In Japanese, the use of a negative preterite (past-perfective) clause (“…V-nakatta”) is pragmatically constrained, and oftentimes a negative nonpast-nonperfective clause (“…V-teinai”) is used where a preterite clause is expected. This work argues that the Japanese negative preterite invariably represents the occurrence of a “negative eventuality”—something whose existence and ontological nature have been extensively debated—rather than the “nonoccurrence” of eventualities. This has significant implications for the general-linguistic understanding of negation, (i) lending support to the supposition that negation comes in two varieties: “propositional” (or Boolean) negation, which expresses the nonoccurrence of eventualities, and “eventive” negation, which expresses the occurrence of a negative eventuality, and also (ii) implying that some negative predicate forms specifically express the latter. It will furthermore be argued that, while in general Japanese nonpast-tensed clauses specify that the topic time is the present or a future time, this is not necessarily the case with nonpast-nonperfective clauses, making it possible for a negative nonpast-nonperfective clause to represent the nonoccurrence of eventualities in a past topic time.

While it is well-known that local anaphors match their antecedents in ϕ-features in many languages, it has been suggested that the form of anaphors is insensitive to the morphological case of their antecedent. We show that this is not the case for local complex reflexives (and reciprocals) in Telugu. Pieces of these elements must match in case features with their antecedents. We provide the first in-depth description and analysis of this type of reflexive. Our analysis bears on the structure of complex anaphors, the relation between anaphors and intensifiers in some languages, and the syntactic mechanisms that allow feature sharing.

Recent research on the Copy Theory of Movement has suggested that the realization of movement chains may be regulated by well-formedness conditions governing complex word formation, such as the Stray Affix Filter (e.g., Nunes 2004; Landau 2006). This paper extends this idea to account for certain underdocumented patterns of noun incorporation in Inuktitut (Eastern Canadian Inuit). In contrast to most prior characterizations of incorporation in the Inuit language, I demonstrate that, at least in Inuktitut, incorporated nominals are syntactically active DPs: they are able to participate in case and agreement alternations and undergo phrasal movement. These findings, in turn, motivate an analysis in which incorporation in at least Inuktitut takes place solely to satisfy the morphosyntactic requirements of certain verbs that are lexically specified as affixal (cf. Sadock 1985, 1991). The observation that incorporated nouns invariably surface within the verb complex even when extracted follows straightforwardly from the aforementioned interaction between chain resolution and the Stray Affix Filter.

Sortal classifiers (SCLs) in Mandarin reveal a semantic duality, where the same sortal classifier has both a classifier use and a measure-phrase use. Furthermore, the same semantic restriction imposed by SCLs manifests in both the sortal-classifier use and the measure-phrase use. Such semantic duality of SCLs raises many important questions: (a) How do SCLs semantically compose with various linguistic elements in the comparative such as quantity adjectives and the comparative morpheme (if any)? (b) How many lexical entries do we need to posit for each Mandarin SCL with respect to the semantic duality in our linguistic theory? (c) What is the semantic distinction between a sortal classifier and a measure phrase? (d) How and why does the same selection restriction of SCLs appear in both of their classifier use and measure-phrase use? Taking the sortal classifier ke for illustrations, this paper proposes that (a) a unified semantics of SCLs can be maintained with respect to their semantic duality, if the framework of degrees-as-kinds recently advocated by Scontras (2014, 2017) is adopted; (b) the same semantic restriction manifesting in the semantic duality of SCLs results from the fact that there is a systematic intrinsic semantic connection between their individual-related denotation (the sortal-classifier use) and their degree-related denotation (the measure-phrase use). If the proposed analysis is on the right track, this study, based on the semantic duality of Mandarin SCLs, provides another important piece of cross-linguistic evidence that degrees may not be simply numerical values, but ontologically complex entities, aligning with the conclusion reached in many recent studies (Scontras 2014, 2017; Anderson and Morzycki 2015; Mendia 2017, 2020: Sect. 6.1; Snyder 2017, 2021).

