I investigate the interaction of Ā-movement, long-distance agreement (LDA), and clause type in Passamaquoddy (Eastern Algonquian) as a lens into the structure of the left periphery. I observe that we must distinguish three LDA patterns in the language: (i) LDA into complements of verbs like 'kocicihtun ‘know’ (“epistemic complements”), which is generally free (i.e. not A-local), but is restricted to the wh-DP under long-distance wh-movement; (ii) LDA into direct perception complements, which is always free, even when long-distance wh-moving a DP; and (iii) LDA into complements of verbs like 'pawatomon ‘want’ (“subordinative complements”, featuring verbs inflected in the subordinative verbal paradigm), which is always subject to A-locality, even when long-distance wh-moving a DP. I propose that these three patterns arise from independently-diagnosable differences in clause size: epistemic complements are full, phasal CPs, direct perception complements are reduced, nonphasal CPs, and subordinative complements are (nonphasal) bare TPs.

Nado.pred že.part! ‘Ça, alors !’ est la manière dont une personne parlant russe pourrait s’exprimer lorsqu’elle est prise de court, lorsqu’elle est frappée de surprise. Cet article propose d’expliquer cet emploi si particulier du modal nado (qui, comme nous le verrons, exprime une forme de nécessité, « il faut ») qui peut, lorsqu’il est utilisé conjointement à la particule énonciative že perdre son expression modale stricte et exprimer alors un ressenti du locuteur à un instant t. Ses usages feront également l’objet d’une analyse et d’une proposition de classification à travers la description d’énoncés russes en contexte.

Cette contribution examine la production des voyelles nasales du français chez les apprenants néerlandophones belges. Elle innove en ce qu’elle allie l'« intelligibilité » des voyelles non natives, évaluée par des auditeurs représentant Paris et Liège, à une analyse acoustique centrée sur la « nativité phonétique ». Les stimuli sont des mots monosyllabiques de haute fréquence produits par 20 apprenants néerlandophones. Les résultats indiquent que l’intelligibilité des nasales non natives est plutôt élevée, exception faite de /ɑ̃/. En outre, les deux groupes d’auditeurs ne diffèrent pas dans leur compréhension des voyelles, à l’exception de /ε̃/, que les Liégeois identifient plus souvent. Cette différence peut être liée à l’impact de (i) la variation en L1 ou (ii) la familiarité des auditeurs belges avec la parole néerlandaise. Enfin, l’étude montre que ce n’est pas tant la nasalité même qui pose des difficultés de production aux apprenants néerlandophones, mais l’interaction avec le timbre vocalique.

Yào in Mandarin, typically a modal, has subjunctive-like uses in complement clauses. Such uses are textual in that they signal interclausal modal cohesion between the main verb and the complement clause in a construction known as the pivotal manipulative construction. They fall into three types, depending on the relationship between yào and the main verb. All three likely originate from complement clauses negated by prohibitives. However, despite a common origin, two of the types are diachronically later and more contentful, rather than procedural. Therefore, it is proposed that the development of uses in complement clauses out of modality proper does not necessarily involve unidirectional increases in procedural meaning, as is often hypothesized.

Van der Auwera and Plungian’s map of possibility and necessity paths, the main topic of the workshop from which this special issue emerged, offers a rearrangement of Bybee et al.’s data on grammaticalization paths in the domain of modality along three dimensions: necessity vs. possibility, pre-modal vs. modal vs. post-modal, and participant-internal vs. participant-external. In this article, I will argue for a different interpretation of ‘post-modality’ and a different model for dealing with the data. With respect to the pre-modal/modal/post-modal distinction, I will point out that most of the ‘post-modal’ functions are in fact still modal. Furthermore, I will point out that the overall direction of change is not towards ‘non-modal’ but rather an increase in discourse orientation. At the late stages in the development of modal meaning, dubbed as ‘post-modal’ in van der Auwera and Plungian, it signifies a shift toward meanings and functions that contribute to the construction of discourse. Additionally, in various hierarchical models of grammar, modal expressions unidirectionally shift into higher positions that correspond to a higher degree of discourse orientation, thus providing independent confirmation for the model of change proposed here.

