<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="no"?><rss xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" version="2.0"><channel><title><![CDATA[LingBuzz]]></title><description><![CDATA[archive of linguistics articles]]></description><link>http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz</link><generator>RSS for Node</generator><lastBuildDate>Thu, 22 Oct 2026 23:17:03 GMT</lastBuildDate><atom:link href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/LingBuzz" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml"/><pubDate>Thu, 22 Oct 2026 23:17:02 GMT</pubDate><language><![CDATA[en]]></language><webMaster><![CDATA[mitcho@mitcho.com (Michael Yoshitaka Erlewine)]]></webMaster><ttl>60</ttl><category><![CDATA[linguistics]]></category><xhtml:meta content="noindex" name="robots" xmlns:xhtml="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"/><item><title><![CDATA[Covert URs: evidence from nasalization in Western Panjabi]]></title><description><![CDATA[Panjabi is an Indo-Aryan language spoken primarily in the Punjab province of Pakistan and the Indian state of Punjab. Long vowels contrast in nasality in the language, but this contrast is neutralized before nasal consonants: [ṼṼN], *[VVN]. This paper presents air pressure data from Pakistani Panjabi showing that predictably nasal vowels before nasal consonants in the language, [ṼṼN], are statistically equivalent in nasality to contrastive nasal vowels, /ṼṼ/ (Exp. 1). However, predictable [ṼṼN] and contrastive nasal /ṼṼ/ vowels behave differently in their interaction with a nasal harmony process, in that only contrastive nasal /ṼṼ/ vowels trigger nasal harmony (Exp. 2). This difference in phonological behavior can be straightforwardly analyzed by assuming (i) that pre-nasal vowels are underlyingly oral, even in morphemes which never show alternations in nasality, and (ii) that only underlyingly nasal vowels trigger harmony. These findings support a view of phonology in which abstract underlying representations (URs) can be completely covert, never surfacing in any allomorph without some kind of symbolic alteration. Surface-oriented approaches to phonology which reject covert URs—including usage-based models relying exclusively on observed exemplars to form lexical representations—have difficulty accounting for these facts.]]></description><link>http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/009318</link><guid isPermaLink="false">009318v2</guid><category><![CDATA[covert urs]]></category><category><![CDATA[abstraction]]></category><category><![CDATA[nasality]]></category><category><![CDATA[punjabi]]></category><category><![CDATA[panjabi]]></category><category><![CDATA[nasal harmony]]></category><category><![CDATA[exemplar theory]]></category><category><![CDATA[phonology]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Paramore, Jonathan Charles; Bennett, Ryan]]></dc:creator></item><item><title><![CDATA[Saving FACE: Fragment answers, copy theory, and radical trace conversion]]></title><description><![CDATA[Jacobson (2016) observes that fragment answers (e.g., Q:  A: ) must denote elements in the restrictor of the -phrase in the question immediately preceding them, while the corresponding element in an overtly clausal answer, possibly elided via VP-ellipsis, does not. This fact presents a challenge for an analysis of ragments s lausal llipsis, or FACE, according to which fragment answers are full clauses in which movement of the overt fragment to a left-peripheral position, followed by ellipsis of the vacated TP, silences everything but the moving fragment itself (cf. Merchant 2005 and references therein). This is because, , it is unclear what properties of movement and ellipsis might conspire to give rise to Jacobson's observation. We show that current FACE-compatible proposals for deriving this observation suffer from conceptual or empirical problems, and offer our own FACE-saving alternative, which we argue overcomes these problems.]]></description><link>http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/010347</link><guid isPermaLink="false">010347v2</guid><category><![CDATA[fragment answers]]></category><category><![CDATA[ellipsis]]></category><category><![CDATA[copy theory]]></category><category><![CDATA[trace conversion]]></category><category><![CDATA[parallelism]]></category><category><![CDATA[semantics]]></category><category><![CDATA[syntax]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Benbaji-Elhadad, Ido; Doron, Omri]]></dc:creator></item><item><title><![CDATA[On “Geminate Transfer” in Semitic, with special attention to Mehri]]></title><description><![CDATA[It has been an ongoing effort in Generative Phonology to explain how the unique Root & Pattern morphology of Semitic languages follows from more cross-linguistic principles. This paper applies the same approach to a phonological pattern that also seems to be unique to Semitic languages, namely “Geminate Transfer”: the realization of an expected C1C2VC2 sequence as C1C1VC2. Focusing on the pattern as it is manifested in the Modern South Arabian language Mehri, the paper follows Bendjaballah and Ségéral (2013) in designating the C1C1VC2 realization as a repair, rather than an alternative, to C1C2VC2. At the same time, it follows Rose (2000) in regarding the phenomenon as the ultimate expression of a universal OCP constraint against sequences of similar (though not necessarily identical) consonants separated by a vowel. An OT account is provided that crucially covers an aspect of the facts that was not treated by Bendjaballah & Ségéral, while also arguing for their skelettal – as opposed to prosodic – conceptualization of the template. Finally, it is claimed that the phenomenon occurs only in Semitic because of the special morphological make-up of Semitic languages.]]></description><link>http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/010456</link><guid isPermaLink="false">010456v1</guid><category><![CDATA[geminate transfer; long-distance geminates; mehri; semitic; strict cv]]></category><category><![CDATA[phonology]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Faust, Noam]]></dc:creator></item><item><title><![CDATA[The Locus of Linguistic Knowledge: An Exemplar Model of Phonetic Neutralization]]></title><description><![CDATA[Eliminativist theories of speech production and perception locate linguistic knowledge exclusively within detailed episodic speech representations and their interactions. This paper examines the tenability of that commitment. Through a series of exemplar based computational simulations modeling the contextual neutralization of phonemic vowel nasality over time for an individual speaker, I explore what is required for eliminativist models to predict both phonetically complete and incomplete neutralization. The simulations show that, with the appropriate weighting of competing production biases of anticipatory nasalization and morphological similarity, eliminativist models can successfully produce phonetically incomplete neutralization. While token frequency manipulations and socially weighted encoding of exemplar memories can achieve phonetically complete neutralization, they introduce questionable empirical predictions and over-generate the predicted types of neutralization.  