This paper provides evidence from Catalan for the existence of bounded and unbounded locative prepositions, and proposes that boundedness in the adpositional domain is derived similarly to boundedness in the verbal, nominal or adjectival domains. Our contribution is both empirical and theoretical. First, we show that Catalan has two simple locative prepositions, a and en, which form a minimal pair as far as boundedness is concerned and exhibit, correspondingly, different selection patterns: while bounded a only selects DPs with a quantity interpretation, unbounded en can combine with both NPs and DPs, which receive a homogeneous interpretation. Second, we develop a syntactic and semantic theory to account for these facts that relates them to the crosscategorial property of boundedness: a-PPs, but not en-PPs, contain an aspectual projection that imposes the interpretation that the otherwise homogeneous region denoted by the preposition is delimited. Moreover, we show that the difference between the structures licensed by a and en has consequences for the interpretation of quantifiers within PPs. Specifically, we set eyes upon a particular context in which a and en take a universally quantified singular DP as complement and form a minimal pair. We propose that while the bounded preposition a allows for the interpretation of the quantifier tot ‘all’ as a universal quantifier of parts, the unbounded preposition en does not. Instead, with en the quantifier behaves as an adjective of sorts associated to a maximality operator. Our paper contributes to furthering our understanding of boundedness across categories in human language.

In many languages, reciprocal meanings are expressed either by grammatical means or by using lexical predicates. The grammatical strategy is productive and may involve derivational affixes (Swahili -an) or pronouns (English each other) with transitive forms, whereas lexical reciprocity is expressed by a restricted class of intransitive predicates like English kiss or meet. The situation is more complex in Romance languages, where reciprocal verbal constructions often require a se clitic without a clear separation between transitive and intransitive forms. Addressing this puzzle, we propose that Romance languages involve a grammatical/lexical distinction as in other languages. We show that numerous Romance constructions systematically allow se omission with certain reciprocals, exhibiting parallel properties to those of lexical intransitives in other languages. A similar observation is made in relation to the distinction between grammatical reflexivity (e.g., English oneself) and lexical reflexives (wash, shave). Furthermore, we show that the se requirement may also be relaxed with transitive verbs, when reciprocity or reflexivity is conveyed by an overt reciprocal/reflexive item (e.g., Spanish mutuamente ‘mutually’). The emerging theoretical picture supports an analysis of se as a head projection that licenses arity-reduction, though language-specific conditions allow se omission when arity reduction is achieved by a lexical reciprocal item or by another overt reciprocal element.

Universal quantifiers differ in whether they are restricted to distributive interpretations, like English every, or permit non-distributive interpretations, like English all. This interpretational difference is traditionally captured by positing two unrelated lexical entries for distributive and non-distributive quantification. But this lexical approach does not explain why distributivity correlates with number: cross-linguistically, distributive universal quantifiers typically take singular complements, while non-distributive quantifiers consistently take plural complements. We derive this correlation by proposing a single lexical meaning for the universal quantifier, which derives a non-distributive interpretation if the restrictor predicate is closed under sum, but a distributive interpretation if it is quantized. Support comes from languages in which the same lexical item expresses distributive or non-distributive quantification depending on the number of the complement. For languages like English that have different expressions for non-distributive and distributive quantification, we propose that the distributive forms contain an additional morphosyntactic element that is semantically restricted to combine with a predicate of atomic individuals. This is motivated by the fact that in several languages, the distributive form is structurally more complex than the non-distributive form and sometimes even contains it transparently. We further show that in such languages, there are empirical advantages to taking the choice between distributive and non-distributive quantifier forms to be driven by semantic properties of the restrictor predicate, rather than morphosyntactic number.

This paper provides new evidence that syntactic principles that are proposed to explain the (un)grammaticality of a sentence can also hold in sociolinguistic variation. In particular, we argue that two puzzling frequency patterns involving negation in French—the proximity effect on negative concord and the polarity effect on future temporal reference—are deeply related and are both derived from the sensitivity of syntactic agreement to “soft” locality constraints. Recent quantitative studies of future temporal reference reveal that, although all negative items are subject to the polarity effect in Laurentian French, pas does not give rise to the polarity effect in Parisian French. We argue that this dialectal difference can be explained by minor variations in the syntactic and semantic properties of the negative marker pas, given an appropriate analysis of the syntax of negative concord. Our paper therefore shows that incorporating sociolinguistic variation into syntactic theory helps refine our understanding of general syntactic principles, such as locality constraints, and argues that frequency/preference patterns should be included in the full theory of syntactic competence and performance of speakers.