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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Festschrifts

UC Irvine

Festschrifts

There are 32 publications in this collection, published between 2025 and 2025.
Essays in Honor of Maria Polinsky (32)

Remarks on case and agreement asymmetries in coordination

Recent literature has claimed that while coordination may give rise to agreement asymmetries, case is always symmetric among the conjuncts in a coordinate structure (Weisser 2020). In other words, a predicate may agree with only one conjunct, but all conjuncts are predicted to realize the same case features. This paper offers evidence against this claim, showing that both types of asymmetries can be found. I then reflect on the wider implications of this data for the relation between case and agreement. The purported lack of case asymmetries but existence of agreement asymmetries has been taken as evidence that case should be evaluated based on syntactic hierarchy, while agreement can be at least partly postsyntactic. Given this reasoning, it follows that analyses that regard case as a byproduct of agreement are incompatible without additional stipulations. Although this paper establishes the existence of both case and agreement asymmetries, I show that the data pose similar issues for traditional analyses of case as a byproduct of agreement, but align readily with those that regard case as a precondition for agreement.

Shifting Russian-speaking diasporas: New directions in the study of Russian as a heritage language

The Russophone diaspora is one of the most established and well-studied diasporas across the world; however, the events of the past decade, especially since the start of Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine, and the intensification of political and social persecutions in the Russian Federation, began to significantly contribute to the reshaping of the Russian-speaking communities by a) prompting an intensified large-scale movement of Russian speakers across the globe and b) raising new questions about the future of Russophone communities in the world and the development of Russian as a heritage language. This paper provides a brief overview of the formation of Russophone diasporas and then focuses on the new wave of immigrants from the Russian Federation as well as refugees from Ukraine. It considers new sociolinguistic ecologies that are being shaped by this most recent movement of Russian-speaking migrants and the effect newcomers may have on more established Russian-speaking communities around the world. The paper concludes with a discussion of possible directions that Russian as a heritage language may take.

Reconciling ATB and parasitic gaps: A smuggling analysis of P-mismatches in Italian

This article addresses the longstanding debate on the unification of parasitic gaps (PGs) and across-the-board (ATB) constructions, discussing novel data from Italian. We show that PP PGs are indeed possible in the language (contra Cinque 1990), which undermines a previous argument against unification. We further show that apparent mismatches in the prepositional content of the main clause extractee and the “parasitic” extractee are allowed with certain reciprocal verbs like litigare ‘argue’, which feature an underlying unaccusative structure (van Craenenbroeck & Johnson 2023b) and prepositions that can “disappear” in specific alternations. We argue that PG constructions are derived through smuggling (Hicks 2009) of the parasitic extractee, which is underspecified for case, to the edge of the adjunct clause, from where it can then undergo ATB movement under identity with the main clause extractee. In using this analysis to explain the range of possible mismatches between PGs and their antecedents, we further strengthen the case for reducing PGs to ATB.

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