Adjusting the relative strength of production biases provides an alternative solution by regulating the degree of neutralization while keeping the production optimum bounded by the competing phonetic targets of production biases. I argue that permitting learned, language-specific production-bias weights provides a more explanatorily adequate account of neutralization than the frequency-based or socially weighted encoding approaches examined here. Crucially, this account requires a form of linguistic knowledge that extends beyond the network of episodic speech representations and their interactions.]]></description><link>http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/010457</link><guid isPermaLink="false">010457v1</guid><category><![CDATA[exemplar theory]]></category><category><![CDATA[neutralization]]></category><category><![CDATA[language change]]></category><category><![CDATA[phonology]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Paramore, Jonathan Charles]]></dc:creator></item><item><title><![CDATA[A challenge to unified accounts of non-canonical belief reports]]></title><description><![CDATA[This paper is concerned with two observations about belief attribution. The first is Fauconnier’s (1984) observation that we can felicitously ascribe to  belief in a proposition , even when our pre-theoretical intuitions suggest that  does not really believe , as long as  would have believed  if he shared some of our presuppositions. The second is to Szab ó's (2010) observation that when  believes , of  individuals, that they bear a property , we can attribute to  the belief that “ things are ” even if  claims not to know how many relevant  beliefs she has. In other words, we can “sum up” 's distinct  beliefs in a single belief report. These two observations have been introduced in isolation of each other, but have recently been offered a unifying account (Mayr and Schmitt 2026). This note posits empirical challenges to unification, and discusses the potential theoretical implications that arise if, indeed, the two observations cannot be successfully unified.]]></description><link>http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/010024</link><guid isPermaLink="false">010024v4</guid><category><![CDATA[belief reports]]></category><category><![CDATA[summative readings]]></category><category><![CDATA[qud-sensitivity]]></category><category><![CDATA[attitudes]]></category><category><![CDATA[semantics]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Benbaji-Elhadad, Ido]]></dc:creator></item><item><title><![CDATA[Demonstratives and Taxonomic Nouns: from Romanian to English]]></title><description><![CDATA[The Romanian noun fel 'kind' is puzzling insofar as it allows the existential reading of DPs of the form  acest fel de masă ‘this kind of table’, but disallows the subkind reading.]]></description><link>http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/010458</link><guid isPermaLink="false">010458v1</guid><category><![CDATA[kind]]></category><category><![CDATA[type]]></category><category><![CDATA[taxonomic]]></category><category><![CDATA[demonstratives]]></category><category><![CDATA[pseudo-partitive]]></category><category><![CDATA[structural ambiguity]]></category><category><![CDATA[semantics]]></category><category><![CDATA[syntax]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Dobrovie-Sorin, Carmen]]></dc:creator></item><item><title><![CDATA[Assigning attributive properties without adnominal modification in Lakota]]></title><description><![CDATA[Lakota has been described as a language in which adnominal modification is realized by a postnominal stative verb (SV). Lakota SVs can function predicatively without a copula, and their attributive use is subject to various constraints that are not typically observed for property words used with a copula, such as adjectives in familiar languages. Among these constraints is their inability to be chained, coordinated, contrasted, or modified within a referring expression. This study investigates the motivation for these constraints and provides evidence that, while a postnominal SV semantically assigns an attributive property to a noun, syntactically it does not function as a modifier of the noun. Instead, the adjacent N and SV constitute a complex stative expression and stand in a syntactic relationship inherited from the copredication and co-dependency between a clause-final N and SV functioning predicatively. This analysis accounts for the constraints, elucidates several outstanding issues in Lakota morphosyntax, and suggests a typologically novel (i.e., previously undescribed) strategy of assigning an attributive property within a referring expression.]]></description><link>http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/010450</link><guid isPermaLink="false">010450v1</guid><category><![CDATA[attributive property]]></category><category><![CDATA[complex stative predication]]></category><category><![CDATA[modification]]></category><category><![CDATA[morphosyntax]]></category><category><![CDATA[nuclear cosubordination]]></category><category><![CDATA[morphology]]></category><category><![CDATA[syntax]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Ullrich, Jan]]></dc:creator></item><item><title><![CDATA[Taxonomic Structures without Reference to Kinds]]></title><description><![CDATA[Nominal constituents of the form that kind of table allow both subkind and existential readings. According to Carl-son (Linguistics and Philosophy 1(3), 1977, 413–456; Reference to Kinds in English. Doctoral dissertation, Uni-versity of Massachusetts, Amherst 1977, published in 1980 by Garland Press) both of these readings involve a unique underlying syntactic configuration and a unique denotation for the noun kind. This analysis cannot be ex-tended to the Romanian acest fel de masă ‘this kind of table’, which is fully acceptable and colloquial on the exis-tential reading, but unacceptable (or only marginally accepted by certain speakers) on