The syntactic derivations of interrogative verbs in Amis and Kavalan

Interrogative words that denote ‘what’, ‘how’, ‘where’, and ‘how many’ in Amis and Kavalan have the same morphosyntactic distribution as verbs. The present paper argues that their use as verbs is not due to unconstrained lexical idiosyncrasies, but exhibits consistent syntactic and semantic patterns. Their grammatical properties and restrictions follow from the interaction of the following factors: the inherent semantics of interrogative words, the available interpretation of the question where they occur, the verbal structures of the voice markers, and the syntactic principles and constraints like the Head Movement Constraint or the Transparence Condition. The syntactic analysis advocated in this paper can extend to other atypical non-interrogative verbs in the two languages and makes falsifiable predictions about what interrogative words can and cannot be used as verbs

Number agreement in Basque: counting vs. measuring

This paper argues that Basque non-agreeing quantifiers are conceptually measures and that measures head their own functional projection in the expanded structure of the Noun Phrase. This functional projection is placed in-between the Classifier Phrase (where division occurs) and the Number Phrase (where counting occurs), following Borer (2005). The distinction we make between the measuring field (in Measure Phrase position) and the counting field (in NumP position) affects referentiality; in fact, agreement and reference only become relevant upon reaching NumP -not before that position, i.e. not in Measure Phrase position. We also show that non-agreeing quantifiers are sensitive to the nature of the predicates they associate with

Mundari: The myth of a language without word classes

Mundari, an Austroasiatic language of India (Munda family), has often been cited as an example of a language without word classes, where a single word can function as noun, verb, adjective, etc. according to the context. These claims, originating in a 1903 grammar by the missionary John Hoffmann, have recently been repeated uncritically by a number of typologists. In this article we review the evidence for word class fluidity, on the basis of a careful analysis of Hoffmann's corpus as well as substantial new data, including a large lexical sample at two levels of detail. We argue that in fact Mundari does have clearly definable word classes, with distinct open classes of verb and noun, in addition to a closed adjective class, though there are productive possibilities for using all as predicates. Along the way, we elaborate a series of criteria that would need to be met before any language could seriously be claimed to lack a noun-verb distinction: most importantly strict compositionality, bidirectional flexibility, and exhaustiveness through the lexicon

Measures and Counting in Basque

In this paper we show that non-agreeing quantifiers in Basque are conceptuallymeasures. Furthermore, based on the differences between agreeing and non-agreeingquantifiers and observing that the latter do not behave as counters (i.e. they can not appear inNumP position) we propose a new syntactic structure for NPs (building on Borer,2005) where measures head their own functional projection. This functional projection isplaced in between the Classifier Phrase and the Number Phrase. We also show thatnon-agreeing quantifiers are sensitive to the nature of the predicates they associate to and thatMeasure Phrases seem to measure both individuals and events/states, as long as the latterdenote non-trivial part-whole structures. The predicate sensitivity of measuring quantifiersare explained using the monotonicity constraint (Schwarzschild, 2002) and ahomomorphism function (Krifka, 1989; Nakanishi, 2004, 2007)