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The papers in this special issue address themes fromThey, Hirself, Em, and YOU 2019(THEY 2019), a conference that brought together researchers working on topics relating to nonbinary gender in language, particularly in pronouns. The papers collected in this special issue provide an overview of the current state of research and practice on nonbinary pronouns as they are currently used in English, as well as connecting the current practices in English to nonbinary pronouns in other languages. There are two sections. In the first section are five traditional academic articles on non-binary language and pronouns; the second section features three short technical articles that raise practical and/or pedagogical issues related to non-binary pronouns from a scholarly perspective. Authors in this volume investigate these topics not only for the advancement of linguistic scholarship, but also to make that scholarship visible to other fields and for broader advocacy.

This paper examines a type of existential there sentence found in Middle English that has been argued to have a structure similar to transitive expletive constructions (TECs) in other Germanic languages, or to follow from the presence of NegP below T during the relevant period. Based on an exhaustive analysis of the 74 examples of this construction found in the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English (out of a total of over six thousand sentences from 1125 to 1913 containing there coded as expletive), we observe that 67 contain both a modal verb and clausal negation licensing a negative associate, unlike TECs found in other Germanic languages, and that the construction is found only between 1390 and 1600. We argue that the availability of this construction was due to a transitory alignment of three syntactic properties in this stage of the language: (i) modals were still main verbs merged within vP, but took a reduced complement consisting of only an inner clausal phase, and did not take a thematic external argument; (ii) English still had negative concord; (iii) Voice and viewpoint Aspect shared a single syntactic projection. The confluence of these three factors provided a non-thematic specifier position, [Spec,vP], into which there could merge. Before the late 14th century, modals were full verbs taking a thematic external argument and full clausal complements, and after about 1600, they were merged directly in T, occurring in a monoclausal rather than a (reduced) biclausal structure. At no point did the English monoclausal spine have the structural room to accommodate a true Germanic TEC.

Harbour (2016) argues for a parsimonious universal set of features for grammatical person distinctions, and suggests (ch. 7) that the same features may also form the basis for systems of deixis. We apply this proposal to an analysis of Heiltsuk, a Wakashan language with a particularly rich set of person-based deictic contrasts (Rath 1981). Heiltsuk demonstratives and third-person pronominal enclitics distinguish proximal-to-speaker, proximal-to-addressee, and distal (in addition to an orthogonal visibility contrast). There are no forms marking proximity to third persons (e.g., ‘near them’) or identifying the location of discourse participants (e.g., ‘you near me’ vs. ‘you over there’), nor does the deictic system make use of the clusivity contrast that appears in the pronoun paradigm (e.g., ‘this near you and me’ vs. ‘this near me and others’). We account for the pattern by implementing Harbour's spatial element χ as a function that yields proximity to its first- or second-person argument.

We argue for a uniformly upward-probing implementation of Agree (Upward Agree, UA), showing that it can account for a wide range of long-distance agreement phenomena, including cases that have been cited as evidence against earlier UA models of ϕ-agreement. Our core revision to earlier UA approaches is a distinction between checking and valuation: while we maintain that checking is strictly regulated by UA, we propose that valuation depends on a secondary relation of accessibility, which allows valuation of a higher probe by a lower, accessible goal, in cases where the checker of the probe cannot (fully) value it. This model provides a better account of asymmetries between Spec-head agreement and long-distance agreement patterns, and also accounts for movement-agreement interactions without a need for EPP features.

Using a corpus of 1118 future-referring clauses from each of five versions of the Christian Gospels, this paper explores the effect that the development of English modals as a distinct class had on the range of meanings expressed by the simple present tense. It is shown that in Old English, the simple present tense was the primary form used to express future meanings, while by Early Modern English modals were obligatory in such clauses. In late Middle English, modals were very frequently used, but are shown not to be obligatory. The change is attributed to the advent, in the late 1500s, of a contrastive interpretable feature modality, spelled out by the modals. Thereafter, a clause lacking this contrastive feature could not be interpreted as future-referring except in planned or scheduled contexts. The featural implications of the present-day decline of the true modals are then briefly considered.

This introductory chapter gives an overview of how views of both contrast and features developed in linguistics, and how they are situated in contemporary Minimalist syntactic theory. It observes that though features have come to play a crucial role in Minimalism as the drivers of syntactic operations and the locus of parametric variation, less attention has been paid to the connection between this and their role in definine paradigmatic contrast. Against this backdrop, the chapter relates each of the subsequent chapters to the overall themes of the volume, discussing the different ways in which they address the theme of contrast and representations.

This paper presents an extension of indexed constraints, such that they can apply not only to individual morphemes, but also to potentially complex constituents such as the stem. This modification allows us to capture a class of long-distance morphologically derived environment effects (MDEEs) that have been previously unexplained. MDEEs typically involve an exceptional phonological pattern that is lost under affixation. Formally, MDEEs are predicted if complex constituents such as stems are treated as lexically exceptional only when every morpheme contained within them is independently exceptional. This approach further predicts asymmetries between bare roots and affixed words, between roots and affixes, and between inflected and derived words. All other things being equal, the first of each pair is more likely to be exceptional in more contexts.

