- Front Matter
- 10.5817/lb2025-42311
- Nov 30, 2025
- Linguistica Brunensia
- Marcin Wągiel + 1 more
- Research Article
- 10.5817/lb2025-38591
- Nov 30, 2025
- Linguistica Brunensia
- Naoki Nakamura
Locality has long been regarded as a key factor constraining "non-local" syntactic dependencies. There has also been proposed another locality requirement, Anti-Locality, which prohibits "too-local" syntactic dependencies. This paper aims to account for the (im)possibility of extraposition from subjects in terms of Anti-Locality. Johnson (1985) observes that extraposition is only allowed from the D-structure object position. Put differently, extraposition from subjects of unergative/transitive predicates (henceforth, external subjects) is prohibited, whereas extraposition from subjects of unaccusative/ passive predicates (henceforth, internal subjects) is allowed. We argue that this contrast is best explained by Erlewine's (2020) Spec-to-Spec Anti-Locality Condition. Building on Fox – Nissenbaum's (1999) QR-and-late-merger analysis of adjunct extraposition from objects, we propose that adjunct extraposition from subjects is derived via two distinct operations: parallel movement of host NPs (Chomsky 2008) and late-merger of adjuncts (Lebeaux 1988). A host subject NP undergoes covert focus A-bar movement and overt A-movement simultaneously, with an extraposed adjunct introduced in the derivation via late-merger. Under a cartographic view (Belletti 2004; Cruschina 2011), we propose that the landing site for the host NP's covert focus A-bar movement is the Spec position of TP-internal Foc(us)P, and that extraposition from external subjects is ruled out precisely because covert focus A-bar movement of the host NP from Spec,vP to Spec,TP-internal FocP violates the Spec-to-Spec Anti-Locality Condition. The Anti-Locality analysis further predicts that when an additional XP—such as a sentence adverbial—intervenes in the host NP's movement path, extraposition from external subjects should be permitted, avoiding Anti-Locality-violating configurations. We demonstrate that this prediction is borne out.
- Research Article
- 10.5817/lb2025-40758
- Jul 21, 2025
- Linguistica Brunensia
- Hana Svobodová + 1 more
- Front Matter
- 10.5817/lb2025-41303
- Jun 30, 2025
- Linguistica Brunensia
- Marcin Wągiel + 1 more
- Research Article
1
- 10.5817/lb2025-38532
- Jun 30, 2025
- Linguistica Brunensia
- Kurt Erbach + 1 more
This paper presents experimental evidence of direct pseudo-partitives being preferred with measure readings rather than container readings. While direct pseudo-partitives (e.g. two cups water) have been called register specific (i.e. cooking contexts), recent evidence has shown that they not only occur more broadly albeit relatively infrequently when compared to indirect pseudo-partitives (e.g. two cups of water), but also that they do not seem to occur with container readings (i.e. two distinct cups, each containing water), as opposed to measure readings (i.e. water to the amount of two cups), or being ambiguous. The results of the present experiment are such that participants rate direct pseudo-partitives with nonce quantity words (e.g. two dakes water) as more natural in sentences with measure readings than when in sentences with container readings. This evidence is taken to support theories of pseudo-partitive syntax in which measure and container readings are derived, not only with different semantics, but different syntax as well, rather than theories which argue for different semantics but relatively uniform syntax across measure and container readings. Moreover, this data suggests that, while direct pseudo-partitives are most commonly found in cooking contexts in US English they are not-necessarily a register-specific form, given the measure reading is demonstrably preferable to the container reading even in non-cooking contexts.
- Research Article
- 10.5817/lb2025-38530
- Jun 30, 2025
- Linguistica Brunensia
- Vincenzo Nicolò Di Caro + 2 more
This paper explores the syntactic and semantic properties of some mirative strategies in Italian, and their possibility to co-occur without producing any redundancy in the utterance. By proposing a specific setting and an event that triggers the speaker's unprepared mind, we analyse the nature of some (syntactic) markers used to convey mirativity, from Ethical and Conversational Datives, to GO and TAKE periphrases, to the expletive negation within a rhetorical question, first individually and then in some combinations. We build a featural geometry to explain why markers of different origins can yield a mirative interpretation. We assign a +ZONAL feature to the markers in question, which represents a semantic space tied to the speaker's expectations. Lastly, we investigate the issue of why mirative obliques might be featurally more complex than other markers. We conclude that the acceptable stackability of two or more mirative markers depends on the fact that mirativity is a pragmatic inference arising as a byproduct of the manipulation of the speaker's expectations.
- Research Article
- 10.5817/lb2025-38535
- Jun 30, 2025
- Linguistica Brunensia
- Artemis Alexiadou
In this paper, I will discuss two cases involving morphosyntactic doubling (doubling of possessive clitics and doubling of auxiliaries) in language mixing and show how features of language mixing reflect general principles of syntactic knowledge. The paper is couched in the line of recent work which employs realizational (and post-syntactic) models of morphology in the case of mixing and assumes that language mixing does not require special rules. Multiple exponents to realize particular morpho-syntactic features are more readily allowed if the items come from different languages. Moreover, the type of doubling discussed here will be shown to inform our theories of the syntaxmorphology-PF interface as well as of the timing and ordering of morpho-phonological processes such as Vocabulary Insertion and Linearization.
- Research Article
- 10.5817/lb2025-38575
- Jun 30, 2025
- Linguistica Brunensia
- Christos Christopoulos
The present paper identifies a new gap in tense-aspect suppletion patterns in Indo-European 'tripartite' tense-aspect systems: For any triple of present-imperfect-aorist forms, the present and aorist forms never share the same base to the exclusion of the imperfect form. I explore the analysability of the relevant gap as a 'containment-and-competition' gap, i.e. in terms of Bobaljik's (2012) *ABA, or, alternatively, as a 'structure-and-locality' gap, i.e. in terms of Bobaljik's *AAB. I argue that, though the present-imperfect-aorist triple does not plausibly meet the morphosyntactic eligibility criteria for the former type of analysis, it does for the latter, once we allow for a specific kind of structural variation across tripartite tense-aspect systems. These conclusions suggest that there are domains in which 'structure-and-locality' gaps arise in the absence of 'containment-and-competition' gaps.
- Research Article
- 10.5817/lb2025-37192
- Jun 30, 2025
- Linguistica Brunensia
- Héloïse Elisabeth Marie-Vincent Ghislaine Ducatteau
International audience
- Research Article
- 10.5817/lb2025-38520
- Jun 30, 2025
- Linguistica Brunensia
- Denisa Spurná