Program

Boundedness and the object case marking associated with it is a complete grammatical phenomenon in Finnish and it has been the topic of a huge amount of research during numerous decades since the end of the 19th century. On the one hand, boundedness can be engendered by quantificational factors (i.e. whether or not the referent of the object is affected in its entirety). Thus, the event expressed by the clause Liisa sö-i mansiko-i-ta (Liisa.NOMINATIVE eat-PAST.3SG strawberry-PL-PARTITIVE ‘Liisa ate (some) strawberries’) is interpreted quantificationally unbounded. On the other hand, boundedness can be engendered by aspectual factors (and whether the action had the intended outcome), e.g. Liisa ampu-i lehmä-n (Liisa.NOM shoot-PST.3SG cow-ACCUSATIVE ‘Liisa shot a cow (and the cow was killed)’ vs Liisa ampu-i lehmä-ä (Liisa.NOM shoot-PST.3SG cow-PART ‘Liisa shot (at) a cow (but it didn’t die)’). Nonetheless, the two types of boundedness, quantificational and aspectual, are intertwined in Finnish syntax in an intriguing way.

I am especially interested in the object case marking in a Finnish verb structure called the Projected Directive Construction (henceforth PDC), e.g. Liisa pyysi Matti-a lähte-mä-än ‘Liisa asked Matti to leave’ (Liisa.NOM asked Matti-PART leave-INF-ILLATIVE), in which the agent of the infinite construction functions as the object of the governing (finite) construction. The PDC is divided into three subtypes. Type A includes verbs such as pyytää ‘to request, to ask (to do sth)’, which take a partitive object regardless of the outcome of the action (i.e. whether the action of requesting reaches the culmination point or not). Verbs used in type B, such as määrätä ‘to order (an order given by an institutional authority)’, take an accusative object despite the result of the action. Type C comprises verbs such as suostutella ‘to persuade’ taking either a partitive or an accusative object, depending on the outcome of the semiotic causation expressed in the clause, i.e. whether persuasion leads to the action being asked or not. The object case marking in the three subtypes reflects the two-faceted nature of the construction: on the one hand, it is a construction used for projection (≈ reported speech and thought); on the other, it is a causative construction. It seems that boundedness – as it has traditionally been defined in Finnish linguistics – does not suffice to describe the alternation of the object case in the PDC.

Goldin-Meadow et al. (2008) have established, in a pioneering study, that when people communicate via improvided gestures, they produce a S(ubject)-O(bject)-V(erb) order regardless of their first language. Could this be the ‚cognitively basic‘ or ‚natural‘ word order? The authors suggest it is. However, a number of studies have followed up and identified factors which make participants gesture an SVO order. I focus on those studies that claim that this factor lies in lexical semantics, namely in the verb’s meaning. We focus on verbs of creation, such as „bake a cake“ or „build a house“, and its role in emergent word order. There are two studies that make a claim about this kind of verbs: Schouwstra and de Swart (2014) claim that created objects follow the verb because they are intensional; and Christensen et al. (2016) claim that objects follow the verb because of „structural iconicity“, that is, the VO-structure is iconic of how the real event of creation happens.

We tested these claims with 32 participants by looking not only at created objects but also at created subjects, such as „a feather grew out“ or „a star appeared“. Our predictions were the following: a) if participants gesture a VO sequence because created objects are „intensional“, then created subjects should never be gestured after the verb (only a SV order should be found); b) if participants gesture VO sequences because of „structural iconicity“, then created subjects would be gestured as VS (see preregistration). Our results confirm the latter, as created subjects were indeed gestured after the verb significantly more often than before the verb (SV).

Our results have the following implication. It has been argued by many that improvised gesturing is an important part of language evolution (see Tomasello 2008). Based on our study, the temporal ordering of event components plays a significant role in the linearization of key parts of the sentence (S, V, and O). If so, the word orders of the world’s languages must have been shaped by the ordering properties of events. This could, for example, explain why there are almost as many SVO languages as SOV languages (see WALS); the temporal order account also explains the relative rarity of the other four orders (VSO, VOS, OSV, OVS): since they do not reflect the temporal order of event components, they are unlikely to become the convention by which events are packaged into language.

Czech polar questions can be interrogative (VSO word order) or declarative (SVO word order). Negation in interrogative polar questions (Nekoupil si Petr nějakou knihu? ‚Didn’t Petr buy some book?‘) predominantly receives the so-called outer reading, which signals that the speaker thinks it possible that p (= the positive prejacent of the question) holds (Staňková & Šimík 2025 for Czech; building on Holmberg 2013, Repp 2013, Romero & Han 2004, a.o.).

This presentation argues that negation in Czech declarative (SVO) polar questions (Petr si nekoupil knihu? ‚Petr didn’t buy any book?‘) is ambiguous between three readings: outer, medial, and inner. These readings differ in their semantic and pragmatic properties and can be distinguished by using several diagnostics: (i) scope relations with positive polarity items, negative polarity items and negative concord items, (ii) interaction with focus, and (iii) compatibility with certain particles (náhodou ‚by any chance‘, ještě ‚yet‘, fakt/opravdu ‚really‘). Formally, I propose that the three readings correspond to distinct positions at Logical Form.

The presentation introduces these diagnostics, outlines a formal analysis of the three negation readings, and reports results from a naturalness judgment experiment in which 71 Czech native speakers rated 88 polar questions in short contexts (audio mode) on a 7-point Likert scale. The results of the experiment support the view that Czech speakers systematically distinguish the three negation readings in declarative polar questions.

Verbal forms in the two branches of Afroasiatic have a common verbal form that in structure corresponds with a nominal base and pronominal enclitics. However, other forms of the verbal system differ in both branches. The structural difference is visible on Egyptian starting with Late Egyptian and consolidating in Coptic. This type of development goes in a rather different direction than the forms in the Semitic language. This process is visible when the forms are morphotactically divided and the functions assigned to particular positions are compared. The structural development in both languages shows differing strategies.

As a separate and internally coherent category quantifying or identifying in various ways members of pairs or dyads, dual determiners in Indo-European, or in general, have not been the subject of a specialized dedicated study so far. In the comparative and diachronic works on diverse Indo-European branches and languages, words like OCS oba ‘both’, Eng. neither, Gk. ἑκάτερος ‘each of the two’, or Ved. katará- ‘which of the two’ find their natural place within the respective sub-categories of pronouns and quantifiers as dual counterparts to plural and singular forms in languages where dual is a fully functional category, and dual agreement is a pervasive feature of morphosyntax. This category is remarkably rare cross-linguistically. Systems comparable to early Indo-European exist only in Japanese and Finnic, and the dual quantifier ‘both’ is (possibly) represented in about 8% in a sample of cca 400. This survey will largely concentrate on the non-Indo-European area with Indo-European serving as a typological framework.