP to an empty nominal ranging over properties (Saab 2022a). As I show, NP-ellipsis is banned in such environments for principled reasons. Thus, the ellipsis pattern is accounted for if the relevant binominals have a different structural source for genitive marking.

Grounded in the principle of Antihomophony (Kayne 2019a), several grammatical/functional morphemes, previously considered to have different properties according to their distribution, are examined. A more abstract and fine-grained analysis of the contexts in which these morphemes appear confirms that they are the same element in all constructions. After reviewing elements such as there, will, Italian feminine marker -a or Spanish plural marker -s, the so-called partitive preposition of is argued to be the same element as the one in other constructions. Therefore, Antihomophony is a powerful principle that simplifies the functional lexicon.

This introduction provides an overview of current research on partitivity. The contributions in this volume collectively address several persistent challenges in the analysis of partitivity, such as (i) the semantic underspecification of partitive markers, which are not always transparently associated with the part–whole relation; (ii) the connection between partitive markers and indefiniteness and negation; (iii) the diachronic development of partitive markers and their relation to other categories, such as determiners and prepositions; and (iv) the syntactic structure of binominal constructions. Overall, we hope that these contributions advance our understanding of the many empirical and theoretical problems that partitivity poses for linguistic theory.

Previous work shows that there are prosodic differences between agreeing and disagreeing responses to positive and negative polar questions (Goodhue & Wagner 2018; González-Fuentes et al. 2015, among others). In this study, we focus on the prosodic properties of responses to negative statements in Spanish, a research question that has received little attention and which has not been explored in any detail. That is, we study what characterizes prosodically the following types of responses to negative statements: A: Los profesores no corrigieron los ejercicios. ‘The teachers didn’t correct the exercises.’; B1: {Sí, No}, los profesores no corrigieron los ejercicios. ‘{Yes, No}, the teachers didn’t correct the exercises.’ [agreeing response]; B2: {Sí, No}, los profesores sí corrigieron los ejercicios. ‘{Yes, No}, the teachers did correct the exercises.’ [disagreeing response]. There are two noteworthy findings. On the one hand, there is a Fall-Rise contour of the response particle (RespP, sí / no), which is observed almost exclusively in disagreeing responses. On the other hand, within the sentence following the response particle, disagreeing responses display four characteristics: (a) a longer duration of the Polarity Particle (PolP); (b) a bigger fall in F0 between the PolP and the verb; (c) a slightly higher F0 of the PolP with respect to the end of the subject; and (d) a longer duration at the end of the subject (with the RespP No). Overall, the PolP in disagreeing responses displays a substantial degree of prosodic prominence, compared to responses in agreement. Also, our results indicate that the RespP does not have an effect on the variables we investigated.