the subkind reading. In addi-tion to bringing up the existence of the atypical Romanian fel ‘kind’, I will enrich the empirical landscape of taxo-nomic nouns (which include kind, type, model, sort or species) by formulating two new crosslinguistic generaliza-tions: (i) the choice between existential and subkind readings correlates with different agreement patterns observable in Romanian and other Romance languages; (ii) in English as well as in Romance languages the necessarily quanti-ficational determiner each is only marginally acceptable in existentially interpreted nominals of the form each kind/type of NP. My solution to these problems will build on Wilkinson’s (The semantics of the common noun kind. In G. Carlson & F. Pelletier, eds. 1995, The Generic Book, 383-397) syntactic-ambiguity hypothesis, accord-ing to which the existential and subkind readings of that kind of table rely on two different syntactic structures. The theoretical contribution of the present paper is a new syntactic analysis of the structure underlying the existential reading and a corresponding semantic composition. The core syntactic assumption will be a null functional head Qual(ity), which carries the burden of the semantic composition. The theoretical advantage of this proposal is that it separates classifying meaning, which is contributed by the syntactic structure (more precisely by the Qual° head) from reference to kind-level entities, which is contributed by taxonomic nouns.]]></description><link>http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/010453</link><guid isPermaLink="false">010453v1</guid><category><![CDATA[kind]]></category><category><![CDATA[type]]></category><category><![CDATA[taxonomic nouns]]></category><category><![CDATA[genericity]]></category><category><![CDATA[semantics]]></category><category><![CDATA[morphology]]></category><category><![CDATA[syntax]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Dobrovie-Sorin, Carmen]]></dc:creator></item><item><title><![CDATA[Not Just Islands: Relativized Blocking Throughout the Grammar]]></title><description><![CDATA[Recent research in computational linguistics has found that most long-distance linguistic dependencies are tier-based strictly 2-local (TSL-2) over their respective representations, providing a precise characterization of blocking elements in phonology and syntax. A subset of the well-known syntactic island effects have been claimed to be one such class of blockers, explaining their superficial diversity via a common computational basis. This article revisits the TSL-2 analysis of islands in light of subsequent work on other types of syntactic locality constraints and on the treatment of gradient blocking. It finds that the TSL-2 islands display variation and gradience of the sort found in other syntactic blockers, while those islands which are not TSL-2 can be distinguished in this regard.  Several directions are suggested for future research on islands and other syntactic locality phenomena.]]></description><link>http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/010454</link><guid isPermaLink="false">010454v1</guid><category><![CDATA[locality]]></category><category><![CDATA[islands]]></category><category><![CDATA[horizons]]></category><category><![CDATA[relativized minimality]]></category><category><![CDATA[gradience]]></category><category><![CDATA[grammatical variation]]></category><category><![CDATA[minimalist grammars]]></category><category><![CDATA[computational complexity]]></category><category><![CDATA[tier-based strictly local languages]]></category><category><![CDATA[syntax]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Hanson, Kenneth]]></dc:creator></item><item><title><![CDATA[Dative-infinitive structures in Russian: semantics and grammar]]></title><description><![CDATA[Russian Dative-Infinitive-Structures (DIS) have been a matter of debate, with focus on such issues as mono vs. bi-clausality, modal flavour, TAM features and case-marking. I argue that all contextual realizations of Russian DIS sentences express a single flavour in root indicative clauses — alethic modality and exhibit the constraint on perfect infinitives in non-negative clauses. The Perfective Infinitive Constraint is canceled in other varieties of DIS sentences which do not express alethic meanings and are realized in irrealis or usual contexts. These asymmetries are explained by the fact that root DIS declaratives unlike irrealis DIS clauses have deictic tense. On formal accounts, deictic tense comes from the TP layer above the infinitive phrase, and the illocutionary force and modal flavour come from the upper CP layer above the TP. Root DIS declaratives enter the derivation as bi-clausal but undergo restructuring as the border between TP and VP is removed. The dative subjects of DIS sentences are raised out of the embedded infinitival clause and lack the animacy condition. The syntax and semantics of DIS sentences are valued across an overtly similar sentence pattern with embedded infinitives ― Dative-Predicative-Structures (DPS). I argue that Russian DPS sentences are control structures that implement a different mechanism of case assignment. Russian infinitival clauses by default retain deictic tense: this factor overrides the control versus raising distinction, but some types of both control and restructuring predicates block deictic tense for semantic reasons.]]></description><link>http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/010452</link><guid isPermaLink="false">010452v1</guid><category><![CDATA[dative-infinitive-structures]]></category><category><![CDATA[dative-predicative-structures]]></category><category><![CDATA[control]]></category><category><![CDATA[raising]]></category><category><![CDATA[restructuring]]></category><category><![CDATA[alethic modality]]></category><category><![CDATA[aspect]]></category><category><![CDATA[deictic tense]]></category><category><![CDATA[semantics]]></category><category><![CDATA[morphology]]></category><category><![CDATA[syntax]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Zimmerling, Anton]]></dc:creator></item><item><title><![CDATA[The Subregular Complexity of Case and Agreement]]></title><description><![CDATA[This dissertation aims to establish a tight bound on the computational complexity of case and agreement dependencies in syntax, that is, the class of possible formal patterns which they exemplify. Such dependencies are shown to be modeled well by a tree-based generalization of of tier-based strictly 2-local (TSL-2) formal languages, mirroring past results on long-distance phonotactics and syntactic movement.

