This paper studies prenominal reduplicative classifier in Cantonese, which has been argued to be a distributive quantifier on a par with English every/each and Mandarin mei ‘every’, and a plural classifier giving the ‘many’ reading. The analysis I propose draws heavily on ideas introduced in the cover theory proposed by Schwarzschild (1996) and Brisson (1998, 2003), and ideas introduced by Partee (2004) and others on quantifying determiner many. I argue that prenominal reduplicative classifier is a quantifying determiner which is ambiguous between a quantifier type and a modifier type. When it occurs with the distributive quantifier dou1 ‘all’, it serves as a modifier, regulating the domain of dou1-quantification by imposing a maximizing effect on the nominal it modifies (see e.g. Link 1983; Gillon 1987; Schwarzschild 1996; Brisson 1998, 2003). Without the presence of a distributive quantifier, prenominal reduplicative classifier serves either as a modifier or as a quantifier, giving its NP a weak cardinal reading or a strong proportional reading, respectively. The proposed analysis implies that domain restriction in Chinese is overtly realized in grammatical form by means of the reduplicative classifier (when combined with a distributive quantifier) and that Chinese may have determiners, which is at least true in Cantonese.

We explore the implications of a particular approach to learning for an architectural question in phonology. The learning approach follows the principle of Minimum Description Length (MDL), which has recently been used for learning in both constraint-based and rule-based phonology. The architectural question on which we focus is whether the grammar allows language-specific statements to be made at the level of the lexicon, as was assumed in early generative phonology, or whether such statements are prohibited, as is commonly assumed within more recent work. We show that under MDL, the architectural question has real empirical implications: across a range of seemingly natural representational schemes, an ability to make language-specific statements about the lexicon is needed to ensure the learnability of an important aspect of phonological knowledge.

In this paper, the unexpected behavior of object negative quantifiers in some diagnostic tests of sentential negation is accounted for within a Minimalist framework assuming that: (i) negative quantifiers decompose into negation and an existential quantifier; (ii) negative quantifiers are multidominant phrase markers, as Parallel Merge allows the verb to c-select their existential part but not their negative part, thus giving negation remerge flexibility; (iii) tag questions involve or-coordination of TPs, and neither/so clauses involve and-coordination of TPs; (iv) two positions for sentential negation are available in English, one below TP (PolP2), and one above TP (PolP1). Activation of either PolP1 or PolP2 in the absence of other scope-taking operators corresponds to two distinct grammars. If PolP1 is active, the negative part of an object negative quantifier remerges in its Specifier valuing the [upol: ] feature of Pol1 as negative ([upol:neg]) while skipping the TP-domain. As no negative formal feature is present in the TP, a negative question tag is required, as well as so-coordination, too-licensing and Yes, I guess so ‘expression of agreement’. Conversely, if PolP2 is active, the negative part of the object negative quantifier remerges in the TP-domain (in Spec, PolP2), thus requiring a positive question tag, neither-coordination, either-licensing, and No, I guess not.

Tlapanec (Mè’phàà) is known for its enigmatic tonal alternation in verb forms according to person and aspect-mode categories, in addition to suppletion and other segmental alternations. In this paper, we argue that the tonal alternations observed in Tlapanec regular agentive verbs can be straightforwardly accounted for by phonology, without resorting to any extreme abstractness: the lexical tones of the prefixes and the verb stems, with underspecification and floating tones, and cross-linguistically common tone processes such as tone spreading and floating tone docking. Such a phonological (or a morpheme-based) approach is contrasted with a word-based approach, where tonal alternations are viewed as inflectional classes. We show that the phonological approach is more adequate than a word-based approach.

Both in linguistics and in psycholinguistics there is some debate about how rich or thin lexico-semantic representations are. Traditionally, in formal semantics but also in philosophy of language as well as in cognitive pragmatics, lexical meanings have been thought to be simple stable denotations or functions. In this paper, we present and discuss a number of interpretational phenomena of which the analysis proposed in the literature makes crucial use of rich meanings. The phenomena in question are cases where the assignment of truth-conditional contents to utterances seems to follow rules that do not operate on simple stable denotations or any other kind of ‘thin’ meanings but where composition takes rich structured representations as input. We also discuss problems for such accounts, which are mostly based on the inability of extant rich meanings accounts to explain many other interpretational phenomena, and we discuss the solutions that have been proposed to solve them. Furthermore, we address the discussion whether the informationally rich meanings are part of semantics, and more specifically part of the lexicon, or whether this information should be ascribed to more general world knowledge.

This squib presents two challenges for the analysis of promise-type verbs within the Movement Theory of Control. We show that the objects of these verbs in Russian are not prepositional and are incorrectly predicted to be legitimate controllers. We also argue against analysing oblique control as movement.