Magdalena Kaufmann‘s paper with John Whitman, “Conditional conjunctions informed by Japanese and Korean” has just appeared online ahead of print in Linguistics Vanguard. Congratulations Magda and John!

Abstract: Many languages assign additional conditional interpretations to apparently regular sentential conjunctions (conditional conjunctions, CCs). Following previous ideas (Kaufmann, Magdalena. 2018. Topics in conditional conjunctions. Invited talk at NELS, vol. 49. Cornell University; Starr, Will. 2018. Conjoining imperatives and declaratives. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 21. 1159–1176), we provide additional support for the hypothesis that CCs involve topicalized first conjuncts. We argue that Japanese and Korean, which appear to lack CCs, in fact mark them quite transparently. Both languages combine sentential conjunctions with topic markers: Japanese -te=wa (standardly considered one of the language’s conditional connectives) and Korean -ko=nun (occurring naturally, not discussed in the literature). We show that Japanese conditional =to fits into the pattern of CCs as well: it is derived by topicalization of conjunctive =to. Conjunctive =to is normally restricted to NPs, but it can coordinate finite clauses so long as the finite verb does not precede =to (Koizumi, Masatoshi. 2000. String vacuous overt verb raising. Journal of East Asian Linguistics 9(3). 227–285). We argue that this requirement can be met in a topicalized clause carrying default tense; the resultant configuration is the conditional connective =to. Semantically, CCs are known to be more restricted than if-conditionals in not readily realizing epistemic conditionals. The elements -te=wa,=to, and -ko=nun are all subject to exactly this restriction, which we refine to exclude only non-predictive epistemics. Following the transparent structure in Japanese and Korean, we interpret CCs by predicating the regular conjunction distributively of the set of (contextually salient and epistemically accessible) situations described by the topicalized first conjunct. We argue that apparent cases of focus on or within the first conjunct of CCs constitute contrastive topics or corrections.

Adrian Stegovec‘s chapter on Number in Slovenian has recently been published in Number in the World’s Languages: A Comparative Handbook (De Gruyter Mouton 2022, edited by Paolo Acquaviva and Michael Daniel), the 5th volume in the series Comparative Handbooks of Linguistics.

Shuyan Wang’s article “Effects of Processing Limits on Computing Scalar Implicatures: Evidence from Child English and Child Mandarin” has just appeared online ahead of its print publication in Language Learning and Development. Congratulations Shuyan!

Stefan Kaufmann’s article “Bernoulli Semantics and Ordinal Semantics for Conditionals” has just appeared online ahead of its print publication in the Journal of Philosophical Logic. Congratulations Stefan!

Muyi Yang’s article “Iffy discourse: Japanese moshi in conditionals and nominal topics” has just appeared online ahead of its print publication in Linguistics Vanguard. Congratulations Muyi!

Ivana Jovović’s article “Condition B and Other Conditions on Pronominal Licensing in Serbo-Croatian” has just appeared online ahead of its print publication in Linguistic Inquiry. Congratulations Ivana!

Abstract: I argue that certain binding facts from Serbo-Croatian, analyzed as Condition B violations by Despić (2011, 2013), are best captured in terms of specific discourse constraints on coreferential pronouns and that such cases have no bearing on the categorial status of the nominal domain in Serbo-Croatian. I show that the availability of clitic and non-clitic pronouns that are coreferential with a possessor antecedent crucially depends on whether the antecedent is a discourse topic or new information focus; this leads me to conclude that such cases are not Condition B violations. I also observe that pronouns in English are subject to identical conditions and conclude that English also has clitic and nonclitic pronouns.