This characterization has several important consequences. First, TSL-2 is a highly restrictive formal class, ruling out many unnatural and presumably impossible patterns whose absence is left unexplained by earlier, string-based classifications of syntactic patterns. Second, the range of patterns it can express aligns closely with well-known cross-linguistic generalizations and points of variation, unifying many phenomena previously handled by distinct theoretical mechanisms. Third, TSL-2 patterns can be computed by simple, cognitively plausible pattern-detection mechanisms, explaining why it is that language makes use of these and not others. Finally, the class of TSL-2 patterns is in principle efficiently learnable, providing a crucial hint into how human children learn languages so effortlessly, and by extension, how we might design artificial systems that do the same.

All necessary background on subregular formal languages and their application to syntax is included, though some familiarity with Minimalist syntax is assumed. As such, this dissertation may also serve as an introduction to subregular complexity for both theoretical and computational linguists alike.]]></description><link>http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/010455</link><guid isPermaLink="false">010455v1</guid><category><![CDATA[case]]></category><category><![CDATA[agreement]]></category><category><![CDATA[locality]]></category><category><![CDATA[subregular complexity]]></category><category><![CDATA[tsl-2]]></category><category><![CDATA[typology]]></category><category><![CDATA[minimalist grammars]]></category><category><![CDATA[syntax]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Hanson, Kenneth]]></dc:creator></item><item><title><![CDATA[Prevalence and predictability: A causal analysis of emerging genericity in Mandarin wǎngwǎng-sentences]]></title><description><![CDATA[This article investigates the meaning of Mandarin sentences with wǎngwǎng, an adverb commonly translated as ‘often’ or ‘usually’. Empirical observations of wǎngwǎng range from proportional quantification and conditional probability to regularity, stability, and predictability. We argue that wǎngwǎng-sentences combine an extensional prevalence requirement with a non-accidental, projectable interpretation, a characteristic property of descriptive generic generalizations. Specifically, we propose a two-dimensional analysis: (i) wǎngwǎng contributes a contextually high prevalence relation between a restriction and a nuclear scope; and (ii) the resulting prevalence pattern must be appropriately grounded in a contextually relevant causal structure in order to support projection beyond the observed cases. In this synchronic sense, wǎngwǎng-sentences exhibit an emerging generic profile while retaining an overt prevalence requirement not shared by generic sentences in general. The analysis connects existing discussions of wǎngwǎng in the Chinese literature on proportionality and regularity with causal approaches to genericity, and clarifies the division of labor between extensional prevalence and causal grounding.]]></description><link>http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/010442</link><guid isPermaLink="false">010442v2</guid><category><![CDATA[genericity]]></category><category><![CDATA[causal semantics]]></category><category><![CDATA[adverbial quantification]]></category><category><![CDATA[mandarin chinese]]></category><category><![CDATA[semantics]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Luo, Zhuosi; Zhang, Linmin]]></dc:creator></item><item><title><![CDATA[Tier-Based Strict Locality and the Typology of Agreement]]></title><description><![CDATA[This paper presents a subregular analysis of syntactic agreement patterns modeled using command strings over MG dependency trees (Graf and Shafiei 2019), incorporating a novel MG treatment of agreement. Phenomena of interest include relativized minimality and its exceptions, direction of feature transmission, and configurations involving a chains of agreeing elements. Such patterns are shown to fall within the class of tier-based strictly 2-local (TSL-2) languages, which has previously been argued to subsume the majority of long-distance syntactic phenomena, as well as those in phonology and morphology (Graf 2022). This characterization places a tight upper bound on the range of configurations that are predicted to occur while providing parameters for variation which closely match the observed typology.]]></description><link>http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/008665</link><guid isPermaLink="false">008665v7</guid><category><![CDATA[agreement]]></category><category><![CDATA[locality]]></category><category><![CDATA[minimality]]></category><category><![CDATA[case-sensitivity]]></category><category><![CDATA[dative intervention]]></category><category><![CDATA[upward agreement]]></category><category><![CDATA[a'-agreement]]></category><category><![CDATA[mg]]></category><category><![CDATA[derivation tree]]></category><category><![CDATA[complement spine]]></category><category><![CDATA[subregular syntax]]></category><category><![CDATA[tsl languages]]></category><category><![CDATA[tiers]]></category><category><![CDATA[syntax]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Hanson, Kenneth]]></dc:creator></item><item><title><![CDATA[Copy control and other control properties in Mandarin]]></title><description><![CDATA[The possibility of overt controllees has long challenged control theories. This paper investigates copy control in Mandarin Chinese, where the embedded subject of a control construction may be overtly realized. Based on acceptability-judgment experiments, we establish empirical generalizations concerning how copy control interacts with exhaustive control, partial control, and raising. We show that copy control is available in Mandarin, but only under tightly constrained conditions: it is licensed with certain exhaustive and partial control verbs in specific configurations, but excluded with raising predicates and transitive subject-control verbs. We argue that these patterns are not best captured by finiteness-based approaches, which dominate existing accounts. We propose a formal analysis within Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG), distinguishing functional control (structure sharing) from anaphoric control (pronominal dependency). These two mechanisms resemble a fundamental distinction in broader control theory between movement-based and PRO-based approaches, but often coexist within the grammatical system of a single language in LFG. Copy control arises precisely in anaphoric-control environments, while being systematically excluded under functional control. The paper contributes to cross-framework comparison (LFG vs Minimalist approaches), hybrid control mechanisms in formally explicit analyses, obviation, distinctions between grammatically licensed copy control and processing-based resumptives, lexical specification under interspeaker variation, and the typology of anaphoric control. We argue that a hybrid model integrating structure sharing and anaphoric dependency provides a principled and empirically grounded account of complex control phenomena.]]