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The elicitation of Information Focus (IF) remains a central challenge in linguistic research, particularly in crosslinguistic and multilingual settings. The standard method, the Question-Answer (QA) test, while widely employed, suffers from well-documented limitations. Specifically, in QA-based elicitation, fragment answers often obscure the syntactic and prosodic realization of IF (Merchant 2004; Krifka 2006), and even full responses may yield interpretive ambiguities, encoding contrastive or corrective readings rather than purely informational ones, thus reducing the reliability of the collected data. To address these methodological issues, Cruschina & Mayol (2022, 2024) propose the Question with a Delayed Answer (QDA) test, an adaptation of the Discourse Completion Task (DCT) used in prosodic research on Romance languages. By inserting intervening material between the wh-question and the response, the QDA encourages the spontaneous production of full, congruent sentences, thereby yielding syntactically transparent data. Building on this methodological innovation, the present paper investigates how IF interacts with argument structure in two pro-drop Romance languages, Italian and Spanish. Focusing on transitive and unaccusative verbs, we show that QDA-elicited data reveal systematic crosslinguistic differences: while Italian exhibits stronger constraints on postverbal subjects under IF, Spanish allows more flexibility. These findings have implications not only for the empirical description of Romance focus strategies but also for theoretical models of the syntax-information structure interface.

Dutch location and change-of-location verbs exhibit seemingly contradictory properties, with characteristics of transitives and unaccusatives mixed. While base verbs like vallen ‘fall’ are unaccusative, some of their particle and prepositional derivatives (binnen+vallen ‘invade’, aan+vallen ‘attack’, over+vallen ‘raid’) are transitive, licensing direct objects and forming personal passives. These derivatives, however, do not form a homogeneous group: binnenvallen and aanvallen display mixed transitive-unaccusative properties, including variation in auxiliary selection, while overvallen behaves as a fully transitive verb. To account for these patterns, we propose a novel syntactic analysis relying on separate functional heads v and Voice. We argue that some structures contain both transitive vP and VoiceP, while others contain only VoiceP. This structural variation accounts for the observed transitivity contrasts, including auxiliary selection patterns and participial formation. The Dutch evidence offers support for a split approach to vP-VoiceP architecture and challenges theories that require the simultaneous presence of both projections.

In contemporary colloquial Hebrew, unaccusative verbs may fail to exhibit ϕ-agreement with their subject when the latter appears postverbally, but not when it appears preverbally. To resolve disagreements regarding the role that intervention may play in licensing this lack of agreement, we conducted two acceptability judgment experiments, whose design and results we report. The findings indicate that intervention is not the factor licensing lack of agreement, contra Preminger’s (2009, 2014) claim, which means the phenomenon does not corroborate his approach to grammaticality. Further, we provide evidence that this lack of ϕ-agreement with a postverbal internal subject results from the reanalysis of the subject as caseless. This is liable to occur in languages that do not morphologically mark nominative. Hebrew existential and possessive constructions had undergone a parallel process in the beginning of the past century.

Applicatives of unaccusatives provide a crucial test case for the inherent- case view of ergativity. If ergative is assigned only to external arguments, in their θ-positions, there can be no “raising to ergative” in applicative unaccusatives; an internal argument subject can never receive ergative case. In this article, I present evidence from Nez Perce (Sahaptian) that this prediction is false. In Nez Perce applicative unaccusatives, the theme argument raises over the applicative argument and is accordingly marked with ergative case. Nez Perce thus demonstrates raising to ergative. Departing from Baker’s (2014) conclusions for similar phenomena in Shipibo (Panoan), I argue that apparently nonlocal movement of the theme in the raising-to-ergative pattern involves not a covert adpositional structure, but rather a response to independently motivated constraints on antilocal movement and remnant movement.

