This paper investigates the demonstrative-reinforcer construction, combinations of a demonstrative and a (usually) adverbial element, in the different Germanic and Romance languages. Documenting that there are four different types, I argue that demonstratives are phrasal elements that are merged in the Specifier position of an intermediate phrase. Depending in part on the different inner makeup, demonstratives may or must move to Spec,DP. Furthermore, reinforcers come in two types: 'bare' reinforcers are merged in the same Specifier as demonstratives; PPreinforcers are right-adjoined. Assuming that there is no Subextraction out of Specifiers or Adjuncts, we can also explain a number of patterns that, although logically conceivable, do not occur in any language.
Pronominal constructions such as something big, often referred to as the 'indefinite pronoun construction', have received different but often homogenous accounts in the literature. In this paper, I document the inner-and cross-linguistic diversity of this construction in German and some other languages. Highlighting respectively different sets of properties, I argue that there are three basic types: one type combines the adjective and the pronoun by complementation, another by adjunction, and a third involves a garden-variety DP. Adjunction is argued to be mediated by a Modifier Phrase (Rubin, E.J., Proceedings of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, CSLI, Stanford, 429-439, 1996). The latter assumption is shown to have a number of advantages.
In order to contribute to the understanding of the nature of inflection, this paper investigates the endings on pre-nominal adjectives in four Germanic languages: Dutch, Norwegian, German, and Yiddish. Incorporating detailed observations about Yiddish in general and non-canonical nominals in particular, this study confirms Harbert's (The Germanic languages, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2007) classification of the Mainland Scandinavian languages as semantically determining their inflections but of German as encoding case, number, and gender on its endings. The latter is shown to be regulated by lexical factors. Dutch is grouped with Norwegian and Yiddish with German. While all four languages differ in their details, the paper proposes that compared to Dutch, the Norwegian weak inflections require a subset of definiteness (sub-)components and that in comparison to German, the Yiddish weak inflections require a subset of lexical triggers. Whereas weak endings only surface inside DPs, which are necessarily definite in Dutch and Norwegian, strong endings are shown to appear in more diverse contexts. Given the language-specific conditions on the distribution of the weak inflections, the strong endings are interpreted as the elsewhere case in all languages.
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