The fundamental left-right asymmetry in the Germanic verb cluster

Cinque (2005, 2009, 2014a) observes that there is an asymmetry in the possible ordering of dependents of a lexical head before versus after the head. A reflection on some of the concepts needed to develop Cinque’s ideas into a theory of neutral word order reveals that dependents need to be treated separately by class. The resulting system is applied to the problem of word order in the Germanic verb cluster. It is shown that there is an extremely close match between theoretically derived expectations for clusters made up of auxiliaries, modals, causative ‘let’, a main verb, and verbal particles. The facts point to the action of Cinque’s fundamental left-right asymmetry in language in the realm of the verb cluster. At the same time, not all verb clusters fall under Cinque’s generalization, which, therefore, argues against treating all cases of restructuring uniformly

Negative Concord in Russian. An Overview

In this article I will describe the general properties of Negative Concord in Russian, which is a strict Negative Concord language, where all negative indefinites must co-occur with sentential negation. However, there are several cases where the negation marker can be absent (like in fragment answers) or can appear in a non-standard position (like at the left of an embedded infinitival). I will take into consideration all these specific cases described by the literature on the negation system of Russian and analyse them according to current approaches to Negative Concord

De valkuilen van een nieuw Bargoens woordenboekje en de makkes van de bargoenistiek. Naar aanleiding van: Henry Roskam Boeven-jargon. Bezorgd door Ewoud Sanders en Nicoline van der Sijs. Amsterdam / Antwerpen: Veen. 2002

This article argues that Henry Roskam's Boeven-jargon, a ‘new’ source of Bargoens or Dutch cant, hardly has any value for Bargoens and post-Yiddish studies at all because the author took almost all of his Bargoens materials as well as all of his hebraized Yiddish examples from J.G.M. Moormann's study of Dutch-based secret languages - while introducing quite a few errors. These errors provide a partial explanation for a couple of misunderstandings in the linguistic introduction to this edition as regards orthography and pronunciation and as regards the status of some stray instances of ‘Sephardic’ Hebrew