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Expletive Negation is widespread in human languages. Although many semantic, pragmatic and syntactic hypotheses about it have been advanced, it still remains puzzling. Two questions, particularly, need to be faced: (i) what are the contexts, mainly syntactic, where negation receives its vacuous interpretation? (ii) Is EN a phenomenon grammatically distinct from standard negation or are they the same one? In this article I will provide empirical and theoretical arguments to show that EN derives from a particular syntactic configuration by investigating a case of Italian EN, i.e. Surprise Negation Sentences. More specifically, I will propose that the Italian negative marker "non" ("not") has a twofold interpretation encoded in syntax: (i) when it is merged in the TP-area during the v*P-phase, it gives the standard negative interpretation reversing the truth-value conditions of a sentence; (ii) when it is merged in the CP domain and the v*P-phase is already closed, it gives the expletive interpretation shown in Snegs. From this point of view, the expletive reading of negation is just a reflex of the syntactic context in which negation is introduced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue that Asante Twi has a process of tonal overwriting on verbs that are crossed by an A'-dependency. It is shown that this view captures the distribution of the process across ex-situ focus constructions, relative clauses and adverbial clauses, which are all contexts involving operator movement. Furthermore, we illustrate that this process is unbounded and applies to each verb in a long-distance dependency. We therefore conclude that this is a reflex of successive-cyclic movement through vP. Additionally, we provide a detailed study of resumption in Asante Twi, showing that despite island-insensitivity, resumption is still derived by movement. Finally, the morpho-phonological side of the phenomenon is investigated. It is shown that overwriting affects only those affixes below v and not those above, which follows from cyclic Vocabulary Insertion. This provides support for Kandybowicz' (2017) assumption that aspect and negation are lower than vP in Asante Twi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

West Circassian displays prominent polysynthetic morphology both in the verbal and nominal domains and both syntactic categories are subject to the same morphological ordering constraints. I argue that despite these similarities, nominal and verbal wordforms in West Circassian are in fact constructed via two distinct word formation processes: while the verbal root and any accompanying functional morphology are pronounced as a single phonological word by virtue of forming a single complex syntactic head via head displacement, the nominal head and its modifiers are pronounced as a single word due to rules of syntax-to-prosody mapping. Such a division of labor provides an account for why only nouns, and not verbs, exhibit productive noun incorporation in the language: West Circassian noun incorporation is prosodic, rather than syntactic. The evidence for the existence of these two avenues of word formation comes from a systematic violation of morpheme ordering observed in verbal nominalizations. In terms of broader theoretical impact, the proposed analysis provides insight into what factors shape a polysynthetic language: while it is tempting to reduce polysynthetic morphology to either simple head displacement or just a consequence of mapping complex syntactic structure to a single phonological word without any head displacement, the West Circassian data show that neither of these mechanisms can be dispensed with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that the extended projection of N (xNP) is a phase that does not permit successive-cyclic movement via an edge position (cf. Bach and Horn 1976; Bosque and Gallego 2014). As has been observed previously, languages in which AP and xNP can be extracted from xNP typically involve an overt agreement relation between the extractee and the 'host.' I argue that the agreeing morpheme is itself theta-marked by the host N, and that this morpheme also establishes an interpretable Agree relation with the extractee. Given well-motivated assumptions about adjunction and Agree, this enables the extractee to be base-generated outside the host's extended projection, and hence to be extracted without violating the Phase Impenetrability Condition. As well as accounting for the robust cross-linguistic correlation between overt agreement and extraction, not accounted for under successive-cyclic analyses, the proposed analysis accounts for the peripherality restriction on extraction, the possibility of deep extraction, and exceptions to these. Finally, I examine an apparent exception to the agreement/extraction generalisation, the mobility of PP and inherent-case dependents of N, arguing that this can be captured in terms of an Agree relation between the preposition and the head N. