This dissertation describes and analyzes the syntactic properties of three inter-related structures in both standard and non-standard varieties of Mandarin: yes-no question, unconditional adverbial clauses, and verb echo answers to yes-no questions.All human languages have ways to ask a yes-no question, but cross-linguistically they differ from each other in the exact strategies used. I systematically look at a type of sentence-internal question particle that is only used in forming yes-no questions in Jianghuai Mandarin, providing cross-linguistic evidence for Bhatt & Dayal’s (2020) proposal about the existence of a class of dedicated yes-no question particles in human languages. I further compare three types of yes-no questions formed with a sentence-internal question particle ha/a or/and an A-not-A string in two mutually intelligible varieties of Jianghuai Mandarin spoken in Wuhu and Nanjing. The distributional differences between ha/a and A-not-A string are understandable if they are within two separate functional projections, QuP and PolP respectively. Meanwhile, the parallel behaviors of all three types of yes-no questions are taken as evidence that they all share the same underlying structure that involve both QuP and PolP, and the variation in their surface forms is reduced to the lexicon. Building on Holmberg’s (2016) analysis of yes-no questions, I argue that the syntax of yes-no questions in Jianghuai Mandarin not only involves a PolP headed by an open-valued polarity variable [�Pol], but a QuP headed by a dedicated yes-no question particle must also be present. Furthermore, I discuss another structure where a yes-no question seems to be allowed, unconditional adverbial clauses, which have not attracted much attention in the literature on Mandarin syntax Unlike the traditional assumption, I show that there exist two distinct types of unconditional adverbial clauses in Mandarin: Headed antecedents and bare antecedents consistently differ from each other in both their internal and external syntax. Regarding the internal syntax, bare antecedents involve an impoverished structure: They are TPs without a left periphery; whereas headed antecedents involve a full-fledged CP-domain. I argue that only headed but not bare antecedents involve an embedded interrogative. In terms of the external syntax, bare antecedents are base generated at Spec douP within the consequent and then overtly move to their canonical pre-consequent position, hence they all fall under the category of central adverbial clauses. In contrast, the merger of headed antecedents is independent from dou, and hence they exhibit more flexibility in their attachment sites and varying degrees of integration with the consequent. It is argued that they can realize as any of the three types of adverbial clauses: central adverbial clauses, peripheral adverbial clauses, and overarching speech-act modifiers, each of which show distinct properties in their external syntax (and internal syntax). This provides cross-linguistic evidence for the three-way division in adverbial clauses recently proposed by Frey (2020) and Badan & Haegeman (2022). Neutral yes-no questions are typically answered by repeating the verb in the question (i.e. “verb echo answers” or VEA) in Mandarin, which is the third structure I investigate in this dissertation. Building on existing studies (Liu 2014, Simpson 2015, Holmberg 2016, Wei 2019, a.o.), I provide converging empirical evidence showing that VEAs must not only involve a base-generated verb or a VP, and there must be an underlying sentential structure. I show that Mandarin VEAs do not involve pro-drop and analyses involving pro-drop face two kinds of empirical challenges: Elements that cannot be pro-dropped are nevertheless omitted from VEAs; whereas elements that can be dropped still allow elements extracted from them to surface in VEAs. Meanwhile, I argue that a head movement approach cannot account for (i) variations in VEAs, especially various kinds of phrasal elements occurring in VEAs; and (ii) VEAs to embedded yes-no questions with matrix scope. I instead propose that Mandarin VEAs are derived through (remnant) PolP movement followed by TP ellipsis.

This thesis investigates the verbal morphology of Lachirioag Zapotec, a Northern Zapotec language from the town of San Crist�bal Lachirioag in Oaxaca, Mexico. There are two parts of the verbal morphology that are the focus of this thesis, the TAM prefixes and the argument enclitics. There are two kinds of TAM prefix: primary prefixes, which are obligatory, and secondary prefixes, which are not. The first part of the thesis centers around the primary prefixes and their use, with a focus on the allomorphy exhibited by the perfective and irrealis prefixes. The second part of the thesis discusses the secondary prefixes and the information that they convey. Finally, the third part focuses on the argument enclitics and plural marker, specifically on their distribution and cooccurrence restrictions.

I report on fieldwork and offer a survey of the temporal system of Foto Dschang (Grassfields Bantu), taking as its starting point Hyman’s early (1980) study of Dschang tense. Dschang is a language which exhibits an elaborate system of graded temporal distinctions. In this thesis, I begin by presenting some background on the language and the methodology for data collection in this project. I then present an overview of temporal configurations found in the language – those for past, future, as well as present and other aspectual forms, together with a number of their key morphosyntactic properties and interactions with negation. The final section concludes with desiderata for future work to stem from this project.

A recent research program – which, after Royer (2022), we may call the “prosody as syntactic evidence” research program – has aimed to use a language’s prosodic structure to make proposals about its syntactic structure, given that it has long been understood that the two are correlated. This dissertation, situated squarely within this research program, presents two major findings about Mam, an understudied Mayan language of Guatemala and Mexico. First, using a number of purely syntactic diagnostics, I show that Mam’s VSO word order is best described as arising from verb- raising (Clemens & Coon 2018), not predicate remnant raising (Coon 2010b) or right-oriented specifiers (Otaki et al. 2019, Little 2020, Scott 2023). Second, I provide further prosodic evidence of this conclusion by describing the prosodic phrasing of Mam VSO declaratives. Across a number of sentence types, including those whose verbs are modified by directional auxiliaries and whose subjects and objects are modified by adjectives, it is shown that Mam’s prosodic phrasing can be read directly off the syntactic tree if verb-raising is assumed. These facts in hand, I develop a prosodic typology of VSO languages, and find that only three prosodic profiles are attested, as proposed by Brinkerhoff et al. (2021), among which Mam, despite being syntactically complex, patterns similarly to other well-documented languages like Irish (Elfner 2012, 2015).

This dissertation examines the formation of questions in Sm’algyax (Maritime Tsimshianic;ISO: tsi; British Columbia, Alaska) based on new fieldwork. The first part outlines the complex morphosyntactic reflexes of both local and long-distance Ā-movement, including wh-movement, relativization, and focus. Although Sm’algyax exhibits a rigidly ergative pattern in terms of number and person agreement, it shows a unique three-way distinction when extracting core arguments of a predicate. The extraction of an intran- sitive subject, a transitive subject, and a direct object are all marked differently. This reveals an underlying structural distinction between intransitive subjects and transitive objects that is not apparent when these elements remain in their in-situ positions. Moving beyond local movement, I show that long-distance movement is possible and exhibits the same morphosyntactic marking found in local movement in each intermediate clause. This provides clear evidence that cross-clausal movement does not occur in “one fell swoop”, but rather involves intermediate landing spots along the way (Chomsky, 1986, 2000; McCloskey, 2000; Chomsky, 2001; Rackowski & Richards, 2005; Chomsky, 2008; van Urk & Richards, 2015). The second part focuses on a unique set of markers in Sm’algyax—referred to as interrogative clitics—that appear in both wh-questions and polar questions. I show that they are sensitive to a root/non-root clause distinction: they may appear in root/matrix questions, but not embedded questions. Their appearance in matrix questions is sensitive to whether those questions are in some sense canonical questions or not. I analyze the interrogative clitics as operators that appear in a high, peripheral syntactic position, and select for an interrogative clausal complement. Finally, I turn to the linear positioning of the interrogative clitics in the clause, and show that they occupy a typologically rare second-last position. I show that appealing to the syntax, phonology, or a combination of syntax and phonology does not capture their distribution. Instead, I argue that the penultimate linearization implicates a distinct morphological component.