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Late bilingual speakers immersed in a second language (L2) environment often experience the non-pathological attrition of their first language (L1), exhibiting selective and reversible changes in L1 processing and production. While attrition research has largely focused on long-term residents in anglophone countries, examining changes primarily within a single L1 domain, the present study employs a novel experimental design to investigate L1 attrition, alongside L2 acquisition, across three domains (i.e., the lexicon, syntax–pragmatics interface, and prosody) in two groups of L1-English L2-Italian late bilinguals: long-term residents in Italy vs. university students in the UK. A total of 112 participants completed online tasks assessing lexical retrieval, anaphora resolution, and sentence stress patterns in both languages. First, both bilingual groups showed comparable levels of semantic interference in lexical retrieval. Second, at the syntax–pragmatics interface, only residents in Italy showed signs of L1 attrition in real-time processing of anaphora, while resolution preferences were similar between groups; in the L2, both bilingual groups demonstrated target-like preferences, despite some slowdown in processing. Third, while both groups showed some evidence of target-like L2 prosody, with residents in Italy matching L1-Italian sentence stress patterns closely, prosodic attrition was only reported for residents in Italy in exploratory analyses. Overall, this study supports the notion of L1 attrition as a natural consequence of bilingualism—one that is domain- and experience-dependent, unfolds along a continuum, and involves a complex (and possibly inverse) relationship between L1 and L2 performance that warrants further investigation.

This paper aims to support the thesis that Speech Act related operators have landing sites in syntax, specifically at the syntax-pragmatics interface. In order to attain this goal, it presents the first formal analysis of a construction, dubbed the jo ‘I’ – construction, that shows an overt first person strong pronoun sitting in sentence-initial position of declarative sentences both in pro-drop and partial pro-drop languages of the Romance family. Taking Catalan as a case in point, it is shown that, prosodically, this first person strong pronoun has a particular intonation (a rising pitch accent followed by a high boundary tone). Syntactically, it corresponds not to a subject but to a (kind of) hanging topic that requires a resumptive element in the clause, while semantically it introduces a reference to the speaker who at the time of uttering the sentence is performing a subjective declaration speech act.

The sentence-final adjunct WHAT has been given much attention for the past few years, mostly on its why-like interpretation and negative force. In this study, evidence will be provided to show that what otherwise seems to be exceptional cases, in effect, constitutes an independent construction, the refutatory WHAT construction. Although such a construction yields a strong negative force, it has the force dwell upon the interlocutor’s attitude or commitment. It is used to refute his/her previous claim in a conversation and can tolerate any utterance form. This is in sharp contrast to the why-like WHAT which is typically used to forbid actions and is restricted to action verbs. As will be revealed later, in syntax, the refutatory WHAT has to employ a component above CP, which not only helps explain the speaker’s refutatory force, but also directs our attention to a new ascending perspective zoned for both the speaker and the hearer/addressee.

Through in-depth analysis of the use of det ‘it, that’ and så ‘then’ occupying the first clausal position (the prefield) in Danish talk-in-interaction, this paper investigates how speakers use highly flexible linguistic elements to their advantage when commencing clauses in real time. These particular words are useful when occupying the prefield, because their flexible nature means that they can be used even when speakers do not have a full format ready for the carrier clause, as long as they have some idea of the interactional purpose of the clause and its information structural prerequisites. The dominating frequency of the most frequent clause openers goes largely unmentioned in previous accounts of the prefield, and the use of det ‘it, that’ and så ‘then’ challenges the popular notion that the textually unmarked prefield is also the grammatical subject of the carrier clause.

In this paper, I discuss a new construction in Brazilian Portuguese, whereby the negative marker não ‘not’, which is syncretic with other types of negation in the language, appears in the slot [Aux_V] in periphrases, a position that is not common in other Romance languages. Among its properties, this type of negation must receive intonational stress, that is, it is a focus element and, as such, it conveys a specific meaning. A comparison with other types of low negation in the same position in Italian, Catalan and French shows that the new negator in Brazilian Portuguese is not the same as the ones that may occur in those languages. Observing this negation marker in relation to low adverbs and to the lexical verb in progressive and perfective periphrases in Brazilian Portuguese, I propose a syntactic position based on the nanosyntax approach, which can explain its focus nature and semantic/pragmatic properties.

El presente trabajo analiza un tipo de estructuras predicativas pertenecientes a un conjunto de ejemplos característicamente abordado en la literatura sobre los constituyentes inarticulados. Específicamente, nos centramos en casos de compleción (Bach, 1994; 2014), es decir, oraciones que expresan proposiciones incompletas o “radicales proposicionales” y que requieren de contenido proposicional adicional contextualmente recuperable. Este tipo de expresiones ha sido tratado en el ámbito de la infradeterminación del significado y los contenidos implícitos, elementos centrales en la discusión sobre la interfaz entre la sintaxis y la pragmática. Analizamos homogéneamente ejemplos de compleción como casos de adjunción, manteniendo la separación entre operaciones de legitimación de argumentos a nivel sintáctico y otras operaciones semánticamente gatilladas y sensibles al contexto. Además del análisis de los adjetivos relativos, nuestra propuesta se extiende a otros tipos de proposiciones incompletas como aquellas expresadas por predicados con objetos o complementos faltantes, superlativos, términos relacionales, predicados de gusto y propiedades dependientes.

