This note comments on Szendrői’s (2017) claim that some of the pragmatic constraints on syntactic operations proposed in Trotzke (2015a) are not supported by convincing empirical evidence. Szendrői objects to two empirical points made by Trotzke. I will deal with these points in turn: Section 1 focuses on the syntactic flexibility of idioms discussed by Szendrői, and Section 2 replies to her comments in the domain of island effects.

This paper focuses on the interaction between raising, subject–verb inversion and agreement in Modern Hebrew. It identifies, alongside ‘standard’ (i.e., English-like) subject-to-subject raising, two additional patterns where the embedded subject appears post-verbally. In one, the raising predicate exhibits long-distance agreement with the embedded subject, while in the other, a colloquial variant, it is marked with impersonal (3sm) agreement. The choice between the three raising constructions in the language is shown to be solely dependent on properties of the embedded clause. The data are discussed and analyzed against a background of typological and theoretical work on raising. The analysis, cast in the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), builds on research on raising, selectional locality, agreement, subjecthood and information structure, as well as verb-initial constructions in Modern Hebrew.

This article investigates a particular phenomenon of coordination that delivers important clues about the nature of syntactic structures. We call this phenomenon left node blocking – the designation is a play on the related concept of right node raising. Left node blocking provides insight into how syntactic structures are produced and processed. The dependency grammar analysis of the left node blocking phenomenon put forth here focuses on roots in coordinated strings. By acknowledging roots, it is possible to discern what coordination is revealing about syntactic structures. In particular, coordination delivers evidence for relatively flat structures.

Recent research has shown that homophonous lexemes show systematic phonetic differences (e.g. Gahl 2008, Drager 2011), with important consequences for models of speech production such as Levelt et al. (1999). These findings also pose the question of whether similar differences hold for allegedly homophonous affixes (instead of free lexemes). Earlier experimental research found some evidence that morphemic and non-morphemic sounds may differ acoustically (Walsh & Parker 1983, Losiewicz 1992). This paper investigates this question by analyzing the phonetic realization of non-morphemic /s/ and /z/, and of six different English /s/ and /z/ morphemes (plural, genitive, genitive-plural and 3rd person singular, as well as cliticized forms of has and is). The analysis is based on more than 600 tokens extracted from conversational speech (Buckeye Corpus, Pitt et al. 2007). Two important results emerge. First, there are significant differences in acoustic duration between some morphemic /s/’s and /z/’s and non-morphemic /s/ and /z/, respectively. Second, there are significant differences in duration between some of the morphemes. These findings challenge standard assumptions in morphological theory, lexical phonology and models of speech production.