I argue that pied-piping, as traditionally understood, might not exist. I reanalyze classic examples from English and other well-studied languages in light of new data from Tlingit, an understudied and endangered language of Alaska. I argue that the initial appearance of piedpiping in Tlingit is misleading and actually reflects structures where no true pied-piping occurs. I then show that a similar analysis is possible for putative cases of pied-piping in other, well-known languages. Consequently, both the phenomenon of pied-piping and the grammatical mechanisms introduced to derive it might be eliminable from the theory of grammar.

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and KeywordsThis paper develops a formal semantic and syntactic analysis of distributive numerals in Tlingit, a highly endangered language of Alaska, British Columbia and the Yukon. Such numerals enforce a 'distributive reading' of the sentence, and thus are one instance of the broader phenomenon of 'distance distributivity' (Zimmermann 2002). As in many other languages, a Tlingit sentence containing a distributive numeral can describe two distinct kinds of 'distributive scenarios': (i) a scenario where the distribution is over some plural entity (cf. 'My sons caught three fish each'), and (ii) one where the distribution is over some plural event (cf. 'My sons caught three fish each time') (Gil 1982, Choe 1987, Zimmermann 2002, Oh 2005. Despite this apparent ambiguity, I put forth a univocal semantics for Tlingit distributive numerals, one whereby they consistently invoke quantification over events. Under this semantics, the ability for distributive numerals to describe both kinds of scenarios in (i) and (ii) is not due to an ambiguity, but instead to the sentences having relatively weak truth-conditions. In contrast to prior analyses of distributive numerals and distance distributivity, the proposed semantics does not actually make use of distributive operators, but nevertheless retains a rather conservative picture of the syntax-semantics interface. The analysis can also account for certain locality effects noted for distance distributives in Korean and German (Zimmermann 2002, Oh 2005), as well as an intriguing puzzle regarding distributive numerals and pluractionality in Kaqchikel (Henderson 2011). Finally, I show how the analysis can be extended to the well-known case of English 'binominal each'.

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