></description><link>http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/009650</link><guid isPermaLink="false">009650v2</guid><category><![CDATA[control theory]]></category><category><![CDATA[copy control]]></category><category><![CDATA[mandarin chinese]]></category><category><![CDATA[lexical functional grammar]]></category><category><![CDATA[experimental syntax]]></category><category><![CDATA[pcdrt]]></category><category><![CDATA[syntax]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Lam, Chit-Fung; Dalrymple, Mary]]></dc:creator></item><item><title><![CDATA[From Sensation to Cognition: A Comprehensive Analysis of Perception Verbs Colexification in Swahili]]></title><description><![CDATA[This study systematically examines the regular patterns of Swahili perception verbs evolving from concrete sensory actions to abstract cognitive functions, revealing the primary mechanisms involved in this developmental pathway. The research materials were collected and analyzed through dictionary searches, literature reviews, and interviews with native speakers. The findings indicate that all five-sense verbs in Swahili project into the cognitive domain: Visual verbs (e.g., "ona", "angalia", and "tazama") have developed rich cognitive meanings such as "understand", "think", and "judge"; auditory verbs (e.g., "sikia") have derived meanings like "know" and "perceive"; while tactile ("gusa"), olfactory ("nusa"), and gustatory ("onja") verbs have extended to cognitive functions such as "move emotionally" and "feel". The semantic extension of Swahili perception verbs into the cognitive domain, along with the language's unique reliance on sensory experiences when conceptualizing internal states, reflects the coexistence of universality and individuality in language. This study unveils the cognitive principles underlying lexical meanings and their cultural conceptualizations in language.]]></description><link>http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/010451</link><guid isPermaLink="false">010451v2</guid><category><![CDATA[perception; verbs; cognition; colexification; metaphor]]></category><category><![CDATA[semantics]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Kones, Jerusha]]></dc:creator></item><item><title><![CDATA[Disentangling syntactic ergativity from constraints on ergative displacement]]></title><description><![CDATA[[21 October 2026: Uploaded with reference list.]

[3 June 2026: Uploaded with a number of revisions, most significantly reorganization and elaboration in section 4.]
[1 October 2025: Uploaded with significant revisions, especially section 4.]]]></description><link>http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/008222</link><guid isPermaLink="false">008222v7</guid><category><![CDATA[relativization]]></category><category><![CDATA[focus fronting]]></category><category><![CDATA[ergativity]]></category><category><![CDATA[reciprocal]]></category><category><![CDATA[parasitic gaps]]></category><category><![CDATA[crossover effects]]></category><category><![CDATA[syntactic islands]]></category><category><![CDATA[resumptive]]></category><category><![CDATA[west circassian]]></category><category><![CDATA[samoan]]></category><category><![CDATA[morphology]]></category><category><![CDATA[syntax]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Ershova, Ksenia]]></dc:creator></item><item><title><![CDATA[Experimental evidence for argument ellipsis as the only derivation of Russian verb-stranding constructions]]></title><description><![CDATA[[This paper supersedes a previous ms. found at https://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/008258]

[[Oct '26: Updated version contains additional data analysis that supports Benbaji-Elhadad and Pesetsky's (2025) claim that ellipsis of predicate nominals does *not* result in degraded acceptability of verb-stranding constructions]]


Russian verb-stranding constructions are argued to exemplify either verb-stranding VP ellipsis (Gribanova 2013b) or argument ellipsis (Bailyn 2017; Landau 2020b). As recent work shows, the debate between verb-stranding VP ellipsis and argument ellipsis is murky due to various confounds in the employed diagnostics (Simpson 2023; Landau 2023b). This paper reports on an acceptability judgment study focused on whether the semantic type of verbal arguments influences acceptability of verb-stranding constructions (as has been observed for Hebrew by Landau 2018). Our results support Landau's finding only partially: only ellipsis of adverbial arguments was found to lead to a decline in acceptability, while no effect of ellipsis of predicate nominals was found. However, if a VP ellipsis derivation were available, all sentences would have an acceptable parse. The reported study thus supports the view that argument ellipsis is the only available structure for Russian verb-stranding constructions with overt subjects. We contrast the findings with Russian verb-stranding constructions that involve polarity focus and conclude that the scope of our claim is limited to verb-stranding constructions that do not involve syntactic head movement (assuming a distinction between types of head movement proposed by Harizanov & Gribanova 2019).]]></description><link>http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/009856</link><guid isPermaLink="false">009856v2</guid><category><![CDATA[argument ellipsis]]></category><category><![CDATA[verb stranding vp ellipsis]]></category><category><![CDATA[russian]]></category><category><![CDATA[acceptability judgement study]]></category><category><![CDATA[syntax]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Kasenov, Daniar; Rudnev, Pavel]]></dc:creator></item><item><title><![CDATA[Turkic influence on the uralic morphology in the Volga-Kama region (german)]]></title><description><![CDATA[This article (BA) tackles language contact at the Volga-Kama region.]]