The French interrogative system, which allows for variation among several distinct syntactic structures, constitutes a domain in which normative prescription and actual usage differ greatly (Elsig, 2009). Although many sociolinguistic studies have examined this variation (e.g., Ashby, 1977; Behnstedt, 1973; Coveney, 1989, 2002; Fox, 1989; Myers, 2007; Quillard, 2000), most can be characterized ...

1. The Puzzles The goal of this paper is to account for the semantics-syntax mismatch and the optionality on the LF-PF mapping in Mandarin lian...dou VP-focus constructions. Specifically, I propose that the observed puzzle in this paper can be explained with the Copy Theory (Chomsky (1995), Bobaljik (2002), and others) and the theory in Bobaljik and Wurmbrand (2008) on LF-PF mapping. In Mandari...

In this paper we propose a unified account of ergativity in two unrelated languages with very different systems of marking grammatical relations. Both Chol (Mayan, Mexico) and Mẽbengokre (Jê, Brazil) have what appear to be aspect-based ergative splits. However, while in Mẽbengokre ergativity is found in verb stems which are formally nominal, ergativity in Chol is found in what can be shown to b...

It is controversial which idioms can occur with syntactic structures. For example, Mary kicked the bucket (figurative meaning: ‘Mary died’) be passivized to The was by ? We present a series of experiments in we test structures are compatible German (for there few experimental data so far) and English, using acceptability judgments. some tested – including left dislocation, scrambling, prefield ...

This study investigates cross-linguistic transfer in the production of long mid front vowels [ø?] and [œ?] by simultaneous bilingual Finnish Finland-Swedish speakers Finland. In Swedish, phoneme /ø/ can be realised as allophones [ø] [œ], while Finnish, only is used. Combining approaches from sociophonetic research, used acoustic analysis to compare height fronting produced monolingual three dif...