Some portmanteaux block ellipsis
Hungarian has a portmanteau negative copula in some contexts. While ellipsis of the complement of negation is generally unremarkable, if the intended ellipsis site contains a copula that can form a portmanteau with negation, the copula gets to escape and be pronounced with negation in its portmanteau form, while the rest of the complement of negation does get elided. The existence of indivisible portmanteaux means that the contents of the ellipsis site must be accessible to whatever forms portmanteaux, and that portmanteau formation can bleed ellipsis silencing. In my thesis defense, I argued that the negative copula portmanteau forms post-syntactically, meaning that the contents of ellipsis sites have to be at least somewhat post-syntactically accessible, and discuss which theories of ellipsis silencing can and cannot capture the existence of elliptical indivisibility.
Some portmanteaux are the result of allomorphy
Negative perfects in Bengali have been analysed as a special semantic tense negator. But they can be split into a silenced perfect and a default negation by ellipsis. In this manuscript, I show that analysing this as two cases of contextual allomorphy is more appropriate and can account for the ellipsis facts more straightforwardly. In another part of my thesis, I show this approach extends to Flemish negative indefinite geen and modal complement ellipsis nicely.
Kinyarwanda has 16 noun classes. When nouns of different classes are conjoined in subject position, verbal agreement shows interesting resolution patterns. This early draft presents these patterns and reaches two tentative conclusions about the nature of noun classes in Kinyarwanda and how agreement seems to work.
Indo-Aryan languages have imperatives meant to be followed immediately, and others to be followed later.
Are both types of commands true imperatives or some other structure with a command use?
See our FASAL proceedings for evidence that both forms are syntactically and semantically true imperatives, despite their morphology.
The difference in negatability between immediate and deferred imperatives in Bengali (but not Punjabi or Hindi-Urdu)
This squib argues that most existing approaches to banning negative imperatives do not succeed for Bengali. It has two true imperatives which differ in whether or not they can be negated, within the same language, but most approaches take a language-level view of negative ineffability.