Many languages have words that can be interpreted either as question words or as existentials. We call such words quexistentials . It has been claimed in the literature (e.g., Haida 2007 ) that, across languages, quexistentials are (a) always focused on their interrogative interpretation and (b) never focused on their existential interpretation. We refer to this as the quexistential-focus biconditional . The article makes two contributions. The first is that we offer a possible explanation for one direction of the biconditional: the fact that quexistentials are generally contrastively focused on their interrogative use. We argue that this should be seen as a particular instance of an even more general fact—namely, that interrogative words (quexistential or not) are always contrastively focused—and propose an account for this fact. The second contribution of the article concerns the other direction of the biconditional. We present evidence that, at least at face value, suggests that focus on a quexistential does not necessarily preclude an existential interpretation. Specifically, we show that it is possible for Dutch wat to be interpreted existentially even when it is focused. We attempt to explain this phenomenon.

The main goal of this article is to argue for the existence and crosslinguistic stability of a phenomenon that I call “negation-licensed commands” (NLCs), in which commands can be interpreted as such only in the presence of negation. The article explores morphosyntactic properties of NLCs in a small number of unrelated languages. It stops short of an analysis of the phenomenon, which will have to await future research.

In this article, we discuss two negative polarity item (NPI) adverbials: in years (and its cousins in days , in months , etc.) and until . We argue that much is to be gained by analyzing the two in juxtaposition. We first explore in years , following our approach in Iatridou and Zeijlstra 2017 ; on the basis of our analysis of this item, we then explore until . Our approach permits a unified account of until , whose behavior has led researchers to consider it lexically ambiguous. The commonalities between in years and our unified until also allow us to explain why both these boundary adverbials are strong as opposed to weak NPIs.

Universal deontic modals may vary with respect to whether they scope over or under negation. For instance, English modals like must and should take wide scope with respect to negation; modals like have to and need to take narrow scope. Similar patterns have been attested in other languages. In this article, we argue that the scopal properties of modals with respect to negation can be understood if (a) modals that outscope negation are positive polarity items ( PPIs); (b) all modals originate in a position lower than I 0 ; and (c) modals undergo reconstruction unless reconstruction leads to a PPI-licensing violation.

Lasnik (1999) has claimed that NegDPs in derived subject position cannot be interpreted in the embedded clause and do not undergo A-chain reconstruction. We show that with a well-defined set of predicates, including deontic modals and raising predicates, scope diminishment of NegDP is observed. We argue, nevertheless, that scope diminishment in these cases is not produced by A-chain reconstruction. We also show that A-chain reconstruction of the indefinite part is possible. We conclude that the claim that NegDP does not undergo reconstruction reduces to the observation that the negative ingredient cannot reconstruct, and we suggest why this should be so. If we are correct, the analysis removes an obstacle to the view that A-chains exhibit syntactic reconstruction.

Languages can express the existence of an easy way of achieving a goal in a construction we call the sufficiency modal construction (SMC), which combines a minimizing/exclusive operator like only or ne … que and a goal-oriented necessity modal like have to or need to , asin To get good cheese, you only have to go to the North End . We show that the morphosyntactic makeup of the SMC is crosslinguistically stable. We show that the semantics of the construction poses a severe compositionality problem. We solve the problem by giving the negation and the exclusive operator differential scope. For only , this means decomposing it into negation and an exclusive other than component.

This article concerns a new constraint on the interaction of quantifier phrases and epistemic modals. It is argued that QPs cannot bind their traces across an epistemic modal, though it is shown that scoping mechanisms of a different nature are permitted to cross epistemic modals. The nature and source of this constraint are investigated.

Counterfactual constructions convey the meaning that the speaker believes a certain proposition not to hold. This article investigates the morphosyntactic composition of counterfactual conditionals and counterfactual wishes and the question of how the form of counterfactuals is related to their meaning. Across languages, there are combinations of tense, mood, and aspect morphemes that are used repeatedly in the expression of counterfactuality. I discuss the role of all three components.