This paper investigates the use of possessive morphosyntax to express modal necessity, as in the English use of have to . We claim that possessive modality constructions arise because both possession and necessity express a relation of inclusion between two arguments of the same semantic type: possession involves a relation of inclusion between two 〈e〉-type arguments, while necessity involves inclusion between sets of worlds. Differences between the two arise from their different syntax: possessive have expresses possession via syntactic transitivity, while modals conceal one argument within the modal head. The similarities and differences are captured within a realizational approach to morphology, in which vocabulary items like have and must are inserted to spell out structures consisting of formal features. The proposal is then extended from have -possession languages such as English to be -possession languages, focusing on possessive modality in Hindi-Urdu and Bengali. We argue that the possessive/modal head can be “applicative-like,” licensing oblique case on an argument that raises to its specifier. This account explains why possessive morphosyntax is uniformly used to express modal necessity, and not other modal meanings: the universal force of elements like have (to) follows from the inclusion relation expressed by possession. Possessive modality thus sheds light not only on the semantics of possession but also on the compositional syntax of modal operators.

This paper addresses the interaction between morphology and syntax in cases where the morphological realization of a structure appears to determine its grammaticality. The empirical focus of the discussion is the go get construction (Zwicky 1969; et seq.), a construction which in English is subject to a strict morphological restriction, only being possible with “bare” morphology. It is proposed that this kind of surface-oriented restriction can be accounted for within the morphological component on the assumption that the syntax can place multiple sets of features on a verb: these multiple feature sets will be interpretable within the morphology only when all sets of features converge on a single realization. The analysis developed for English is then generalized to analogues of the go get construction in languages that show morphological restrictions different from the one seen in English: Marsalese (Cardinaletti and Giusti 2001), Modern Greek, and Modern Hebrew, and an outline is given for its extension to other phenomena in which morphological syncretism is able to resolve cases of syntactic feature conflicts.

Singular they enjoys a curious notoriety in popular discussions of English grammar. Despite this, and though its use with quantificational, non-specific, and genuinely epicene antecedents dates back at least to the 1400s (Balhorn 2004), it has been little discussed in formal linguistics. This squib suggests an analysis of this longstanding use of they, while also describing a more recent change in they’s distribution, whereby many speakers now accept it with singular, definite, and specific antecedents of known binary gender. I argue that the distribution of they, in both conservative and innovative varieties, has implications for our understanding of the syntactic representation of gender in English, the structure of bound variable pronouns, and the regulation of coreference.

Much work has focused on the use of “fake”’ past in marking counterfactual clauses. This chapter focuses instead on the contribution of aspect, evaluating claims that some languages require both fake past and fake (imperfective) aspect in counterfactual clauses. We argue that this appearance is an illusion, resulting from the fact that past tense forms are aspectually underspecified in many languages: this underspecification gives rise to an apparent requirement for imperfective marking in some languages (e.g. French, Zulu), but an apparent requirement for perfective marking in others (e.g. Palestinian Arabic). Finally, we suggest that in languages that truly require imperfective marking in counterfactuals, the requirement is for imperfective simpliciter, independent of tense (Hindi, Persian). The resulting typological picture has implications for how fake temporal marking is structurally represented in counterfactual clauses.

It is impossible to provide a definition of “auxiliary” that is consistent with all of its uses in the literature, but the term is most often used to refer to elements that express (or are involved in the expression of) clause-level distinctions such as tense, aspect, mood, modality, voice, agreement, polarity, and evidentiality. “Auxiliary” is thus sometimes used interchangeably with “auxiliary verb” (occasionally “helping verb”), as such inflectional auxiliaries must generally co-occur with a main (lexical) verb and typically bear finite inflection whereas the main verb occurs in a nonfinite or participial form (though other patterns are possible). In some work, however, auxiliaries are understood to include uninflected particles that do not morphologically resemble verbs—this definitional question is addressed most directly in typological work on Grammaticalization, as well as in the AUX versus Main Verb Debate in the generative tradition. The works cited here focus on auxiliary verbs that co-occur with main verb predicates (excluding both copulas and inflectional particles), though exceptions are noted where relevant. Auxiliaries are also often discussed under the heading of “periphrasis.” Though this more general term applies to any case in which a category is expressed syntactically rather than morphologically (as in the periphrastic comparative more beautiful rather than beautiful-er), in practice it is often used to refer only to verbal periphrasis. Auxiliaries have been the focus of much work on grammaticalization, as they often develop from main verbs (particularly predicational and copular verbs, verbs of possession, and verbs of motion and position), and related work in historical linguistics charting the development of auxiliary verbs in particular languages. Within recent work in generative theoretical linguistics, auxiliaries have been used as a diagnostic window into issues such as clause structure and verbal inflection, and within the Principles and Parameters tradition they have contributed to investigations of head movement, though auxiliaries have rarely been the central focus of recent work in this tradition. Auxiliaries have been the focus of some work in language acquisition, again often as a diagnostic of broader acquisition of clause structure and tense/aspect systems. In the generative tradition, much syntactic and semantic work on auxiliaries has focused on auxiliaries such as be and have and on modal auxiliaries (the latter particularly in formal semantics) and their distinctive syntactic properties in English (and, to some extent, related European languages). More “lexical” auxiliaries, such as those derived from verbs of motion, lack these properties and have received much less attention in this tradition. Work on typology and grammaticalization, by contrast, has typically focused on a much broader range of auxiliary verbs, as have works describing in detail the auxiliary systems of particular languages. This broader focus better captures the morpho-semantic characterization of auxiliaries, given at the beginning of this article, as lexical elements that express categories typical of inflection. Many of the works cited here do mainly discuss English and related languages, reflecting the focus of much theoretical work in linguistics. Exceptions are noted where relevant.