Epistemic modality as disjunction in Cinyungwe
Hannah Lippard

I will present a portion of my ongoing dissertation research on polysemous disjunction in the Mozambican Bantu language Cinyungwe. In this talk, I will focus on the lexical items peno and pinango, which have both disjunctive and epistemic modal meanings. As coordinators and as modals, their syntactic distribution partially but not entirely overlaps. I will present empirical patterns regarding the interpretations of peno and pinango, including bisyndetic coordination, noun class agreement, subject-object asymmetry, and speaker knowledge. I will suggest that neither word has Boolean disjunction as its core semantic meaning. Instead, both appear to be instances of Cinyungwe co-opting discourse-adverbial epistemic modals to express disjunction.

What is bro doing?
Will Zimmermann

Bro is a decidedly Gen-Z/Internet piece of vernacular, and its users accept sentences like (1-3). In this talk, I aim to bring us closer to situating bro within a typology of pronominals and related objects.

1. What is bro doing?
2. I feel bad for bro
3. Bro hasn’t read {his/her/their/*bro’s} Kripke

Like a third singular pronoun, bro picks out a referent in the discourse (1-2). It can occur anywhere in the string, as demonstrated by (1-3). Additionally, it can be coreferential with a pronoun of any gender but cannot itself be bound, both shown in (3). Taken together with the fact that it is clearly lexical yet lacks an overt determiner, this makes it seem like some sort of proper name. And yet it carries a strong (negative, humorous, sarcastic) evaluative component, making it seem like an epithet (e.g., the guy, the idiot; see Patel-Grosz 2014, 2015) . So what is it? I do not propose a final analysis of this never-before-studied item, but I do try to get us closer.

This talk is structured as follows. After introducing bro and its general properties, I discuss personal pronominal inventories cross-linguistically, demonstrating that they do not have to be closed and non-lexical like in standard English (Panagiotidis 2002; Ritter & Wiltschko 2019; Song, Nguyen, and Biberauer 2024, a.o.). Next, I discuss epithets and find that, although bro possesses some epithet-like properties (has a negative evaluative component, cannot bear stress), it fails other tests. I then discuss whether bro can be treated as a proper noun. Finally, I introduce a number of bro-like items from the same register, namely blud, sis, and unc, which all function essentially the same. Intriguingly, bro and these other items, which I refer to collectively as bronouns, are all originally either shortened kinship terms or words that refer to a certain kind of friend. I draw a connection to the superficially similar items Mom and Dad, and I propose a diachronic account of bronouns. I conclude by relating their evolution to that of kinship-based pronouns in (South) East Asian languages like Vietnamese.