Abstract: This article employs frame semantics, a usage-based model of construction grammar, along with a quantitative corpus-based approach, to examine the characteristics of the construction involving adverbial complements and the quasi-participle mówiąc 'speaking' in Polish. The author analyzes instances of this construction within the National Corpus of Polish to ascertain its structural, semantic, distributional, and discourse-functional features. Furthermore, the study identifies adverbial complements with a strong affinity for the construction. The investigation reveals that the construction is frequently associated with distinct categories of adverbial complements that invoke diverse semantic frames. Additionally, this construction appears in various registers and serves multiple functions in discourse.

abstract: The inverse scope of negated deontic necessity modals is a typologically robust phenomenon. In this paper I examine Russian necessity modal dolžen 'must' in its deontic reading and compare two accounts of its inverse scope: the positive polarity approach and the neg-raising approach. I argue for the following points: (a) neg-raising predicates exhibit typical properties of positive polarity items; (b) the scalar implicature approach to neg-raising derives those properties; (c) dolžen patterns with neg-raising predicates w.r.t. the relevant properties. I conclude that the neg-raising approach perfectly accounts for dolžen and is very close to accounting for English must . I also provide criticism of the competing positive polarity approach.

abstract: A lesser-known type of noun complement clause construction in Russian is discussed, in which N + čto -clause is preceded by the distal demonstrative tot . The construction involves a non-anaphoric non-deictic use of tot , which depends on the presence of a declarative (or relative) CP. Special distributional properties of the construction are discussed, such as its compatibility with non-attitude nouns like 'advantage'. A compositional analysis is proposed based on the idea that demonstratives uniformly take two arguments. It is argued that the properties of the construction are captured in a structure proposed in Hankamer & Mikkelsen 2021, with D taking CP as a complement and subsequent raising of D to a little d around the NP.

abstract: This paper is concerned with multiple source left branch extraction in Bosnian-Croatian-Serbian, where left branch elements of multiple NPs are extracted. It shows that while multiple source left branch extraction is possible, it exhibits ordering restrictions. It demonstrates that these locality effects are based on an important fact that has also been noticed on completely different grounds for Case in left branch extraction by Dadan (2020): left branch elements enter feature-sharing with the elements they modify not in their base position, but after they undergo movement. It is argued that the observed locality effects can be accounted for in a system based on Bošković's (2007) proposal that movement is driven by the presence of an uniterpretable u K feature on the moving element, as well as Bošković's (2020, 2021) proposal that u K disrupts labeling (Chomsky 2013).

abstract: While Russian usually permits both extraction from subjects and scrambling of objects, we observe that these movement processes often cannot co-occur. We argue following work on similar restrictions in other languages that such patterns emerge from a theory in which word order is established phase-by-phase and then preserved, in combination with the concept that vP is a phase, as well as a ban on movement within phrase edges. This investigation also reveals some additional factors in Russian that allow the expected constraints on movement to be circumvented.

abstract: In Russian, the direct object of a transitive verb is canonically accusative case-marked. Under sentential negation, the direct object can be accusative or genitive case-marked. There is a long standing debate about whether this case alternation is semantically conditioned. This paper reports on an experiment designed to test whether this case alternation is influenced by definiteness and/or existential commitment. While these predictions were not borne out, this experiment identified three sources of variability in the acceptability of genitive case: i) participant effect; ii) age effect, iii) verb’s effect. These findings provide empirical support for an ongoing language change in Russian, whereby the accusative is becoming the default case under negation. These findings also have implications for further investigations and empirically adequate analyses of Genitive of Negation.