Jordanian Arabic uses a single definite article, al-, across functions that other languages split across multiple morphological forms. This paper introduces the Jordanian Arabic Definite Article Corpus (JADAC), the first spontaneous-speech corpus documenting the functional distribution of al- (N = 2658 NPs; approximately five hours of YouTube speech across three formats). When quantified against a crosslinguistic referential typology, the distribution follows a clear three-way pattern: 41.5% of NPs serve canonical definiteness functions, 18.1% build genus-level kinds in generic statements, and the remainder follow the expected indefinite pattern, except for a small subset, roughly 5%, showing structurally governed form-function mismatches. We argue that al- operates through two operations. The first isolates unique or maximal referents in episodic contexts; the second builds abstract kinds from predicates in generic ones. Most apparent mismatches follow from these same mechanisms rather than from semantic attrition. Within this mismatch subset, we identify a previously undescribed reverse pattern. Elative and ordinal constructions appear without the article despite denoting semantically definite referents, the inverse of the well-documented case where definite marking fails to deliver it. These findings supply new empirical data for formal accounts of kind-reference and article typology from a language and construction type not previously documented.
The previous literature has distinguished between two types of bias in polar questions: “original bias”, which reflects the speaker’s prior belief regarding the truth of the answers, and “contextual bias”, which conveys freshly introduced evidence for or against a given answer. Building on these two fundamental biases and employing a novel diagnostic based on bare polar response particles, we argue for the existence of a third type of bias, which we call “projected bias”, indicating the answer that the speaker considers most likely to enter the Common Ground. We posit this flavor of bias on account of its distinct alignment pattern, which cannot be attributed to merely mirroring one of the two fundamental biases or to a random choice between the two. Specifically, while projected bias requires the presence of a fundamental bias in order to arise, it may align with either of them and displays a strong affinity with contextual bias when the two fundamental biases are in conflict. We capture this alignment pattern by appealing to differences in evidential strength between original and contextual bias, thereby highlighting the manner in which projected bias coordinates on the discourse goal shared by the speaker and the addressee of resolving the issue raised by the question. We make our proposal explicit by implementing it within the Scoreboard Model.
This paper investigates person-number agreement with coordinate subjects in Russian, focusing on cases where the conjuncts differ in person. While normative grammars and descriptive studies describe only resolved agreement and closest conjunct agreement in VS word order, corpus and experimental data show that speakers also accept 3rd person agreement patterns that do not follow the person hierarchy 1 > 2 > 3. These agreement patterns receive intermediate acceptability ratings in the experiments. The paper synthesizes existing experimental results on conjunctive subjects and presents new experimental data on disjunctive subjects. Conjoined subjects allow 3rd person plural agreement, whereas disjoined subjects allow both plural and singular 3rd person agreement. Agreement patterns depend on word order and coordination type, with closest conjunct agreement particularly prominent in VS structures with disjunction. I propose a minimalist analysis in which the coordination phrase lacks a person feature, resulting in 3rd person agreement, while resolved agreement is derived via Multiple Agree with conjuncts. The contrast between conjunctive and disjunctive subjects follows from their different feature specifications. The Russian data show that non-canonical agreement patterns are systematic and provide important evidence for the structure of coordination.
The Malavedan language is a severely endangered Dravidian tribal tongue spoken in the Kollam, Kottayam, and Pathanamthitta districts of Kerala, India. While historically overshadowed by its dominant neighbour, Malayalam, current field documentation (2025) reveals a pronominal and address system that has resisted the hierarchical complexities characteristic of the broader region. This paper documents that system and frames it as a bidirectional comparative study: it examines not only what Malavedan lacks relative to Malayalam, but what Malavedan possesses that Malayalam does not. Malayalam encodes a graduated honorific system through its second-person pronominal distinctions, /n̪iː/, /n̪iŋŋaɭ/, and /t̪aːŋkaɭ/, and through third-person honorific forms /id̪d̪eːham/ and /ad̪d̪eːham/ that grammaticalize deference toward a referred-to third party. Malavedan has none of these forms. ‘Egalitarian’ is used here in a strictly grammatical sense, to mean that the pronominal paradigm does not rank the people it refers to; it does not mean that the community lacks deference, which it expresses through titles, kin terms and bodily conduct. What Malavedan has instead is a three-way proximal/distal/far-distal deictic contrast that Malayalam lacks entirely. The far-distal forms /t̪oːʋarə/ (that man, far) and /t̪oːt̪t̪uʋə/ (that woman, far) fuse the deictic distance marker /t̪oː-/ with adult gender information in a single form, a strategy that has no equivalent in Malayalam, whose pointing word /at̪aː/ ‘there’ carries no gender. When the referent is a child, for whom adult gender distinctions are inapplicable, the gender-neutral far-distal form /t̪oːt͡ʃt͡ʃə/ is used instead, with gender if needed carried by the accompanying noun. This adult/non-adult split within the far-distal demonstrative slot has no Malayalam parallel. Taken together, these distance contrasts point to a language that has invested its grammatical resources in locating people in physical space, where Malayalam has invested its own in ranking them socially. The structural gap produced by Malavedan’s egalitarian architecture generates a pragmatic clash when speakers interact with Malayalam-medium institutions, forcing reliance on borrowed ‘Sir’ and ‘Madam’ to navigate social hierarchies that the native system has no grammatical resources to express. Despite this structural flatness in the social domain, Malavedan possesses a sophisticated insider lexicon that performs crucial social work: coded referents for police (/kiːt̠t̠uʋaːjan/), exonyms for surrounding communities, an endonym (/t͡ʃaːd̪ikaːɾə/) that asserts collective identity on the community’s own terms, and ambivalent status terms, like /ɲon̪d̪alə/. Intergenerational transmission has effectively broken down, and children now operate almost entirely within the Malayalam framework. Documenting this shift is more than lexical salvage. It records an indigenous social map before the pressure of a dominant, deeply stratified language erases the pragmatic logic on which that map was built.
Chinese languages offer multiple ways to form a polar question. In this paper, we examine five Sinitic languages: Mandarin, Shanghainese, Changsha Xiang, Cantonese, and Taiwanese Southern Min, and using a panel of tests, we test all the available forms to determine which of these polar question forms are syntactically interrogative sentences and which are declarative sentences used as questions. We find that shifou-questions, A-not-A questions, kam-questions, as well as particle questions with a particle originating from a negative adverb are interrogative sentences, and particle questions with an origin other than negation and intonation questions are declarative questions. Negative particle questions were the least uniform category: some of them patterned with interrogatives, while others, with declaratives.
