In this talk I show (based on joint cross-linguistic work with various collaborators) that distributive  -- i.e., `classical' -- meanings for the universal part of the language (connectives and DP-internal quantifiers) correspond to bigger morpho-syntactic structures while the corresponding smaller structures have a weak (plural) meaning. This, I will argue, raises a problem for a...

Dependent case by Agree: Ergative in Shawi (joint work with Emily Clem, UCSD)Ergative and accusative behave as dependent cases insofar as their appearance on a nominal depends on the presence of another nominal in the same domain. Recent work on case theory has taken the phenomenon of case dependency to challenge the idea that case is...

Pragmatic Indecision Vague predicates are obligatorily tolerant (Wright 1973).  For example, the positive form gradable adjective ‘long’ cannot be used to draw a sharp distinction, even when the facts of the context of utterance and the semantic properties of the sentence in which it occurs otherwise conspire to make such uses possible:  in a context...