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The paper discusses mechanisms of clausal adjunction, that is, transforming a clause into a modifier with a specific interpretation (purpose, temporal, causal, etc.). It focuses on infinitival rationale clauses in Mari (Uralic), which can be headed simultaneously by a marker identical to the dative postposition (lan) and a complementizer (manən). Although in line with the popular P- approach to clausal adjunction (e.g., Landau 2021), analyzing lan as a P head is problematic because its distributional properties are atypical for an adposition and align closely with those of a clausal functional head, which prompts a question about its actual categorial status. I examine several ways to reconcile the P-approach with the Mari data, demonstrate that all these options face problems, and outline an alternative Mood-account. I propose that rationale clauses contain a MoodP with a teleological modal inserted as its head (spelled out as lan), which determines the semantic type and distribution of these clausal adjuncts—the presence of the modal allows rationale clauses to be used as modifiers predicated of the matrix TP. The paper contributes to the discussion of modifying clauses by showing that they can be regulated from within and offering a dual-strategy view that captures cross-linguistic variation; it further touches upon the issue of reanalyzing and grammaticalizing adpositions and ‘shifting’ grammatical categories.

This paper discusses the status of island phenomena in Avatime, an endangered Kwa language of Ghana. We focus on clausal adjuncts, specifically noun complement clauses (NCCs). We show that while standard adjuncts are strong islands in Avatime, NCCs allow argument extraction. We suggest that this is related to the fact that NCCs in Avatime are not a type of relative clause. Instead, NCCs involve a kind of serial verb construction, which independently allows for extraction.

This article investigates as-clauses in Catalan and other Romance languages. It observes that as-clauses can display an overt or canonical realization of the verbal complement or a gap. It argues that, when as-clauses display an overt verbal complement, they are interpreted as manner adjuncts, and when they display a gap in the verbal complement position, they are interpreted as evidential adjuncts. Whereas manner as-clauses in Catalan are analyzed as adverbial relative clauses, it is claimed that evidential as-clauses involve an operator (tal) moving to an A’-position; such an operator abstracts over a propositional variable in the verbal complement position and is coindexed with the matrix clause. This analysis permits to grasp the very deep differences presented by two superficially very similar constructions and to provide a rather simple account of several idiosyncrasies of evidential as-clauses.

The goal of this article is to explore the utility of experimental syntax techniques in the investigation of syntactic variation. To that end, we applied the factorial definition of island effects made available by experimental syntax (e.g., Sprouse et al. 2012) to four island types (wh/whether, complex NP, subject, and adjunct), two dependency types (wh-interrogative clause dependencies and relative clause dependencies) and two languages (English and Italian). The results of 8 primary experiments suggest that there is indeed variation across dependency types, suggesting that wh-interrogative clause dependencies and relative clause dependencies cannot be identical at every level of analysis; however, the pattern of variation observed in these experiments is not exactly the pattern of variation previously reported in the literature (e.g., Rizzi 1982). We review six major syntactic approaches to the analysis of island effects (Subjacency, CED, Barriers, Relativized Minimality, Structure-building, and Phases) and discuss the implications of these results for these analyses. We also present 4 supplemental experiments testing complex wh-phrases (also called D-linked or lexically restricted wh-phrases) for all four island types using the factorial design in order to tease apart the contribution of dependency type from featural specification. The results of the supplemental experiments confirm that dependency type is the major source of variation, not featural specification, while providing a concrete quantification of what exactly the effect of complex wh-phrases on island effects is.

Adjuncts and relative clauses are traditionally classified as strong islands for extraction across languages. However, the Mainland Scandinavian (MSc.) languages have been reported to differ from e.g., English in allowing extraction from adjunct and relative clauses. In order to investigate the distribution of possible island extractions in these languages based on naturally produced material, we conducted two exploratory corpus studies on adjunct and relative clause extraction in Danish and in English. Results suggest that both extraction from finite adjuncts and from relative clauses appears at a non-trivial rate in naturally produced Danish, which supports the claim that these structures are not strong islands in Danish. In English, we also found a non-trivial amount of examples displaying extraction from finite adjuncts, as well as a small number of cases of relative clause extraction. This finding presents a potential challenge to the claim that English differs from MSc. in never allowing extraction from strong islands. Furthermore, our results show that both languages appear to share certain trends that can be observed in the extraction examples regarding the type of extraction dependency, the type of adjunct clause featured in adjunct clause extraction, and the type of matrix predicate featured in relative clause extraction.