The fiftieth anniversary of the publication of the Survey of Canadian English presents a unique opportunity to examine change in Canadian English over five decades of real time. A partial replication of the original survey was therefore conducted in 2023-24, gathering a similar number of responses (approximately 14,000) from every province of Canada. The new survey reprised 45 of the old survey’s questions, including variables of pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and spelling, many of these contrasting British, American, and in some cases Canadian variants. A comparison of the two datasets at the aggregate level finds that the proportion of American variants has grown and continues to grow at the expense of British and Canadian variants, though not all variables show this trend and the spelling variables are generally an exception; that Canada’s provinces vary in the extent to which they display this shift; that vocabulary is more regionally variable than pronunciation, grammar or spelling; and that regional variation is declining today, compared to its prevalence in 1972.

Nous analyserons dans cette contribution les marqueurs pouvoir et peut-être du français et a putea ‘pouvoir’ et poate ‘peut-être’ du roumain, et plus précisément l’évolution de leurs emplois modaux vers des emplois non modaux, que nous décrirons dans une perspective contrastive. Dans le cas du français, nous nous appuierons sur les études antérieures sur la question, où sont répertoriées et décrites des valeurs modales comme la possibilité aléthique, épistémique et déontique, ainsi que des valeurs post- ou plus-que-modales, où le sémantisme modal s’affaiblit, comme la sporadicité ou la concession, ou différentes valeurs illocutoires. En roumain, on retrouve la plupart de ces valeurs pour les marqueurs étudiés, mais leurs valeurs non modales ont été beaucoup moins étudiées. Nous chercherons à voir si les mêmes valeurs, modales et non modales, des marqueurs se retrouvent dans les deux langues et à mettre au jour les cas d’emplois divergents.

Cette étude se concentre sur la dissidence linguistique du français mitchif, une variété en voie de disparition du français laurentien, parlée par un nombre diminuant de Métis de l’Ouest canadien. L’analyse se focalise sur l’utilisation des marqueurs de conséquence (ça) fait (que), donc, alors et so dans un corpus comprenant une cinquantaine d’entretiens recueillis au sein de la communauté métisse de Saint-Laurent, au Manitoba, durant les années 1980. Les résultats internes soutiennent l’hypothèse d’une parenté linguistique avec d’autres variétés du français laurentien. En parallèle, les données externes indiquent une nette dominance de la variante (ça) fait (que), renforçant ainsi le caractère fortement vernaculaire du français michif en comparaison avec d’autres variétés du français laurentien. Enfin, l’analyse d’extraits d’entrevues démontre que l’utilisation soutenue des variantes vernaculaires joue un rôle crucial en tant que marqueur identitaire, permettant aux locuteurs de revendiquer leur appartenance culturelle ainsi qu’une langue qu’ils perçoivent comme distincte de celle des autres francophones.

This article discusses the syntactic analysis of V3 patterns in a V2 language in relation to the articulated left periphery familiar from work in the cartographic tradition. V3 patterns in Dutch or in German have been analysed as involving a regular V2 pattern with an initial sentence external constituent. This type of analysis has been invoked, for instance, for CLD patterns in Dutch. This article shows how one distinctive V3 pattern in the Ghent variety of Dutch provides support for a fine-grained structure of the left periphery. In this pattern, an initial adverbial adjunct is followed by an invariant die which is itself followed by the finite verb. We provide evidence that this pattern must not be equated with adverbial CLD in Dutch or the Ghent variety. We show that the constituent preceding die is not main clause-external. Invariant die is analysed as the spell out of a featurally enriched left peripheral head, more specifically an instantiation of a D-enriched Force encoding discourse anchoring.

