The paper presents and examines a previously undescribed puzzle concerning the syntactic distribution of Russian mandative verbs (velet' 'order', razrešit' 'allow') and non-verbal deontic modals: these predicates exhibit dual behavior as they embed non-finite clauses with either implicit obligatorily controlled (PRO) or overt referential (DP) subjects. The ambiguity holds for the same native speakers and no detectable difference in terms of the Tense-Agreement characteristics can be found between infinitival constituents with DP/PRO subjects. To account for this phenomenon, I propose, first, to analyze mandative verbs as lexical realizations of a verb of communication that embeds a silent deontic modal head; the latter, in turn, takes a clausal proposition as its complement. Second, I demonstrate that the reported DP/PRO alternation is described by the following generalization: An embedded overt referential subject is allowed only when there is no potential dative DP controller available within the higher clause. In the spirit of the traditional Case theory, I argue that an embedded lexical subject must be Case licensed, and, since non-finite clauses are Case deficient, licensing may only be done by a higher (matrix) functional head, namely Appl 0 , which normally introduces an obligation Holder; thus, matrix Holders and lexical embedded subjects end up competing to receive Case from the same functional head. Finally, I show that, as no true subject raising happens, Case assignment proceeds long-distance over a CP boundary.

This special issue of Acta Linguistica Academica is the second volume of selected papers from the thirteenth Conference on Syntax, Phonology, and Language Analysis (SinFonIJA 13). An international linguistics conference, SinFonIJA is held annually at hosting institutions in the region of the former Yugoslavia and Austria-Hungary, and features work carried out in all areas of formal linguistics. SinFonIJA 13 was held at the Research Institute for Linguistics in Budapest (now the Hungarian Research Centre for Linguistics) in September 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the conference took place online, with talks and poster presentations delivered in real time.In the fall of 2020, Acta Linguistica Academica accepted our proposal for two special collections. The first volume appeared in December 2021 (Volume 68, Issue 4), and focused on contributions in syntax, morpho-syntax, and semantics. The present issue is the second of the two, and includes papers on phonology, phonetics, syntax, and semantics.In Unstressed vowels in English: Distributions and consequences, Péter Szigetvári builds on Trager & Bloch (1941) and Szigetvári ( 2016) and provides further evidence for the claim that diphthongs in (British) English are short vowels followed by consonants (glides). Novel evidence, presented in the paper, comes from the distribution of unstressed vowels in British English. Phenomena that are brought to bear on the analysis include the parallelism between the vocalic components of diphthongs and unstressable short vowels, and the realization of diphthongs in unstressed positions.Eirini Apostolopoulou in her paper Place of articulation shifts in sound change: A gradual road to the unmarked shows how markedness of codas is reduced in the diachronic development of Italiot Greek. The paper focuses on the changes that affect heterosyllabic clusters consisting of a non-coronal and a coronal consonant, and proposes three stages of change: (a) no shift; (b) DORSAL > LABIAL shift, and (c) DORSAL, LABIAL > CORONAL shift. The diachronic process is accounted for in terms of Rice's (1994) model of the PLACE node, de Lacy's (2002) markedness hierarchy, and Alber & Prince's (2015) Property Theory.Sebastian Bredemann's paper The role of phonology in Vata adjectival agreement provides novel evidence in favor of integrational theories of the morphology-phonology interface (e.g., Wolf 2008), as opposed to the separational ones (Halle and Marantz 1993). According to the former, the general phonology of a language can influence Vocabulary Insertion; according to the latter, Vocabulary Insertion does not interact with the phonological component of the grammar. The paper offers new evidence from adjectival agreement in Vata, where the shape of the agreement morpheme is determined by the phonology of the adjectival stem. This pattern can be straightforwardly accounted for under an integrational approachbut not a separational one.Kata Baditzné Pálvölgyi's paper Tonal peaks in the spontaneous speech of vantage level Hungarian learners of Spanish...

The paper provides a detailed examination of reflexive strategies in the Kuznetsovo dialect of Hill Mari (Mari, Uralic) filling in an existing gap in the description of anaphoric elements in Uralic languages. Firstly, I focus on simple lexical reflexives derived from the stem (ə̈)škə̈-. Having examined their morphosyntactic and binding properties, I adopt several typological classifications and approach the Hill Mari data from a cross-linguistic perspective comparing them to anaphors in other Uralic languages. Secondly, I consider other reflexive strategies employed in Uralic languages, such as complex (reduplicative) reflexive pronouns and reflexive detransitivization of a predicate, and I demonstrate that these scenarios are unavailable in the variety of Hill Mari under discussion.

The present paper examines deverbal event nouns in Kaqchikel (Mayan) that consist of both nominal and verbal projections. Contrary to the recent proposal made by Imanishi (2020), who argues that nominalized verbs in Kaqchikel obligatorily lack an external argument projection, we demonstrate that intransitive unergative predicates maintain their external arguments under nominalization. We further propose that event -ik nouns in Kaqchikel are derived via predicative control with the verbal part being predicated of the possessor DP introduced in Spec,nP (in the spirit of Landau 2015). Additional support for this comes from the behavior of antipassive predicates under nominalization, which preserve the internal argument instead of the external one.