The paper addresses the topic of syntagmatic interaction of verbal categories, following up on the pioneering work by V.S. Xrakovskij, as well as on my own earlier studies of resolution of infelicitous combinations of verbal categories (such as present perfectives). In this paper, I discuss conflicts between lexical and grammatical features of the verb, focusing on interaction of voice/valency and transitivity, on the one hand, and interaction of actionality and grammatical aspect, on the other hand. The paper demonstrates that the scenarios of resolution of conflicts are the same as those documented for cases of functional conflict between grammatical markers: a certain combination will be either excluded, or the respective category will be reinterpreted. The same tools used to constrain grammatical categories such as hierarchies of local markedness are shown to be able to capture interaction of lexical and grammatical features in the domain of valency and actionality.

There are two major proposals regarding how to derive the VOS word order in the Mayan family. One is a right-specifier analysis, according to which specifiers of lexical categories are located to the right of the heads and the subject occupies a right-specifier. The other is a predicate fronting analysis, in which vP is preposed across the subject. Comparing two Mayan languages, Chol and Kaqchikel, this paper argues that Kaqchikel reaches VOS via a right-specifier route rather than a predicate fronting route, and suggests a possibility of extending the right-specifier analysis to Chol VOS sentences.

It has been repeatedly proposed in one way or another that there are intriguing similarities between wa-marked topic NPs in Japanese and ang-marked topic (or nominative) NPs in Tagalog and other Philippine languages (Shibatani 1988, 1991, Katagiri 2004, 2006). The key observation here is that Tagalog ang-marked topic NPs are not allowed in exclamative, meteorological, or existential constructions, where it is also not possible to use Japanese wa-marked topic NPs. More recently, Santiago (2013) proposed that the distribution of topic NPs in Tagalog can be accounted for in terms of the thetic/categorical distinction (Kuroda 1972). In this paper, I carry out a contrastive analysis of Tagalog topic NPs and Japanese topic NPs and challenge this hypothesis about the parallelism between Tagalog and Japanese. By reexamining the data already discussed in the literature and introducing additional sets of facts, it will be shown that: in Tagalog (i) non-topic-marking in allegedly thetic constructions can be explained by means of language-particular factors such as historical sources, (ii) topic NPs can appear in thetic sentences, and (iii) topic-marking is optional in some categorical sentences. Taken together, the above mentioned similarities between Tagalog and Japanese are shown to be superficial and coincidental. The contrast between thetic and categorical judgments realized in Japanese is not a good predictor of the occurrence or non-occurrence of topic NPs in Tagalog.

We report on a new Japanese corpus of eye-tracking data. The corpus design is partly modeled on the Dundee Eye-Tracking Corpus for English and French texts, but it addresses language-specific issues such as the lack of segmentation spaces in Japanese texts. Twenty-four native Japanese speakers read excerpts from the Balanced Corpus of Contemporary Written Japanese, presented with or without a space between segments. Segments were based on bunsetsu units (a content word plus functional material). Two types of methodologies were used for data collection: eye-tracking and self-paced reading. We report two analyses to illustrate the advantages of having such a large reading-time data set for texts that have annotations such as syntactic-dependency relations. First, contrary to previous eye-tracking reports based on relatively small sets of sentences, texts segmented with spaces were read more quickly than the same texts presented without spaces. Second, across the various types of sentences in the corpus, reading a bunsetu was faster the more it was preceded by dependent phrases. This evidence for anti-locality effects, is more general than what was thus far available in the literature.

Negative sentences in Tunis Arabic are usually formed by two particles: a prefix maː- and a suffix -ʃ, which are simultaneously affixed to a predicate. Previous studies regard the former as a negative maker, while researchers have proposed various interpretations regarding the function of the latter. The present paper aims to define the semantic property of the suffix -ʃ from two viewpoints which have not been adopted in the previous studies: (i) relationship between the function of -ʃ in non-negative contexts and that in negative contexts, and (ii) -ʃ as a marker of irrealis modality. The survey shows that the suffix -ʃ in non-negative contexts denotes inference or interrogative, while in negative contexts, non-assertive or nonfactual. In terms of modality, all these notions share the common feature of irrealis. Therefore, the suffix -ʃ can be defined as an irrealis modality marker. As it is possible to regard the distinction between realis and irrealis as a polarity, four related modalities can be distinguished by a combination of two polarities of negative-affirmative and realis-irrealis. Thus, in Tunis Arabic, these four modalities are encoded by use of the negative marker maː- and the irrealis modality marker -ʃ: affirmative realis sentence is marked by the absence of both markers, negative realis sentence is marked by the use of maː-, affirmative irrealis sentence by the use of -ʃ, and negative irrealis sentence by the use of both markers.