The paper addresses word order change in the history of English and proposes a novel account arguing that an intricate combination of two factors led to the pertinent changes. In particular, I will address the data and generalisations in Kroch and Taylor (2000) and outline a scenario that may be… read more
The paper investigates head final effects (HF-effects) in German and English and argues that the syntactic configuration that underlies them gives rise to three different types of violations in the interfaces. It is shown that HF-effects are either morphological or prosodic in nature. A diagnostics… read more
In this article, we analyze the syntactic and semantic properties of modal particles appearing in non-assertive speech acts in German and in Bellunese. We propose that modal particles in exclamations and special questions function as evidential markers interacting with the evaluative component to… read more
In this paper, I argue that the distinction between OV and VO word orders should not be accounted for by a distinction in the base. More specifically, I argue that this distinction can be reduced to the workings of two parallel interface conditions that define the optimal mapping from syntax to PF… read more