We reexamine the status of the coordinate structure constraint (CSC; Ross 1967) by drawing on evidence from Japanese and Korean. Contrary to the standard view that the CSC is a syntactic constraint, the empirical patterns from the two languages show that it should instead be viewed as a pragmatic principle. We propose a pragmatic analysis by building on and extending a previous proposal by Kehler (2002). Examining the Japanese and Korean data turns out to be vital in the comparison of the syntactic and pragmatic approaches, since the syntactic differences between the relevant constructions in the two languages and their counterparts in English crucially distinguish the predictions of the two approaches.

Why do nominalizations mean what they do? I investigate two deverbal nominalizers in Northern Paiute (Uto-Aztecan, Numic: Western United States), -na and -, which create nominalizations that describe either an event (like the poss-ing gerund in English) or an individual (like agent nominalizations with -er). I propose a syntax and semantics for these deverbal nominalizations that account for their interpretive variability. On the syntax side, I argue that -na and - overtly realize the nominal functional head that canonically assigns case to possessors when this head takes a vP complement. On the semantics side, I propose that Northern Paiute has operators that abstract over a variable inside nominalizations. This accounts for the meanings that deverbal nominalizations in Northern Paiute have, and it highlights their relationship to nominalization patterns in other languages.

This article presents and discusses evidence that genitive and dative objects regularly become nominative in Ancient Greek passives of monotransitives and ditransitives. This is a typologically and theoretically significant state of affairs for two reasons. (i) As is well known, nonaccusative objects are, in many languages, not allowed to enter into Case alternations, a fact that has been accounted for in the government-binding/principles-and-parameters literature on the basis of the assumption that nonaccusative objects—prototypically datives—bear inherent, lexical, or quirky Case. By this reasoning, Ancient Greek genitives and datives must be concluded to have structural Case. (ii) Even in languages where dative-nominative (DAT-NOM) alternations do obtain, they are often limited to ditransitives, a fact that can been taken to suggest that dative qualifies as structural Case only in ditransitives. A language like Ancient Greek, which allows genitive and dative objects to become nominative in all passives (monotransitives and ditransitives), shows that it is, in principle, possible to have a linguistic system where genitive and dative qualify as structural Cases in both monotransitives and ditransitives. Case theories must be designed in such a way as to allow for this option. We argue for an analysis of Case alternations that combines the view that alternating datives and genitives enter the formal operation Agree with a morphological case approach to the distribution of overt case morphology. We furthermore compare Ancient Greek DAT-NOM and genitive-nominative (GEN-NOM) alternations in passives to Icelandic DAT-NOM and GEN-NOM alternations in middles, pointing to a number of interesting differences in the two types of alternations that depend on (i) the types of nonaccusative arguments entering Agree, (ii) the verbal head (Voice or v) entering Agree with nonaccusative objects, and (iii) the rules of dependent case assignment in connection to the role of nominative in the two languages.

As linguists theorize about language endangerment and loss (LEL), we must understand the big picture: the coexistence of languages in particular polities and how the competition that sometimes arises is resolved. Many concerns have been voiced about LEL since the early 1990s, but theoretical developments regarding language vitality lag far behind linguists’ current investment in language advocacy. While discussing issues such as the failure to connect the subject matter to language evolution in general, the framing of LEL as deleterious almost exclusively to ‘indigenous peoples’, a lack of historical time depth, and the omission of the ecological factors in typical approaches to LEL, I argue that linguistics should theorize about language vitality more adequately than has been the case to date.

Infixation and allomorphy have long been investigated as independent phenomena—see, for example, Ultan 1975, Moravcsik 1977, and Yu 2007 on infixation, and Carstairs 1987, Paster 2006, Veselinova 2006, and Bobaljik 2012 on allomorphy. But relatively little is known about what happens when infixation and allomorphy coincide. This article presents the results of the first crosslinguistic study of allomorphy involving infixation, considering fifty-one case studies from forty-two languages (fifteen language families). Allomorphy and infixation interact systematically, with distinct sets of behaviors characterizing suppletive and nonsuppletive allomorphy involving an infix. Perhaps most notably, suppletive allomorphy is conditioned only at/from the stem edge, while nonsuppletive allomorphy is conditioned only in the surface (infixed) environment. The robustness of these and related findings supports a universal serial architecture of the morphosyntax-phonology interface where: (i) infixation is indirect, involving displacement from a stem-edge position to a stem-internal one, counter to several influential theories of infixation (see especially McCarthy & Prince 1993a and Yu 2007); (ii) suppletive exponent choice is prior to (i.e. not regulated by) the phonological grammar (in line with Paster 2006, Pak 2016, Kalin 2020, Rolle 2021, and Stanton 2023, inter alia); and (iii) realization—including exponent choice and infixation—proceeds from the bottom of the morphosyntactic structure upward (à la Bobaljik 2000, Embick 2010, Myler 2017).

Berkson, Davis, and Strickler (2017) provide an invaluable report on incipient /ay/-raising in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Their data suggest that /ay/-raising conditioned strictly by phonetic voicelessness is a possible early stage in the development of /ay/-raising. This raises a particularly vexing question of why /ay/-raising has gone on to be conditioned by phonological voicing in all North American varieties for which its interaction with /t, d/ flapping has been examined. It suggests that the process of phonologization reorganizes the distribution of phonetic variants, rather than simply discretizing phonetic precursors.

This article discusses in detail two cases of even-marked negative polarity items (NPIs) in Greek and Korean that are not scalar or exhaustive. This prima facie paradoxical finding suggests that EVEN-marking is not always an indicator of scalarity—and, at least in the case of the Korean and Greek NPIs discussed, even is grammaticalized as a nonscalar NPI marker. We propose that the nonscalar NPIs are antispecific indefinites with referential vagueness, which is a form of ignorance best captured as nonexhaustive variation in the potential values of the NPIs (Giannakidou & Quer 2013). We also show that the difference in Greek and Korean between scalar and nonscalar NPIs is reflected in prosody: scalar NPIs are ‘emphatic’, and nonscalar NPIs are ‘nonemphatic’; we therefore conclude that prosodic prominence, not even, signals scalar structure. The fact that not all NPIs are scalar or exhaustive falsifies theories claiming that exhaustivity is the source of all NPIs (Chierchia 2006, 2013).