This article explores patterns of agreement and word order in the Central Algonquian language Border Lakes Ojibwe. This variety of Ojibwe shows alternations between VOS and VSO word orders and complex interactions between probes on Voice, Infl, and C. I show that the behaviour of lower probes feeds and bleeds the possible agreement and movement relations on each subsequent probe. These complex interactions culminate with the peripheral agreement marker on C, which shows a curious pattern that I dub reverse omnivority, where the probe agrees with lower ranked arguments over higher ranked arguments regardless of whether it is a logical subject or object. The core theoretical innovation is an extension of the syntactic operation agree to encode a relativized EPP, which captures variation and restrictions on movement and the possibility of movement and feature copying being independent. The account provides a strong case for Ojibwe as a configurational language, and is shown to capture variation in agreement and word order in various corners of Ojibwe and beyond.

The left periphery is commonly taken to be the locus of information-structural properties of utterances, hosting the topic and focus field, with the elements occupying left-peripheral positions being endowed with [Topic] and [Focus] features. In this article I show that not all constructions formed in the left periphery have information-structural characteristics of topics and foci, and propose that the relationship between the left periphery and the extended projection of the verb should be re-evaluated. I first explore the left periphery in two typologically distinct languages, Wolof (West Atlantic, Senegal) and Igala (Yoruboid, Nigeria), and show that constructions with topics and A'-extracted elements in the two languages share some typical properties of such structures cross-linguistically. I then turn to clauses with nominal predicates in the two languages, and show that they are formed in the left periphery, with the predicate moving to the syntactic position otherwise reserved for A'-extracted exhaustified elements, and the subject occupying the position of the topic. Crucially, clauses with nominal predicates do not exhibit the information-structural properties otherwise associated with the two left-peripheral positions, meaning that endowing those positions with features such as [Topic] and [Focus] does not yield adequate empirical coverage. However, both positions exhibit formal syntactic properties of left-peripheral elements. I do not propose a new analysis in this article, but lay out the issues which an analysis of the left periphery should capture, and propose avenues for further research.

Cet article est une étude de l’anglais may dans deux types de phrases, la question fermée et l’optatif. Avec des données de corpus, nous nous inscrivons dans l’approche énonciative de Culioli pour tenter de répondre à la question: le verbe modal anglais typique may perd-il sa valeur déontique de permission (tel qu’observé dans les questions fermées) dans une phrase optative exprimant des prières ou des souhaits? L’hypothèse est que may demeure un marqueur de compatibilité, le paramètre énonciatif clé modifiant l’interprétation des phrases étant l’attitude du locuteur. Dans une interrogative, le locuteur laisse l’interlocuteur juger de ce qui est demandé, tandis que dans une optative, le locuteur asserte la nature bénéfique de la prière, s’en remettant aux circonstances pour sa validation. Des preuves textuelles sont apportées pour illustrer les différents types d’engagement du locuteur.

This article studies the commissive use of can in conditionals such as I can do the dishes, if you like. Its main goal is to spell out the semantic building blocks of what we call offer-can, arguing that the seemingly speech act interpretation is a feature of the conditional statement as a whole rather than the modal itself. To achieve this, we disentangle authority and ability at the semantic level (in agreement with Copley 2009), and single out the notions of “issue to be solved” and “preferred solution worlds” as epistemic basis and bouletic ordering, respectively, for modal quantification. We propose a comparison between the conditional offer and other non-conditional conditionals, and offer some thoughts regarding permission-can and can-you-pass-me-the-salt questions, arguing for authority shift in questions, in a way akin to the interrogative flip in questions with evidentials and epistemic modals.

This paper provides a novel description and syntactic analysis of different types of quantifiers in Chuj, an underdocumented Mayan language. We focus on a subset of expressions that quantify over entities, and that have been noted to appear obligatorily in sentence-initial position. We argue that three types of quantifiers should be distinguished: (i) Predicative A-quantifiers, which occur sentence-initially because Chuj is a predicate-initial language; (ii) Focus D-quantifiers, which occur sentence-initially because they are lexically specified for an [A$'$] feature; and (iii) Basic D-quantifiers, which, lacking an [A$'$] feature, have no effects on the syntactic position of their host arguments. We also sketch syntactic analyses of each type of quantifier.