The paper presents an account of the (non-)realization of the DP shell in presuppositional clauses within a system where such clauses are uniformly DPs. It is argued that the DP shell is realized by a spanning verb (in languages like Russian) or a spanning complementizer (in languages like English). The analysis is extended to account for the distribution of complementizer drop.

We report three reading comprehension experiments investigating the interpretational preferences and processing of pro and overt pronouns in Chinese, a ‘discourse-oriented’ pro-drop language (Huang 1984). Our offline rating experiments showed that both pro and overt pronouns were subject-based, but the preference for the subject antecedents was stronger with pro than with overt pronouns. In addition, these different levels of subject biases were confirmed in a self-paced reading experiment; a processing penalty was incurred with object antecedent interpretation regardless of the pronominal type, but the penalty was bigger for pro than for overt pronouns. These experimental results are consistent with Accessibility theory that less specific anaphoric expressions (e.g. pro) were less likely than more specific anaphoric expressions (e.g. overt pronouns) to refer to a less prominent antecedent (e.g. syntactic object).

Unbounded dependencies (UDs), in wh-interrogatives, relative clauses and other constructions, have been a major focus of syntactic research for more than half a century. The most widely assumed approach analyzes them in terms of movement and views island phenomena as largely a matter of syntax. Both these positions are problematic. Moreover, they stem from assumptions that have been at the heart of syntactic theorizing for many decades. Chaves and Putnam present evidence that both the dominant approach to UDs and the general approach to syntax from which it derives are flawed. They argue for a non-movement approach to UDs and a largely non-syntactic approach to island phenomena, and for an approach to syntax which has the relation between linguistic knowledge and language use and the complexity of acceptability judgements as central concerns. Their book is an important one that could have a major impact both on research on UDs and on syntactic research more generally.

The western European present perfect is subject to substantial crosslinguistic variation. The literature, however, focuses on individual languages or on comparisons of a restricted number of languages. We piece together the puzzle and do so in a data-driven way by comparing the use of the present perfect through a parallel corpus based on the French novel L’Étranger and its translations in Italian, German, Dutch, European Spanish, British English, and Modern Greek. We introduce and showcase Translation Mining, a software suite combining a parallel corpus database with annotation and analysis tools. Translation Mining allows us to generate descriptive statistics of tense use across languages but also to visualize variation through its multidimensional scaling component and to link the variation we find to the underlying data through its integrated setup. We confirm that the present perfect competes with the past and we reveal the fine-grained scalar nature of the variation. To complete the puzzle, we ascertain the dimensions of variation, ranging from lexical and compositional semantics to dynamic semantics and pragmatics.1

Campos (1986) argues that object drop in Spanish exhibits island effects. This claim has remained unchallenged up to today and is largely assumed in the literature. In this paper, I show that this characterization is not empirically correct: given a proper discourse context, null objects can easily appear within a syntactic island in Spanish. This observation constitutes a non-trivial problem for object drop analyses based on movement.