This paper investigates the syntax and pragmatics of a peculiar type of wh-questions found in Martinican Creole and characterized by the presence of the clausal determiner la in sentence-final position. Regular and la-marked wh-questions do not differ as far as their internal and external syntax is concerned. Pragmatically, however, la-marked wh-questions stand out in the two following ways: (a) they cannot be uttered out of the blue, and (b) they do not tolerate nothing-type answers. I attribute these properties to the presence of la, which I argue is the spell-out of a [+familiar] feature. Accordingly, a la-marked wh-question will refer to a familiar QUD introduced through the prior addition of an existential proposition to the common ground. On the basis of the interpretational properties of la-marked wh-questions, as well as the distribution of la, I propose that la is merged in the Grounding layer proposed by Wiltschko (2021). This is consistent with the fact that it plays a role in the management of the common ground. Beyond Martinican Creole, this analysis lends support to the assumption that certain pragmatic functions are encoded in the grammar.

In a recent study of the clause-initial position in verb-second declaratives (the prefield), Bohnacker & Rosén (2008) found significant differences between native Swedish and German concerning the frequencies with which constituents occurred in the prefield, as well as qualitative differences concerning the mapping of information structure and linear word order: Swedish exhibited a stronger tendency than German to place new information, the so-called rheme, later in the clause. Swedish-speaking learners of German transferred these patterns from their L1 to German. Their sentences were syntactically well-formed but had Swedish-style prefield frequencies and a strong pattern of Rheme Later, which native Germans perceive as unidiomatic, as an acceptability judgment and a rewrite-L2texts task showed. The present study extends Bohnacker & Rosén's work in three ways. Learners of the reverse language combination (L1 German, L2 Swedish) are investigated to see whether similar phenomena also manifest themselves there. Secondly, written and oral data from highly advanced learners are examined to see whether the learners’ persistent problems can be overcome by extensive immersion (3, 6 and 9 years of L2 exposure). Thirdly, besides investigating theme–rheme (old vs. new information), some consideration is given to another information-structural level, background vs. focus. The learners are found to overuse the prefield at first, with non-Swedish, German-style frequency patterns (e.g. low proportions of clause-initial expletives and high proportions of clause-initial rhematic elements). This is interpreted as evidence for L1 transfer of information-structural or discourse-pragmatic preferences. After 6 and 9 years, a substantial increase in clause-initial expletive subjects, clefts and lightweight given elements is indicative of development towards the target. The findings are related to current generative theorizing on the syntax-pragmatics interface, where it is often maintained that the integration of multiple types of information is one of the hardest areas for L2 learners to master.

This article deals with the interface between syntax and discoursepragmatics/semantics in bilingual speakers. Linguistic phenomena at the interface have been shown to be especially vulnerable in both child and adult bilinguals; here we explore four variables that contribute to this vulnerability to different extents depending on the nature of the interface: underspecification, cross-linguistic influence, quantity and quality of the input, and processing limitations. We investigate the role played by the aforementioned variables in two recently completed studies. One compares the performance of English— Italian and Spanish—Italian bilingual children, monolingual English- and Italian-speaking children and adults on forced-choice grammaticality tasks on the distribution of overt and null subject pronouns in Italian and in English. The second explores bilingual and monolingual speakers’ sensitivity to the presence of definite articles in specific and generic plural noun phrases in Italian and in English. We show that over and above structural overlap, other factors must be We show that over and above structural overlap, other factors must be included to account for differences in the behavioural data in the two tasks and in different populations of bilinguals and monolinguals. We argue that processing factors play a non-trivial role in the difficulty encountered by bilinguals in coordinating syntax with contextual discourse-pragmatic information, regardless of the absence or presence of partial structural overlap. In the case of the internal coordination between syntax and semantics, processing factors may be less likely to affect bilinguals’ performance, while the extent of structural overlap and the associated internal formal features seem to play a more important role.

This paper investigates the nature of adjunct-inclusive interpretations in Japanese, which has long been debated in the literature. Previous studies have disagreed on whether these interpretations arise from V-stranding VP-ellipsis or adjunct ellipsis. This study argues that adjunct-inclusive interpretations fall into two distinct types: one semantically encoded and structurally represented, and another pragmatically inferred, depending on context beyond sentence structure. Using anaphoric expressions and negation as diagnostics, this study shows that adjunct-inclusive interpretations involving (i) omission of both adjunct and object in transitive sentences and (ii) adjunct omission in intransitive sentences are syntactically represented, supporting the existence of V-stranding VP-ellipsis. By contrast, adjunct-inclusive interpretations where only the adjunct is omitted and the object is contrastively focused are derived from pragmatic inference via free pragmatic enrichment, rather than from syntactic structure. These findings provide empirical and theoretical support for the view that Japanese does not allow syntactic adjunct ellipsis but does allow V-stranding VP-ellipsis. More broadly, this study contributes to the understanding of the syntax–pragmatics interface in ellipsis, showing that not all implicit interpretations reflect syntactic structure and highlighting the importance of carefully distinguishing between semantic and pragmatic sources in analyzing ellipsis phenomena.