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We put forth a formal analysis within the Minimalist framework of argument alignment in languages with one type of direct/inverse system. Our proposal involves the cyclical application of a phase-edge Person constraint, which ensures that a [+Participant] argument (when present) is promoted from the verbal ( vP) to the inflectional (IP) domain. We illustrate the proposed analysis with Paraguayan Guaraní, a language with direct/inverse alignment whose morpho-syntax has received little attention from a formal perspective. Paraguayan Guaraní does not mark tense morphologically in Infl(ection); instead, the overt realization of Infl varies depending on the person specification of the arguments. We refer to languages of this type as Generalized P( erson) -languages, in contrast to Restricted P-languages, whose direct/inverse system is limited to the vP domain and whose Infl encodes tense (e.g., Hungarian and Kashmiri). Building on insights in Ritter and Wiltschko (2014) on the anchoring function of Infl, we link the distinction between the two types of language to the presence vs. absence of an interpretable tense feature and its complementary interpretable person feature in the Infl node of the clausal structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We argue for syntactic verb cluster formation in certain restructuring configurations, the result of which is interpreted via function composition. This cluster formation can be diagnosed by its semantic consequences. In particular, we observe that in these configurations all embedded elements must receive a matrix interpretation even if there is no evidence that these elements leave the embedded VP at any stage of the derivation. We show that verb cluster formation and function composition provide a solution to this puzzle. We propose that the process of cluster formation takes place whenever two lexical verbs are part of the same phasal Spell-Out domain, which we relate to Richards' (2010) distinctness proposal. Our analysis entails that (i) some instances of head movement have semantic effects and hence cannot take place at PF; (ii) the set of rules of semantic composition must include function composition; and (iii) it provides additional support for the notion of distinctness and extends its application to head movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While we agree with Baker () that noun incorporation (NI) is not a unified phenomenon cross-linguistically, we argue against his claim that head movement is still needed for NI in a number of languages (including Mohawk and Mapudungun). Our proposal is that NI involves phrasal movement. The motivation behind our proposal is that incorporated nominals can be much larger than bare roots with a structure incompatible with head movement. The empirical foundation for the phrasal movement claim comes primarily from Onondaga ( qua Northern Iroquoian) and Ojibwe ( qua Algonquian). In these languages, incorporated nouns appear with nominalizers and inflectional morphemes violating Baker's (, ) Proper Head Movement Generalization. Our proposal about NI has important theoretical ramifications: while it has been popular to build words in polysynthetic languages in the syntax via head movement, we view 'wordhood' and the polysynthetic properties of such languages as a phonological phenomenon (Déchaine ; Branigan et al. ; Compton and Pittman ). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a systematic account of the spatial expressions of Shupamem, a Grassfields Bantu language of Cameroon that has very few items clearly identified as spatial prepositions, a good number of nouns that are used to denote locational relations, and a small and well-defined set of items in the extended projection of spatial Ps that denote the speaker's point of view, but often give the impression of locative or directional Ps. It is proposed that the structure of Shupamem locative PPs consists of two core components: (a) a functional head, P, and (b) a nominal complement. Either component may surface without phonetic content once specific requirements are met, namely, once the Edge of the PP is minimally overt. We claim that the nominal complements denoting location, unlike referential nouns, depend on P for their interpretation, as a result of which they may move to its Edge and license a silent P. A silent P is also licensed by the elements that denote speaker point of view, via movement of the silent P to the point of view head; this results in phase extension, and explains the obligatory presence of point of view markers in some contexts, giving the impression they are Ps. The account proposed for Shupamem offers a unified treatment of the functional structure of spatial Ps across typologically different languages, while it investigates how silent parts of the spatial P structure are licensed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines an anaphoric construction, British English do, and locates it within the dichotomy in the ellipsis literature between deleted phrases and null pro-forms, concluding that the choice is a false one, in that pro-forms involve deletion as well; the question, then, is how to account for the differential permeability to dependencies that require external licensing of the various deleted constituents. British English do has some characteristics of a fully deleted phrase, and some of a pro-form. The paper proposes that deletion is involved in this construction, but of a smaller constituent than can host wh-movement or long quantifier-raising. Therefore, deletion must occur within the syntax, in order to bleed syntactic processes. It is further shown that, within a phase-based syntax, Voice must be a phase rather than v, but that both functional heads must exist, and offers a new explanation for the incompatibility of passive and British English do, as well as an account of why some languages, like English, lack impersonal passives, while others, such as Dutch, allow them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]