></description><link>http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/010448</link><guid isPermaLink="false">010448v1</guid><category><![CDATA[language contact]]></category><category><![CDATA[uralistics]]></category><category><![CDATA[turkology]]></category><category><![CDATA[sprachbund]]></category><category><![CDATA[morphology]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Schüchter, Lorenz]]></dc:creator></item><item><title><![CDATA[Synthetic Linguistic Data]]></title><description><![CDATA[Synthetic linguistic data have become increasingly prominent in linguistic research, from the analysis of large collections of AI-generated texts to controlled experiments investigating grammatical and lexical preferences. This glossary entry extends Bresnan’s (2016) distinction between the linguistic garden and the bush by introducing an artificial plant nursery as a metaphor for synthetic data. We distinguish between synthetic bush data, consisting primarily of corpus-like collections of model-generated language, and synthetic garden data, in which model outputs are elicited under controlled conditions to investigate specific linguistic hypotheses. We argue that synthetic data constitute a distinct object of linguistic investigation: comparing them with natural language data can reveal both shared patterns and divergences, but their interpretation requires careful consideration of the conditions under which they are generated.]]></description><link>http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/010447</link><guid isPermaLink="false">010447v2</guid><category><![CDATA[artificial intelligence]]></category><category><![CDATA[synthetic]]></category><category><![CDATA[large language models]]></category><category><![CDATA[corpora]]></category><category><![CDATA[experimental methods]]></category><category><![CDATA[semantics]]></category><category><![CDATA[syntax]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Samo, Giuseppe]]></dc:creator></item><item><title><![CDATA[Partitives, groups, and wholes]]></title><description><![CDATA[There’s an attractive view in social ontology on which a group is identical to its members. It has its defenders, but seems felled by a simple objection resting on plausible assumptions about the semantics of plural partitives—assumptions built into standard plural logic. We argue the assumptions are false: whether something counts as ‘one of’ a plurality turns on how that plurality is carved up, a sensitivity the standard regimentation misses. We propose and defend a cover-based semantics that captures it, blocks the objection, and earns its keep on independent grounds. The same account answers a parallel, wellknown objection to composition as identity. Our view thus bears both on the logic and meaning of plurals and on debates in metaphysics.]]></description><link>http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/010446</link><guid isPermaLink="false">010446v1</guid><category><![CDATA[composition as identity; cover; group; numeral; partitive; plural logic]]></category><category><![CDATA[semantics]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Nicolas, David; Payton, Jonathan]]></dc:creator></item><item><title><![CDATA[Exclusive focus in Akan and type flexibility]]></title><description><![CDATA[Exclusive focus particles in many languages have flexible positions: as adverbial particles (as in English, ) or as adfocal particles (), with the same truth conditions. This raises the question of whether exclusives are ambiguous between an A-quantifier entry and a D-quantifier entry, dubbed the type-ambiguity view here (Horn 1969, Rooth 1985, 1992, Coppock and Beaver 2014, Yip and Adedeji 2024, Yip 2026; cf. Renans 2017); or uniformly as an A-quantifier, and the adfocal use is merely a syntactic “concord” phenomenon with a null exclusive operator OP, dubbed the uniform operator view here (Lee 2005, Quek and Hirsch 2017, Sun 2021, Bassi et al. 2022, Branan and Erlewine 2023, Aremu 2026; cf. Bayer 1996, i.a.). 


This paper argues for the type-ambiguity view over the uniform operator view of exclusives for Akan. In Akan, only adfocal particles are attested:  ‘only’ and  ‘only’, which may be doubled together. We show that  allows for cross-categorical association with focus, whereas  alone does not and must depend on  for association with VP and CP. Based on their scopal behavior, we further demonstrate that the locus of exclusive semantics is on the adfocal particles but not a null OP. We propose a type-flexible analysis of exclusives with higher-order quantification and abstraction, which also explains exclusive doubling and the asymmetries in focus association.]]></description><link>http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/010003</link><guid isPermaLink="false">010003v3</guid><category><![CDATA[exclusive focus]]></category><category><![CDATA[only]]></category><category><![CDATA[type flexibility]]></category><category><![CDATA[cross-categorical association]]></category><category><![CDATA[higher-order abstraction]]></category><category><![CDATA[semantics]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Yip, Ka-Fai; Ahenkorah, Comfort]]></dc:creator></item><item><title><![CDATA[ERGATIVE ALIGNMENT EQUALS ‘ERGATIVITY’ MINUS PSEUDO-ERGATIVITY]]></title><description><![CDATA[Not every language that appears to be an ergative language actually is one. However, if it is a language with ergative alignment, the absolutive is the case of the grammatical subject, regardless of transitivity. Pseudo-ergative languages must not be confused with ergative languages; otherwise, the very confusions to which typologists have become accustomed arise. [corrected bibliography; included: marked-S languages]]]></description><link>http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/010393</link><guid isPermaLink="false">010393v11</guid><category><![CDATA[grammatical subject]]></category><category><![CDATA[comparative syntax]]></category><category><![CDATA[functionalism]]></category><category><![CDATA[structuralism]]></category><category><![CDATA[typology]]></category><category><![CDATA[ergativity]]></category><category><![CDATA[split