Imke Driemel

Logophoric pronouns in West African languages occur in attitude environments and are anaphorically linked to an attitude holder in a superordinate clause. This has motivated theorists to treat logophoric pronouns semantically as an obligatorily bound variable (bound from the edge of an embedded complement clause). Culy (Linguistics 32:1055–1094, 1994) and Bimpeh and Sode (in Proceedings of TripleA, vol. 6 pp. 1–16, 2021), however, point out that logophoric pronouns in Ewe do not behave like obligatorily bound variables, allowing both sloppy (bound) and strict (non-bound) readings in focus contexts involving ‘only’ and ellipsis. We strengthen this line of criticism by providing novel cross-linguistic data that indicate that logophoric pronouns in Ewe, Igbo and Yoruba support strict readings. We offer an alternative formal account to existing approaches that builds on Bimpeh et al. (in Proceedings of the 40th WCCFL, pp. 1–10, 2024) and can capture both strict and sloppy interpretations, while preserving the requirement that a logophoric pronoun be anaphoric to an attitude holder. The main novelty involves decomposition of logophoric pronouns into two syntactic components at LF—a variable that can in principle be free and refer strictly, and a semantic presuppositional feature log that can be ignored in ellipsis and focus sites, following similar ideas in the literature on pronominal features (Sauerland in Proceedings of SALT 23, pp. 156–173, 2013). Our analysis implies that in terms of their syntactic and semantic make up, logophors are essentially no different from other pronouns, consisting of a referential index plus semantic features.

Mitrović & Sauerland (2014, 2016) claim that, across languages, DP-conjunction decomposes into [JP [MuP [DP1 ⟳] MU] [J’ J [MuP [DP2 ⟳] MU]]]. Their account, when combined with the independently motivated assumption that children better comprehend utterances which display a greater degree of 1-to-1 mapping between form and meaning (van Hout 2008, Guasti et al. 2023: a.o.), predicts that sentences where only J or MU are pronounced should be harder to comprehend relative to sentences where both J and MU are realized. We conducted an experiment testing this prediction by investigating children’s comprehension of conjunctive expressions in Georgian and Hungarian. While, for Hungarian, we did not find any differences between the types of conjunctive expressions, for Georgian, we found evidence that J-MU expressions were harder for children to comprehend than J or MU expressions. Our results challenge the account by Mitrović & Sauerland (2014, 2016) and cannot be captured by other existing accounts of conjunctive expressions either (Szabolcsi 2015, Haslinger et al. 2019). EARLY ACCESS

It is well known that children produce non-adult-like forms during language acquisition. Among these are errors where in the fashion of multiple exponence the child overtly marks an underlying feature or category more than once. In addition, children also produce errors where features that are marked fusionally with one form in the target language are marked separately with more than one form by the child. This paper is concerned with such errors in the domain of English past tense. We present a comprehensive corpus study investigating the frequencies and distribution of different error types, combining both overregularization and overtensing errors, which have previously been studied separately. We then propose an analysis based on Generalized Head Movement (Arregi & Pietraszko, 2021) and Distributed Morphology arguing that errors can be derived from two occasionally occurring underlying mistakes: negligence of secondary features and omission of obliteration. We show how these two mistakes and their interaction can account for the overall differences in error rates and distributions between different error types as well as across different verbs.

Upwards-oriented complementizer agreement raises questions about the directionality and locality of agreement. Based on novel data from original fieldwork, we argue that what has been described as an agreeing ‘say’-based complementizer in Kipsigis (Diercks and Rao 2019; Diercks et al. 2020) is the lexical verb ‘say,’ and what looks like C-Agree is in fact agreement between this verb and its locally introduced (often covert) subject. Our analysis highlights that ‘say’-based complementizers might be of category V, not C, in more languages than previously thought (Koopman 1984; Major 2021), which means that some instances of what has been described as C-Agree may instantiate standard verbal agreement. Furthermore, we provide a semantic analysis of ‘say’-based complementation in Kipsigis along the lines of contentful eventualities (Hacquard 2006; Kratzer 2013a).

Split conjunction refers to discontinuous coordinate structures in which conjuncts are spread across the clause. In German, split conjuncts show connectivity effects such as plural agreement on the finite verb. This paper argues for an underlying biclausal structure with subsequent deletion of redundant material in the last conjunct – also known as a stripping analysis. We propose that the connectivity effects are caused by multiple dominance of shared constituents, which subsequently move out of the coordinate structure in order to be linearized. Evidence for this proposal comes from word order restrictions with plural agreement and multiply bound pronouns, an incompatibility with collective predicates, lack of sloppy identity readings, and the possibility of cumulative quantifier readings.

Children acquiring a non-negative concord language like English or German have been found to consistently interpret sentences with two negative elements in a negative concord manner as conveying a single semantic negation. Corpus-based investigations for English and German show that children also produce sentences with two negative elements but only a single negation meaning. As any approach to negative concord and negative indefinites needs to account for both the typological variation and the child data, we revisit the three most current syntactic Agree-based analyses, as well as a movement-based approach and show that they either have difficulties with the child data or face challenges in the adult language variation or both. As a consequence, we develop a novel analysis of negative concord and negative indefinites which relies on purely morphological operations applying to hierarchical semantic representations within a version of the Meaning First architecture of grammar. We will argue that the typological variation between the main three different types of languages as well as the children’s non adult-like behaviour fall out from this in a straightforward fashion while the downsides of the Agree- and the movement-based accounts are avoided.

Patient‐voice clauses within the symmetric voice system of Balinese disallow any extraction from the external‐argument position, while definite external arguments are blocked from occurring altogether. The former fact is traditionally taken as evidence for syntactic ergativity in Austronesian. The latter fact has recently been argued to provide evidence for postsyntactic case licensing via adjacency with the verb. In this article, we offer a simple alternative explanation for the in‐situ properties of patient‐voice agents in Balinese—one that does not make reference to case. We argue that patient‐voice heads come with a feature that triggers removal of the external argument's DP shell, resulting in the loss of a determiner and a category‐D feature that would otherwise enable extraction.