The relation of c-command (Reinhart 1976, 1983) is widely believed to be THE fundamental relation in syntax, underlying such diverse phenomena as coreference (the BINDING PRINCIPLES), scope and variable binding, syntactic movement, and so on. Precedence is generally held to be irrelevant. This article argues that this view is mistaken. Syntax does not involve c-command at all, but rather a much coarser notion of command, PHASE-COMMAND, where only phasal nodes matter, not every node in the tree. Precedence also plays an important role. The article argues this point in detail for the binding principles, and shows that the relation that is required is PRECEDE-AND-COMMAND (Langacker 1969, Jackendoff 1972, Lasnik 1976), where command is phase-command. It revisits Reinhart's arguments for c-command and against precedence, and shows that those arguments do not go through. Finally, precede-and-command does not need to be stipulated, but follows from a view of grammar and processing where sentences are built in a left-to-right fashion.

Many languages of lowland South America mark remoteness distinctions in their TAM systems. In Amahuaca (Panoan; Peru) multiple remoteness distinctions are made in the past and the future. I argue that the temporal remoteness morphemes (TRMs) of Amahuaca can be understood as indications of the remoteness of the event time relative to the utterance time in matrix environments. In dependent clauses, however, the picture is more complicated. By exploring adjunct switch-reference clauses, I show that TRMs in dependent clauses display a previously unreported ambiguity reminiscent of ambiguities found with adjunct tense. Specifically, they can relate the time of the adjunct clause event to the time of the matrix event or to the utterance time. I suggest that this ambiguity may arise from the availability of multiple interpretation sites for adjunct TRMs, with the possible interpretations being constrained by the temporal semantics of switch-reference markers themselves. This work thus contributes to the empirical understanding of how TRMs are interpreted in dependent clauses, suggesting interesting potential parallels to the interpretation of adjunct tense.

Adjunct clauses have traditionally been assumed to be syntactic configurations from which extraction is universally impossible. However, numerous studies have challenged this assumption and extraction from finite adjunct clauses has been shown to be acceptable to varying degrees in the Mainland Scandinavian languages, as well as in English. The relative acceptability of extraction appears to depend on a number of factors, including the type of adjunct clause and the type of extraction dependency. Research on L2 learning has shown that learners often transfer properties of their L1 grammar into their L2 during the process of learning a second language. Our previous studies on L1 English and L1 Danish found a surprising contrast in which L1 English users found relativization out of adverbial clauses to be better than L1 Danish users did. Based on these findings, we conducted an L2 acceptability judgment experiment on extraction from three types of finite adjunct clauses in Danish (corresponding to English if-, when- and because-clauses) in order to test whether language-specific parameters related to extractability are transferred from L1 to L2. Our results show that the judgments from L2 Danish speakers are intermediate between and significantly different from L1 English and L1 Danish, which does not suggest a parameter resetting.

The main aim of this article is to argue that Japanese allows verb-stranding verb phrase ellipsis (VVPE). For this purpose, I examine data involving null adjuncts, and propose a new generalization about the distribution of null adjuncts, which can easily be accounted for if VVPE is available in Japanese. Furthermore, I demonstrate that null adjunct sentences with overt objects are subject to the same constraint as pseudogapping sentences in English are. Given that pseudogapping is a particular instance of VP-ellipsis (Jayaseelan, in Linguist Anal 20:64–81, 1990; Lasnik, in Papers on minimalist syntax, MIT working papers in linguistics, 1995, Fragments: Studies in ellipsis and gapping, 1999), this strongly suggests that null adjunct sentences involve VP-ellipsis.

By analogy with the movement analysis of temporal clauses, some authors have proposed that conditional clauses be derived by leftward operator movement (Bhatt and Pancheva 2002, 2006, Arsenijević 2009, Tomaszewicz 2009). This movement analysis of conditional clauses is shown to account for the incompatibility of main clause phenomena and conditional clauses in terms of intervention effects. The cartographic implementation of this analysis predicts that conditional clauses will be incompatible with speaker-oriented modal expressions and that conditional clauses will lack the low-construal reading found in temporal clauses (Bhatt and Pancheva 2002, 2006). Thus, the absence of low construal in conditional clauses, which was initially taken to be an obstacle for the movement account of conditional clauses (see Citko 2000), becomes an argument in its favor.