This study investigates the base-generated order of internal arguments in Japanese double complement unaccusative (DCU) verbs, which contain both a Goal and a Theme argument. Because of the relatively free word order of Japanese and the EPP feature on v, surface configurations of DCUs (Goal-Theme-V and Theme-Goal-V) do not directly reflect the base structure. To address this issue, this study examines verbal nouns that share their Root with DCU verbs to determine the base word order. Since scrambling within nominal projections is generally ungrammatical, the relative order of arguments inside verbal noun phrases provides crucial insights into the base-generated word order. The Goal-Theme order (e.g., ofisu-e-no tegami-no toochaku ‘the letter’s arrival at the office’) is consistently more acceptable than its counterpart structure, Theme-Goal, suggesting that the Goal argument is base-generated in a structurally higher position than the Theme argument. To validate this conclusion, this study conducted a formal acceptability judgment experiment with 36 native speakers of Japanese who rated transitive and DCU noun phrases that varied in argument order. The results confirmed that the Goal-Theme order in DCU nouns is more acceptable than the Theme-Goal order, supporting the hypothesis that the Goal argument occupies a structurally higher position than the Theme in the base structure. These findings facilitate our syntactic understanding of unaccusative constructions in Japanese and empirically support the use of nominal structures to infer verb argument hierarchies. KCI Citation Count: 0

This research article provides evidence from Jordanian Arabic (JA) that passive predicates, unlike unaccusative predicates, project phases. Two tests are formulated to demonstrate this difference, namely long-distance agreement (between T0 and the internal argument) and quantifier stranding. Following Alexiadou et al. (2006), Alexiadou and Doron (2012) and Bruening (2013), we attribute this difference between passive and unaccusative predicates to the presence of Voice Phrase in the former but not the latter. In so doing, this article challenges a number of assumptions that equally qualify passive and unaccusative predicates as phases, or lack thereof, in natural languages (see e.g., Chomsky 2000; Legate 2003; Centeno and Vicente 2008; Deal 2009).

上古漢語的不及物動詞有使動用法的相當多，然而不論是不及物動詞用為使動的狀況，還是其用為使動的條件與限制，都還是有待釐清的，本文即是針對這些問題來進行探討。本文一方面對不及物動詞用為使動式的狀況給與了一個精要的描述，另一方面則從動詞與論元的屬性、句法的限制等幾點來探討不及物動詞在產製使動式上是依憑怎樣的條件與限制。本文還對上古漢語的使動式和表示致使的「使…V」式進行了比較，指出了二者間之異同。

This paper deals with morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic aspects of the so-called Cognate Object Construction with particular reference to Serbo-Croatian and Slovene. The relevance of an examination of such morphologically robust languages is manifold. It facilitates an understanding of some of the puzzling properties of the construction cross linguistically, offers a way of explaining the noted disagreement regarding judgments found in the literature on Germanic languages such as English and also presents a clear case where (contrary to the dominant view in the literature) morphology seems to deceive, rather than inform us, about syntax. Based on a barrage of tests, I argue that there are two types of cognate objects: arguments and non-arguments. Extending the treatment of modifiers within the Davidsonian tradition to the latter, I analyse them as first-order predicates. This allows me to capture their core properties, among which is the obligatory modification, something unaccounted for in the literature. The semantic parallelism between the adverbial modifiers and non-ACOs extends to the syntax as well. Treating non-ACOs as adjuncts solves the problem of the scarcity of syntactic space that arises with unaccusative verbs that license them. ACOs, on the other hand, behave syntactically and semantically like run-of-the-mill arguments and a run-of-the-mill transitive syntax can be maintained (for a majority of them) instead.

This article examines passive-type constructions in Mauritian Creole, arguing that they are topic, not passive constructions. I claim that their initial argument (the displaced object) occupies the specifier position of a Topic Phrase, not the structural subject position. This proposal is motivated by the fact that nothing at the surface identifies the displaced object as a grammatical subject, except its position relative to an auxiliary or verb. The topic analysis is supported by both semantic restrictions relating to specificity and animacy and syntactic restrictions relating to distribution (word order) and coordination. It is also supported by the fact that these same restrictions do not apply in unaccusatives, a structurally similar type of construction. The important contribution of this article is that passive-type constructions in Mauritian Creole are ‘apparent’ rather ‘real’ passives, with the wider implication being that creoles, like many languages, do not use canonical passives to express passive meaning.