ergative]]></category><category><![CDATA[pivots]]></category><category><![CDATA[passive]]></category><category><![CDATA[antipassive]]></category><category><![CDATA[absolutive]]></category><category><![CDATA[nominative]]></category><category><![CDATA[dependent case]]></category><category><![CDATA[clause structure]]></category><category><![CDATA[semantics]]></category><category><![CDATA[morphology]]></category><category><![CDATA[syntax]]></category><category><![CDATA[diachrony]]></category><category><![CDATA[causative]]></category><category><![CDATA[applicative]]></category><category><![CDATA[shipibo]]></category><category><![CDATA[cariban]]></category><category><![CDATA[ovs]]></category><category><![CDATA[sov/ovs]]></category><category><![CDATA[typological functionalism]]></category><category><![CDATA[differential subject marking]]></category><category><![CDATA[dam]]></category><category><![CDATA[marked-s language]]></category><category><![CDATA[marked-nominativ]]></category><category><![CDATA[marked-absolutive.]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Haider, Hubert]]></dc:creator></item><item><title><![CDATA[Gemini’s changing responses to data fabrication requests: Observations from a replication study]]></title><description><![CDATA[Kawahara (2026) found that Gemini complies with a request for data fabrication in 17 out of 30 trials (57%). In this note, I briefly report the results of three follow-up experiments conducted nine days after Kawahara (2026), which all failed to replicate this result. The most plausible explanation is an unannounced change in the safeguard mechanisms.]]></description><link>http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/010449</link><guid isPermaLink="false">010449v1</guid><category><![CDATA[gemini]]></category><category><![CDATA[research ethics]]></category><category><![CDATA[replication]]></category><category><![CDATA[model change]]></category><category><![CDATA[guardrail]]></category><category><![CDATA[syntax]]></category><category><![CDATA[phonology]]></category><category><![CDATA[semantics]]></category><category><![CDATA[morphology]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Kawahara, Shigeto]]></dc:creator></item><item><title><![CDATA[Animal Implicatures: A Note on the Informativity Principle and Bayesianism]]></title><description><![CDATA[Several recent analyses of animal signals have proposed that when animals have the choice between a signal S and a more informative signal S+, S+ is preferred if it is true (= Informativity Principle). The principle is usually taken to apply both in production and in comprehension. A Gricean analysis currently lacks plausibility for lack of evidence for a theory of mind in the target species. But this doesn’t mean that the animal Informativity Principle must be entirely taken as primitive. In fact, some uses of the principle in comprehension can be replaced with simple Bayesian reasoning. We explain in which cases this happens, and why the key data adduced for the Informativity Principle cannot be explained in this way because they involve production rather than comprehension. This suggests a new division of labor in which the animal Informativity Principle is primitive in production, but derived from Bayesian reasoning in comprehension.]]></description><link>http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/009943</link><guid isPermaLink="false">009943v6</guid><category><![CDATA[animal linguistics]]></category><category><![CDATA[animal communication]]></category><category><![CDATA[animal semantics]]></category><category><![CDATA[animal signals]]></category><category><![CDATA[bayesian pragmatics]]></category><category><![CDATA[informativity principle]]></category><category><![CDATA[semantics]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Schlenker, Philippe; Chemla, Emmanuel; Spector, Benjamin]]></dc:creator></item><item><title><![CDATA[Featural Relativized Minimality and non-local A-movement]]></title><description><![CDATA[[This paper condenses work that is spread across several chapters of my dissertation, and offers a unified and improved discussion of the theoretical implications of the proposal. Feedback is more than welcome!]

Two vastly held assumptions in the syntactic literature of the past few decades are that movement is always triggered by a step of Agree, and that agreement probes can be relativized as searching for particular φ-features. If we combine these two, a so-far mostly unnoticed prediction is derived: we should expect to find instances of movement that are not strictly DP-local (i.e., they can target a lower DP instead of one closer to the probe), but otherwise have all properties of A-movement, and none of Ā-movement. I argue that this is a welcome prediction, as it is empirically borne out: movement to specTP in Äiwoo shows exactly this combination of properties.]]></description><link>http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/010444</link><guid isPermaLink="false">010444v1</guid><category><![CDATA[locality]]></category><category><![CDATA[a-movement]]></category><category><![CDATA[a/Ā-distinction]]></category><category><![CDATA[agreement]]></category><category><![CDATA[austronesian]]></category><category><![CDATA[syntax]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Roversi, Giovanni]]></dc:creator></item><item><title><![CDATA[The Ōṅkāra Phonotactic Orientation Hypothesis]]></title><description><![CDATA[This paper proposes that Tamil phonotactics shape words toward the sound contour of ōm (ஓம்): a clean, unobstructed opening and a close that settles on a sustained sonorant rather than stopping abruptly. The evidence is threefold. The Tolkāppiyam permits words to end only in vowels or in sonorant consonants (nasals, liquids, semivowels), never in stops. Words may not begin with liquids, retroflexes or consonant clusters. And Tamil modulates loanwords to meet both conditions (Rāma → Irāmaṉ, loka → ulakam, rājan → aracaṉ, with j → c and a vowel added before r). The hypothesis is descriptive and testable against Tamil dictionaries and texts. The contour is named after ōṅkāram, whose a-u-m structure it shares. It takes no position on the origin of Om itself. Predictions and falsification criteria are stated so that the hypothesis can be confirmed or rejected by future work.]]