In modern Kyushu dialects, so-called “shimo-nidanka” (a change to lower bigrade conjugation) is observed, in which the final vowel of irrealis/conjunctive (mizen/ren’yō) stems of former upper bigrade (kami-nidan) verbs takes /e/ and accordingly merge with former lower bigrade (shimo-nidan) verbs. According to the proto-Kyushu-Ryukyuan hypothesis, this trait is the result of sound changes experienced by both Kyushu dialects and Ryukyuan, and these shared sound changes define the monophyletic group consisting of the aforementioned. However, there is still a possibility that “shimo-nidanka” is a result of analogical changes rather than sound changes. This study examines the validity of the proto-Kyushu-Ryukyuan hypothesis by analyzing the former upper bigrade verbs in modern Kyushu dialects from the perspective of their phylogenetic position. There is evidence to support this hypothesis in the dialects of central Miyazaki Prefecture. This study also argues that other modern Kyushu dialects can also be seen as descendants of the proto-Kyushu-Ryukyuan.

This paper aims to elaborate on the POP (Problems of Projection) framework advocated by Chomsky (2013, 2015a) by conducting a reminiscent consideration of Locative Inversion, a construction with the idiosyncratic grammatical array and information structure. Traditionally, the construction has been given a syntactic derivation in which the locative PP undergoes movement to SPEC-T, while the subject DP remains within the VP-domain. This derivation poses two crucial questions for the POP framework: i) how the VP-internal subject undergoes φ-agreement with T and ii) what kind of agreement takes place in {PP, TP}. By refining the POP framework, this paper proposes that i) the POP framework maintains long-distance agreement such as in the Agree framework of Chomsky (2000, 2001) and ii) {PP, TP} receives a label of <Top, Top> as the result of topic-feature agreement via topic-feature inheritance from C by T. In addition, this paper attempts to clarify the interaction between syntax and information structure that is observable in Locative Inversion. Specifically, it demonstrates to what extent the syntactic derivation affects the unambiguous information structure in which the locative PP counts as a topic, while the postverbal subject is presented with focus. This paper argues that this peculiar information structure is associated with the syntactic derivation where {PP, TP} undergoes topic-feature agreement and obtains a label of <Top, Top>. The discussion in this paper suggests that the topic agreement/labeling is reflected in two ways: it helps the syntactic derivation converge and it guarantees that the locative PP functions as the topic of the sentence.

In Tutuba, a minority language of the Republic of Vanuatu, the numbers 11–19 use the undercounting additive method reflecting the Proto-Oceanic language, whereas numbers 21 and higher use overcounting. Overcounting can also be found in Orkhon Turkic inscriptions of the 700s and Mayan and Germanic languages. This way of counting, which at first can appear confusing, is rare worldwide, and its creation in conjunction with the Tutuba language, was unknown until now.

This paper focuses on how the Tutuba society used numbers 21 and higher in the context of traditional rituals. In the Tutuba society, pigs were highly valued as an indicator of wealth. At rituals, distribution and communal meals of pork were essential, and having a full accounting of the number of attendees was thus crucial. Accordingly, this paper concludes that at the Tutuba rituals, the abstract concept of numbers was embodied by the cycad leaf, thus, the method of enumerating by using cycad leaves brought about innovation of overcounting.

Furthermore, this paper reveals that the Tutuba society, which did not have letters, used cycad leaves to replace letters and play the role of record books that maintained quantities and attendee numbers.

In Kupsapiiny, a Southern Nilotic language of Uganda, nearly all common nouns in the singular or the plural have two forms depending on the presence vs. absence of a suffix. This study examines how long and short common noun forms (with and without the suffix, respectively) occur in discourse by means of Dryer’s (2014) Reference Hierarchy. It shows that short forms are only infrequently used for indefinites, with their mandatory use restricted to two types of indefinites, semantically nonspecific indefinites involving negation and true-predicate nominals, whereas long forms serve as frequently used, default forms, which occur not only in definite situations, but also – in fact, more commonly than short forms – in most indefinite situations. The present study hypothesizes that long forms have semantically generalized from forms marking definiteness, i.e., the speaker’s assumption about the identifiability or accessibility of the referent to the hearer (Givón 1995, 2001), to those indicating the speaker’s assumption about the accessibility of the referent (type) to the hearer (or sometimes the speaker themself) with the result that their context extended from definite situations to include most indefinite situations, as reported about the diachronic development of definite articles in other languages (e.g., Greenberg 1978). It speculates that the context extension for long forms was brought about by associations between referents in discourse based on the Gricean maxim of relation as well as subjectification. Other types of factors than the speaker’s assumption about the referent (type) accessibility and indefiniteness in the choice between long and short forms (lexical, constructional, contextual, and generational differences as well as special uses of short forms for definites) are also described. This study also points out that the Kupsapiiny noun system as a whole contradicts the grammatical form–frequency correspondence hypothesis (Haspelmath 2021).

This paper offers a description and analysis of differential object marking (DOM) observed in -sqa or -na subordinate clauses in Ayacucho Quechua. This language allows for two patterns of object marking, accusative -ta and -ø, only within nominalized subordinate clauses. It is argued that this DOM is triggered by two information structural properties: contrastive focus and unexpectedness. The accusative -ta marking is preferred to -ø marking when an object NP is in contrastive focus and/or is unexpected from common grounds. Such DOM in Ayacucho Quechua has three implications for the typology of DOM and information structure. First, DOM can be triggered by contrastive focus or unexpectedness, although these two factors have not been widely reported to be relevant to DOM. Second, it is possible to recognize information structure–based grammatical markings in subordinate clauses, which have been said to be “pragmatically flat” (Bybee 2002). Last, contrastiveness as an information structural property can be formally marked.

This study aims to elucidate the restrained distributions of embedded topicalization and left dislocation (LD) through an online acceptability judgement task. Currently, there are two opposing approaches regarding their confined distributions. The intervention approach by Haegeman (2007, 2009, 2010a, 2010b, 2012) argues that topicalization gives rise to the intervention effect with operator movement to the left periphery. The truncation approach by Miyagawa (2017), on the other hand, notes that the truncation of a Topic Phrase excludes both topicalization and LD in the complements of Class C and D predicates of Hooper and Thompson (1973). The rationale for the latter approach is that LD, which does not involve movement, would not intervene with operator movement. The results of the acceptability judgement task reveal hitherto unnoticed differences of acceptability among various complements, and we are led to reconsider the exact syntactic projections hosting topicalization and LD. It is argued that both intervention and truncation are operative at the periphery, but their effect on embedded topicalization and LD varies depending on the matrix predicate class.