The overarching goal of this article is to shed new light on the debate over whether pronouns ( she/ he/ it) generally have the syntax and semantics of definite descriptions ( the woman/ the man/ the thing) or that of individual variables. As a case study, we investigate the differences between personal pronouns and demonstrative pronouns in German. We argue that the two types of pronouns have the same core makeup (both contain a null NP and a definite determiner), but demonstrative pronouns have additional functional structure that personal pronouns lack. This analysis is shown to derive both their commonalities and their differences, and it derives the distribution of demonstrative vs. personal pronouns by means of structural economy constraints.

This paper presents an exploratory production study of Bharatanatyam, a figurative(narrative) dance. We investigate the encoding of coreference vs. disjoint reference in thisdance and argue that a formal semantics of narrative dance can be modeled in line withAbusch’s (2013, 2014, 2015) semantics of visual narrative (drawing also on Schlenker’s,2017a, approach to music semantics). A main finding of our investigation is that larger-levelgroup-boundaries (Charnavel, 2016) can be seen as triggers for discontinuity inferences(possibly involving the dynamic shift from one salient entity to another).Keywords: co-reference, disjoint reference, dance semantics, iconic semantics, picturesemantics.

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This paper explores the φ-agreement system in Kutchi Gujarati, focusing on canonical transitive cases and on non-canonical cases involving psych predicates and modal auxiliaries. Based on the agreement pattern in the future perfect, we argue that φ-agreement in Kutchi Gujarati involves two agreement probes, a higher (number/person) probe in T, and a lower (gender/number) probe in the v/Asp area. After showing how such a system derives the split-ergative agreement pattern in canonical transitive constructions (Section 2), we extend our analysis to other types of verbs, specifically to psych predicates (such as gam ‘like’) and to constructions that involve modal auxiliaries (such as par ‘have to’), both of which require a dative-marked subject (Section 3).

One of the open questions in the literature on again-type elements (such as English again and German wieder 'again') is how to derive their different readings. Specifically, we can differentiate between a repetitive reading (e.g., some activity happens that has happened before) and a restitutive reading (e.g., some activity that has not happened before restores an earlier state). One controversial question is whether these two readings involve lexical ambiguity of 'again' (the lexical ambiguity analysis) or whether they can be derived from one lexical entry of 'again' by assuming different structural configurations (the scope analysis). We investigate Kutchi Gujarati pacho 'again' and show that this again-type element has, in fact, three readings, which are best accounted for by combining both the lexical ambiguity analysis and the scope analysis within the same language. Moreover, Kutchi Gujarati is a language in which word order closely reflects information structure. This allows us to investigate the information-structural effects that are associated with different readings of pacho 'again', such as the "all-given" status of utterances with repetitive pacho, and the corresponding surface word orders.