></description><link>http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/010445</link><guid isPermaLink="false">010445v1</guid><category><![CDATA[tamil]]></category><category><![CDATA[Ōṅkāram]]></category><category><![CDATA[phonology]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Tharumarasan, Elavenil]]></dc:creator></item><item><title><![CDATA[The semantics of hekuang (‘let alone’) and its interaction with dou (‘even’)]]></title><description><![CDATA[This work investigates Chinese particle hekuang (‘let alone’), which exhibits an intriguing interaction with the even-like scalar use of dou (scalar dou). We highlight two important but underexplored empirical observations. First, hekuang typically co-occurs with scalar dou. Second, a hekuang-sentence is reminiscent of a rhetorical question. Drawing on these observations and a degree-QUD-based perspective on scalar particles (e.g., Greenberg 2018, Zhang 2022’s work on English even, and Chen and Greenberg 2022, Zhang 2026a’s work on Chinese dou), we propose that hekuang marks a speech act that carries a rhetorical, persuasive effect. ‘p hekuang q’ can be paraphrased as ‘given p, which maximally resolves the contextually salient degree QUD, isn’t q evidently true’. It thus persuades interlocutors to accept the truth of an implied q.]]></description><link>http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/010443</link><guid isPermaLink="false">010443v1</guid><category><![CDATA[hekuang (‘let alone’)]]></category><category><![CDATA[dou (‘even’)]]></category><category><![CDATA[scalarity]]></category><category><![CDATA[degree qud.]]></category><category><![CDATA[semantics]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Chen, Zhuang; Zhang, Linmin]]></dc:creator></item><item><title><![CDATA[Structural Parallels between Language and Music: Expectation, Compatibility, and Creativity]]></title><description><![CDATA[This study examines structural parallels between language and music while avoiding direct equivalences between their respective units and representational systems. The comparison focuses on three domains: expectation and resolution, structural dependency and compatibility, and the interaction between recurrent patterns and creative production. Drawing on research in linguistics, music cognition, and neurocognition, the study combines theoretical discussion with linguistic and musical examples. The analyses show that both language and music exploit previously established contexts to generate expectations whose fulfilment, postponement, modification, or disruption contributes to the interpretation of unfolding sequences. Comparable organizational principles also emerge in context-sensitive structural relations and in the reuse and transformation of acquired patterns. These parallels, however, do not imply shared grammatical representations or equivalent communicative functions. Instead, the findings support a constrained comparison in which language and music remain distinct systems with domain-specific representations, while exhibiting converging principles in the organization of structure, expectation, and creative variation over time.]]></description><link>http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/010439</link><guid isPermaLink="false">010439v1</guid><category><![CDATA[language and music; structural expectation; musical syntax; linguistic patterns; creativity]]></category><category><![CDATA[semantics]]></category><category><![CDATA[morphology]]></category><category><![CDATA[syntax]]></category><category><![CDATA[psycholinguistics]]></category><category><![CDATA[musicology]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Georgiou, Evangelos]]></dc:creator></item><item><title><![CDATA[Verb position in German: Cycles and movement]]></title><description><![CDATA[This paper discusses various approaches to head movement in HPSG. It points out that the cyclic verb
trace causes problems with coordinated verbs in initial position and discusses non-cyclic
approaches. Restricting the conjunctions in coordination structures is explored as well. The
interaction of verb fronting with apparent multiple frontings (V3) in German is discussed and it is
pointed out that this causes problems to approaches assuming a different architecture of the
fronting mechanism in HPSG (elements of SLASH of type sign. Finally an implicational
constraint is proposed that rules out coordinations in head-complement structures.]]></description><link>http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/010441</link><guid isPermaLink="false">010441v2</guid><category><![CDATA[verb position]]></category><category><![CDATA[head movement]]></category><category><![CDATA[syntax]]></category><category><![CDATA[german]]></category><category><![CDATA[germanic]]></category><category><![CDATA[syntax]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Müller, Stefan]]></dc:creator></item><item><title><![CDATA[Classifying negated nominals across Mixtec]]></title><description><![CDATA[Descriptions of negated nominal constructions vary drastically across Mixtec languages, even between closely related varieties. This paper argues that the apparent intervarietal differences in the syntactic and morphological characteristics of negated nominals arise because three distinct constructions, all of which are superficially similar, may coexist within a single variety. A description of negation and the syntactic and morphological features of the three types of negated nominals is given for San Martín Peras Mixtec. A review
of published data on eleven other Mixtec varieties shows that their negated nominals all fit relatively neatly into one of the three categories seen in San Martín Peras Mixtec but that many varieties only include description of one of the constructions. These findings emphasize the need for more thorough descriptive and comparative work on negated nominals in Mixtec, and they provide researchers with a set of syntactic features to consider in investigations of other Mixtec languages.]]></description><link>http://ling.auf.net/lingbuzz/010440</link><guid isPermaLink="false">010440v1</guid><category><![CDATA[mixtec]]></category><category><![CDATA[negation]]></category><category><![CDATA[negative quantifiers]]></category><category><![CDATA[syntax]]></category><dc:creator><![CDATA[Eischens, Ben]]></dc:creator></item></channel></rss>