Elena Titov

This squib accounts for the inconsistencies in the occurrence of GenNeg with the Russian verb byt’ ‘to be’ and other genitive verbs by distinguishing two independent lexical entries for byt’ with a specified location with differing syntactic and semantic characteristics. One is predicative/argument-taking, while the other is the copula in a copular construction with a locational prepositional predicate. Sentential negation invariably assigns GenNeg to the grammatical subject of the copular construction, whereas the subject of predicative byt’ is in the wrong syntactic configuration to receive GenNeg, which forces nominative case assignment via agreement with the finite Infl.

This paper looks at two cases of number agreement mismatch in Russian numeral<br> phrases and offers a unified syntactic analysis for both. One case relates to exam-<br> ples where a higher numeral that typically selects a plural NP fails to do so when<br> the head noun lacks a singular lexical form. Instead, an NP headed by a noun that<br> lacks a plural lexical form is chosen despite the selectional requirement of the nu-<br> meral. The second case concerns data discussed in Franks & House (1982) that in-<br> volve topicalization of a complement of a lower numeral, which consistently selects<br> a singular NP, with the topicalized NP unexpectedly appearing in the plural form.

This paper investigates a phenomenon that has been referred to in the linguistic literature as contrastive topic. Traditionally, contrastive topic is analyzed as an independent information-structural notion that is linked to a particular interpretation and intonation. The paper, however, argues that the information-structural notion of contrastive topic is redundant and can be reduced to that of contrastive focus. The apparent dissimilarity between contrastive topics and contrastive foci is attributed to a difference in the structures that contain them rather than any particular difference between the associated information-structural notions themselves. The structures that host contrastive topics and contrastive foci are claimed to be distinct due to the nature of an additional focused element obligatorily present in the sentence. Contrastive topics and contrastive foci themselves, in contrast, are shown to be associated with identical interpretations, which results in their identi...

This paper looks at two cases of number agreement mismatch in Russian numeral phrases and offers a unified syntactic analysis for both. One case relates to examples where a higher numeral that typically selects a plural NP fails to do so when the head noun lacks a singular lexical form. Instead, an NP headed by a noun that lacks a plural lexical form is chosen despite the selectional requirement of the numeral. The second case concerns data discussed in Franks & House (1982) that involve topicalization of a complement of a lower numeral, which consistently selects a singular NP, with the topicalized NP unexpectedly appearing in the plural form.

Gisbert Fanselow’s work has been invaluable and inspiring to many ­researchers working on syntax, morphology, and information ­structure, both from a ­theoretical and from an experimental perspective. This ­volume comprises a collection of articles dedicated to Gisbert on the occasion of his 60th birthday, covering a range of topics from these areas and beyond. The contributions have in ­common that in a broad sense they have to do with language structures (and thus trees), and that in a more specific sense they have to do with birds. They thus cover two of Gisbert’s major interests in- and outside of the linguistic world (and ­perhaps even at the interface).

This paper investigates the interpretive and formal properties of the so-called focus construction in Akan. It argues that Akan has only one true morphological focus marker, namely na, whereas the marker de(ε) that has been analysed in the linguistic literature on Akan as a focus marker (Boadi 1974; Saah 1988; Boadi 1990; Saah 1994; Marfo and Bodomo 2005) is in fact a marker of contrastive topic. The proposed analysis relies on the idea that the Akan morphological markers na and de(ε) carry out exactly the same interpretive function as the falling and rising prosodic markers, respectively, found in intonation languages. It is shown that a number of controversies associated with Akan information-structural marking can be accounted for by assuming a certain parallelism with intonation languages. It is demonstrated that particular types of information-structural partitioning are cross-linguistically encoded via a marked strategy, with the parametric variation resulting from the differe...

According to the principles of economy, scrambled orders require an interpretive license. Removal of such a license should result in canonical orders, that is, orders I hypothesize to be determined by a thematic hierarchy. It is traditionally assumed that the interpretive license for scrambling is provided by information-structural interpretations such as focus and background. However, either direct object–indirect object or indirect object–direct object order is possible in Russian all-focus constructions, complicating the choice of order analyzed as canonical. I argue that Russian scrambling can be licensed by a variety of interpretations, focus/background encoding being but one of them. When the construal of objects is neutralized on the basis of all of the relevant interpretations, the direct object–indirect object order surfaces, strongly suggesting that this is the canonical order of Russian objects.