Abstract I explore what modification and negation tell us about the logical form of resultatives: a resultative relates the events of its two parts, but is a predicate of a third event, a change, equal to neither. This is important for explaining the construction—most significantly, the direct object restriction—and understanding how it differs from others that seem similar. It also shapes how we might use resultatives in the analysis of synthetic causatives.

Developing a comprehensive theory of passives has been a central goal in Japanese theoretical linguistics. A recent study by Jo and Seo (J East Asian Linguist 32:91–132, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-023-09253-x) represents one such attempt. They propose a uniform syntactic analysis of direct and indirect passives in Japanese. Building on the syntactic head Pass(ive) introduced by Bruening (Syntax 16(1):1–41, 2013. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9612.2012.00171.x), they argue that, unlike in English, where Pass selects exclusively for an agentive Voice, the Japanese Pass head can take as its sister a projection of either an agentive or an expletive Voice. While (Jo and Seo in J East Asian Linguist 32:91–132, 2023. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10831-023-09253-x) make a valuable contribution to the theory of Japanese passives, I argue that their analysis encounters empirical challenges and adopts unmotivated theoretical assumptions. Specifically, I demonstrate that the Pass head in Japanese, like its counterpart in English, selects only for agentive Voice. Furthermore, I contend that no syntactic or semantic differences in the Pass head need to be posited between Japanese and English. If my arguments hold, this paper supports the view that the defining characteristic of passives is the demotion or removal of the external argument, and this is made possible by the Pass head as one of the functional heads provided by Universal Grammar (UG).

As a completive adverbial meaning ‘in a short time’, the Taiwanese Southern Min (TSM) ts̍ıt ‘one’ plus the verbal classifier ē sequence can be used in a preverbal but post-subject position to encode clausal dependency. This usage of ts̍ıt-ē is often translated as ‘immediately after’ or ‘as soon as’. While Adverbial ts̍ıt-ē(-á) (ts̍ıt-ē + the delimitative suffix -á) and tsin kín ‘very quickly’ in the sentence-initial position of an independent sentence establish backward linking with the preceding sentence, the subordinator ts̍ıt-ē regulates forward linking of two successive (sub)events. As a completive adverbial, the subordinator ts̍ıt-ē is subject to the telicity requirement, and it also encodes a speaker’s subjective evaluation that marks (un)expectedness. The low attachment of the subordinator ts̍ıt-ē in the subordinate clause accounts for the asymmetries observed in the three environments for how the telicity requirement is satisfied (e.g., whether completion or inchoativity has to be overtly marked): (a) an independent sentence with completive ts̍ıt-ē(-á), (b) a SUB ts̍ıt-ē clause, and (c) the main clause following a SUB ts̍ıt-ē clause. Finally, the fact that a SUB ts̍ıt-ē clause can only precede the main clause, and must be lower than a reason clause calls for further investigation.

The paper reports the results of an analysis of acoustic correlates to phonological contrasts in vowel length, quality and pharyngeal width with data from five native speakers of the Khalkh dialect. The study replicates Svantesson’s (1985) discovery of a chain-shift rotation of the round vowels in their presumed evolution from Classical Mongolian. Analysis with VoiceSauce (Shue et al. in: Proceedings of the ICPhS XVII, 1846–1849, 2009) finds that in addition to the first formant, the harmonics-to-noise ratio is a reliable indicator of the ATR versus RTR contrast that has been hypothesized to be the basis of the language’s vowel harmony.