Abstract This study investigates how omitting the accusative case marker affects the acceptability of Korean canonical, scrambled, and right-dislocated constructions. An acceptability judgment experiment reveals that right dislocation incurs a greater penalty than scrambling when the object is marked with the accusative case. However, when the accusative marker is omitted, scrambled constructions pattern similarly to canonical ones, whereas right-dislocated constructions behave differently. Specifically, the penalty for accusative drop in right dislocation is substantially reduced. These findings suggest that accusative drop in both canonical and scrambled constructions stems from processing costs associated with morphological omission, while in right dislocation, the reduced penalty results from a PF-level mechanism of extra deletion. This mechanism, which permits non-constituent deletion under adjacency, is unavailable in canonical and scrambled contexts. Thus, the results support a biclausal movement-plus-ellipsis analysis of right dislocation, where surface omission of the case marker is licensed through extra deletion triggered by PF deletion, differentiating it structurally and derivationally from scrambling and canonical configurations.
Abstract This study investigates how the argument structure of shifting verbs in Mandarin is represented and processed during sentence comprehension. Shifting verbs — traditionally classified as intransitive but increasingly used in transitive frames — have been widely discussed in theoretical linguistics; however, their cognitive status remains underexplored. Addressing this gap, we examine whether shifting verbs have developed transitive argument structures and how they are processed in real time. Using self-paced reading and acceptability judgments, we compared shifting verbs to unaccusative verbs in transitive and intransitive contexts, where unaccusative, traditionally analyzed as intransitive, served as a baseline. Acceptability results showed that shifting verbs in transitive frames were readily accepted, unlike unaccusative verbs, which were consistently rejected in the same contexts. Reading time data revealed distinct processing profiles: Shifting verbs exhibited argument-structure flexibility, including possible coactivation of transitive and intransitive representations at the verb and target regions. In contrast, unaccusative verbs elicited substantial processing penalties in transitive frames. These findings show that argument structure representations can be shaped by usage. More broadly, results suggest that grammatical change can be observed not only in language use but also in real-time comprehension, offering insights into how evolving syntactic configurations are encoded and accessed in the mental lexicon.
Abstract The observation that wh -expressions in a lot of languages can be interpreted either interrogatively or non-interrogatively has led to the widely accepted thesis that wh -expressions originate as variables, with their interpretations determined through being bound by a question operator or other non-interrogative operators ( Cheng 1991 , Li 1992 , Tsai 1994 , Cheng & Huang 1996 , among others). However, recent studies on a specific non-interrogative wh-construction in Mandarin, known as “ wh -conditionals,” challenge this variable-binding approach ( Liu 2016 , 2017 , Xiang 2016 , 2020 , Li 2021 ). In wh -conditionals, two wh -clauses are connected to express a conditional meaning. These studies advocate for a question-based approach, proposing that the meaning of wh -conditionals stems from interrogative meaning rather than variable binding. As a result, the question-based approach predicts that wh -conditionals should be linguistically closer to wh -questions than to other non-interrogative wh -constructions. This paper confirms the prediction using wh -constructions in Khorchin Mongolian. Despite their distinct theoretical commitments, the two approaches can be reconciled to address challenges pointed out by Cheng & Huang (2020) , Pan & Kuang (2023) , and Tsai (2023) to the question-based view.
Abstract In Eurasia, the hotbed of classifier languages as an areal feature is in East Asia, Southeast Asia, part of eastern India, and a less concentrated cluster in the Middle East and Central Asia. In Europe, only a few languages have been claimed to employ numeral classifiers. Russian, located in Eastern Europe, has a tripartite numeral construction [Num X N], where X’s are considered sortal classifiers by some researchers, e.g., Sussex (1976) and Goto (2012) , and is listed as a classifier language in the World Atlas of Classifier Languages (WACL). However, the status of Russian as a classifier language is controversial. In this paper, we first adopt the definition of classifier languages proposed by Her, Hammarström & Allassonnière-Tang (2022) . We then apply explicit syntactic criteria to evaluate Russian numeral constructions and examine the tripartite [Num X N] structure. Ultimately, our analysis demonstrates that the elements previously identified as sortal classifiers in Russian are in fact measure nouns, and we reject their classification after examining the reasons behind this misidentification. The findings suggest that it would be prudent to reexamine all putative classifier languages in Europe.
The Malay berprefix has not been discussed as extensively as other Malay verb prefixes. It has been accorded fuzzy meanings, such as "to mean something taking place" and "to be able to combine with any base form." Such vague definitions have hindered and prevented a thorough understanding of it. Our analysis took into consideration a middle voice marking system of situation types established by Kemmer (1993, 1994) and refined the categories based on instances collected from a large annotated corpus, the Malaysian Malay News Corpus (Chung & Shih 2019). From the corpus, 262,210 instances of berwere retrieved, analyzed and categorized into 14 distinct functions. The results revealed that 93.33% of the total word-tokens of berwere middle markers, whereas the remaining 6.67% were non-middle markers. We also refined and added new categories not mentioned in the past (e.g., "State of Having ROOT," and "Stative"). Some of the middle functions of ber-, especially the most cited and prototypical "Grooming/Body Care" function, were not the most frequently found functions. This indicated that berin Malay, as a middle marker in the form of reflexives in Malay, was not frequently found in the corpus.
