This article investigates the morphosyntax of verbs of internally caused scalar change and the main facets of their meaning. Availing ourselves of primary evidence from Italian, French, and Spanish corpora, we argue that the verbs under scrutiny divide into three subclasses whose common denominator is that they encode ‘change by inner predisposition’ or change that is possible because of inherent propensities of specific entities. We understand inner predisposition as a feature of the content of the verbs investigated, which has relevance to the choice of the undergoer, alongside the cause of two of the subclasses. Apart from this feature verbs of change by inner predisposition are indistinguishable from other verbs of change. We argue against an agentive or generalized causative analysis, and we advance a proposal for the lexical semantics of representatives of each of the three subclasses and for the alternations in which they participate.

Since the sex of the speaker is normally as obvious as can be, there is no point in coding first-person singular gender – or so it may seem. This typological study examines the extent of sex-based gender marking in personal pronouns, possessive determiners, predicative adjectives, and verbs across first-, second-, and third-person singular. A worldwide perusal of grammars in addition to data elicitation yields a total of 115 languages with first-person gender. The paradigms of pronouns and possessives are found to be highly inconsistent, whereas those of verbs show a tendency towards consistency. Gender marking on adjectives is fully consistent. The likelihood of first-person gender is increased by a general sensitivity to gender and a dedicated gender morpheme. A distinction is made between pronouns and possessives as referential units and gender markers on verbs and adjectives as grammatical units. By their very nature, referential markers are sensitive to the contingencies of the extralinguistic world and subject to communicative constraints such as redundancy and economy. They therefore end up being organized in inconsistent paradigms. By contrast, grammatical units are largely untouched by these extraneous influences and may therefore develop consistent paradigms.

Numerals and ordinals occupy a special place in the typology of suppletion. In generative work, one basic cross-linguistic parameter is whether ordinal allomorphy displays internal vs. external marking. Internal marking is when irregular forms propagate from lower ordinals to higher ones (English ‘first’$ \to $‘twenty-first’), whereas external marking is the lack of propagation. We catalog ordinal formation in Armenian dialects through both formal-generative and functional-typological perspectives. We find that Eastern Armenian and Early Western Armenian are uniformly external-marking systems for the ordinals of ‘1–4’. However, Modern Western Armenian is a mixed system: ‘1’ displays external-marking while ‘2–4’ display internal-marking. Simultaneously, the ordinal of ‘1’ uses a suppletive portmanteau, while the ordinals of ‘2–4’ use agglutinative allomorphs. We formalize these differences in a derivational approach to morphology (Distributed Morphology). We argue that mixed systems arise from allomorphy rules that are sensitive to either constituency or linearity. The Western mixed system seems typologically rare and novel. Given our formal analysis, we then uncover other asymmetries in the propagation of irregular ordinals and the retention of portmanteau morphology across 35 Armenian varieties. The end result is a strong functional correlation between suppletion, external marking, and lower numerals.

The concept of ‘snowclones’ has gained interest in recent research on linguistic creativity and in studies of extravagance and expressiveness in language. However, no clear criteria for identifying snowclones have yet been established, and detailed corpus-based investigations of the phenomenon are still lacking. This paper addresses this research gap in a twofold way. On the one hand, we develop an operational definition of snowclones, arguing that three criteria are decisive: (i) the existence of a lexically fixed source construction; (ii) partial productivity; (iii) ‘extravagant’ formal and/or functional characteristics. On the other hand, we offer an empirical investigation of two patterns that have often been mentioned as examples of snowclones in the previous literature, namely [the mother of all X] and [X BE the new Y]. We use collostructional analysis and distributional semantics to explore the partial productivity of both patterns’ slot fillers. In sum, we argue that the concept of snowclones, if properly defined, can contribute substantially to our understanding of creative language use, especially regarding the question of how social, cultural, and interpersonal factors influence the choice of more or less salient linguistic constructions.

This paper presents several new empirical observations regarding some interpretive effects and structural restrictions of modals that occur in sentence-initial positions in Chinese. It provides a new analysis of sentence-initial modal sentences in terms of the overt head-movement of a modal to the sentence periphery to value strong focus features and to focus-mark either the proposition or the subject of a sentence. This new proposal helps explain the markedness exhibited by such sentences, correctly predicts the structural and semantic restrictions of modal sentences, and directly explains the scopal interactions observed between modals and various types of focus constructions. It also shows that changes in word order in Chinese are not ascribable simply to an optional or free derivation in syntax but are related to an understudied mechanism in that language, i.e. T-to-C movement, and that the roles of information structure are represented as formal features in syntax. The results shed new light on how Chinese – though profoundly different from Germanic and Romance languages typologically – exemplifies a similarly fine structure in the sentence-internal domain, parallel associations of scope-bearing units with sentences’ left peripheries, and a neat interaction of syntax with discourse configurations.

The Galician definite article and direct object clitics exhibit allomorphy-like alternations which raise a number of questions for the morphology-phonology interface. This squib highlights inadequacies of allomorphic approaches to these alternations, outlining a novel way forward in which segmental changes apply to a stem in a fashion reminiscent of Celtic mutation. Differences between the article and the object clitic can then be ascribed to their prosodic weights, evident elsewhere in the language. Taken together, these findings expand our view of potential triggers for morphophonological alternations.

This study examines the copy raising constructions in Chinese and proposes an integrated analysis built on the insights of the prominent proposals from recent years. It argues that the matrix subject in Chinese copy raising is base-generated and requires a coindexed copy in the complement. Though concurring with Landau’s (2011) predication theory that recognizes theta assignment and predication as two ways of semantically licensing an argument, this squib differs from him in assuming that languages like Chinese can be parametrized in not treating the perceptual source as thematic. It is further argued that in Chinese, the perceptual source construal of the subject does not come from theta assignment but rather as an implicature which interprets the matrix subject to be involved in the topic event denoted by the perception verb.