This study examines types of compounds other than the Synthetic Genitive Construction (SGC) in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Jordanian Arabic (JA), discussing the word class of the parts of the compound and identifying the head. The analysis reveals that there are four types of compounds in MSA, and three in JA. The Prep + Prep combination is missing from JA. I also argue that the word class of the parts of the compound of Arabic in general, and of MSA in particular, is not diverse. Regarding the head, I suggest that N + N compounds other than the SGC, Adj + Adj compounds and reduplicated compounds can be either semantically double-headed or headless
The topic of my paper is the syntax and the quantificational force of free-choice items (FCIs) in Hungarian. FCIs such as any have been at the forefront of research interest in the past decades (e.g., Ladusaw 1979; Kadmon & Landman 1993; Giannakidou 2001). The close interdependence of syntactic, semantic and even pragmatic considerations makes the study of FCIs one of the most interesting research programmes. Earlier investigations of the syntax and semantics of FCIs in Hungarian include Hunyadi (1991; 2002), Abrusán (2007) and Szabó (2012). In my paper, I show that FCIs in Hungarian occupy the syntactic position associated with distributive quantifiers (É. Kiss 2010). Furthermore, I examine the quantificational force of FCIs by the well-known battery of quantification tests (for a previous application for Hungarian, cf. Surányi 2006): almost-modification, modification by exceptive phrase, donkey anaphora, predicative use, is-modification, incorporation and split reading with modals. My findings of mixed quantificational behaviour provide further corroboration for the analysis of FCIs as quantificationally underspecified intensional dependent indefinites.
In this paper, we argue for the existence of two local domains (phases, cf. Chomsky 2001; 2009; Legate 2003, among others) inside the DP: the n*-phase, parallel to the vP (as in Svenonius 2004), and the d*-phase, parallel to the CP. Two acknowledged phasal properties are discussed. (i) The n*/d*-phases define their own peripheries: peripheries are essentially modal-quantificational spaces, as shown by the decomposition of Topic-Focus features recently proposed (Butler 2004; McNay 2005; 2006). (ii) Phases are assumed to be domains of linearization: after (internal or external) merge, syntactic objects are hierarchical, but not linear, so phases must be linearized before they are sent to PF. The distribution and interpretation of DP-internal adjectives is taken to be indicative of these two domains.
In a number of languages, children have problems with the interpretation of pronouns if a potential local antecedent is present. There is an intensive debate on whether this effect is due to a delayed acquisition of Principle B, or it is the result of pragmatic or processing difficulties that children face in interpretation tasks. We conducted two experiments involving a picture-sentence verification task to investigate whether the Pronoun Interpretation Problem exists in Hungarian child language. We found that the Problem is present if the test sentences are given in isolation, but it disappears if a minimally coherent discourse is created. We argue that our results support the view that the binding principles are innate and do not need to be acquired, but children have problems with computing coreference options in certain contexts (Reinhart 2004; 2006; 2011). Coherent discourse allows children to accommodate pronouns with close to adult-like success because in this case they do not calculate local coreference possibilities for pronouns.
