Subjects, Topics, and Anchoring to the Context

The article discusses the connection between the syntactic and semantic properties of weak, strong, and referential DP subjects. In particular, I argue that nominal expressions possess a situation argument and that their interpretation and their distribution follow from the presuppositional requirements that the determiner imposes on the individual argument and situation argument of its complement nominal. These presuppositional requirements, I then argue, are embodied by local relations of the subject to a distinct head in the C domain, Fin(0) in the system of Rizzi 1997, where specific referential values of discourse antecedents are accessible

Change-of-state Paradigms and the middle in Kinyarwanda

This paper investigates the derivational relationships among members of verbal paradigms in Kinyarwanda (Bantu JD.61; Rwanda) by pursuing two interrelated goals. First, I describe a variety of derivational strategies for marking transitive and intransitive variants in change-of-state verb paradigms. Second, I focus on the detransitivizing morpheme –ik which serves as one possible marking for intransitive members of these paradigms. Ultimately, I argue that this morpheme is a marker of middle voice, and the variety of readings which appear with this form can be subsumed under a single operation of argument suppression. Finally, I provide a discussion of reflexives and the apparent lack of a reflexive reading with –ik by arguing that this reading is blocked by either lexical reflexives or the reflexive prefix i–