This paper examines the syntax of quantificational expressions in Chuj, a Mayan language spoken primarily in Guatemala and Mexico. Building on Royer, Buenrostro & Jenks (2026), we argue that Chuj quantifiers fall into two distinct syntactic categories. Some quantifiers function exclusively as determiners, while others belong to the well-established category of nonverbal predicates (Grinevald & Peake 2012, Coon 2016, Armstrong 2017, Mateo Toledo 2023). This syntactic split is supported by a range of diagnostics, which we systematically apply to another type of quantifier: wh-items. The results indicate that Chuj wh-items should be treated exclusively as nonverbal predicates, leading us to reanalyze wh-questions as constructions that necessarily involve pseudoclefts. Our novel approach challenges the prevailing view in the Mayanist literature, which has treated wh-items as components of the extended nominal domain, and supports a less common one instead (Zavala 1992, Tonhauser 2003, 2007). We demonstrate that our proposal also derives three (seemingly idiosyncratic) properties of Mayan wh-questions in a unified and theoretically appealing way: (i) the apparent ban on wh-in situ (Caponigro, Torrence & Zavala Maldonado 2021, Coon, Baier & Levin 2021), (ii) the ban on multiple wh-questions (Caponigro, Torrence & Zavala Maldonado 2021, Coon, Baier & Levin 2021), and (iii) the phenomenon known as pied-piping with inversion (Smith-Stark 1988, Aissen 1996).

Microplastic (MP) pollution in terrestrial ecosystems is attracting global attention. The transfer of MPs in terrestrial food chains remains poorly understood, particularly in poultry systems. This study investigates polystyrene (PS) MP transfer and surface weathering characteristics in an “earthworm-chicken” food chain by feeding chickens earthworms that had been previously exposed to PS MPs and by oral gavage. The results showed that MP concentrations decreased from soil (10.06 ± 0.03 mg/g) to earthworm casts (6.39 ± 1.05 mg/g) to chicken faeces (3.76 ± 0.39 mg/g), and the transfer process of MPs in the “earthworm-chicken” food chains is characterized by continuous fragmentation. MPs were distributed throughout different parts of the chickens’ digestive tract after 3 h oral gavage and were only detected in the faeces after 24 h. Scanning electron microscopy and Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy revealed that MPs underwent varying degrees of weathering in the earthworm casts, chicken faeces and gastrointestinal tract, exhibiting surface holes and cracks. Compared with pristine MPs, the significantly higher carbonyl index of MPs in the gizzard demonstrates the key role of the gizzard in MP fragmentation. This study contributes to understanding the trophic transfer and fragmentation processes of MPs in chickens, and provides a basis for future research on the environmental processes of MPs in terrestrial food chains.

Speakers predictably make errors during spontaneous speech. Listeners may identify such errors and repair the input, or their analysis of the input, accordingly. Two written questionnaire studies investigated error compensation mechanisms in sentences with doubled quantifiers such as Many students often turn in their assignments late. Results show a considerable number of undoubled interpretations for all items tested (though fewer for sentences containing doubled negation than for sentences containing many-often, every-always, or few-seldom). This evidence shows that the compositional form-meaning pairing supplied by the grammar is not the only systematic mapping between form and meaning. Implicit knowledge of the workings of the performance systems provides an additional mechanism for pairing sentence form and meaning. Alternate accounts of the data based on either a concord interpretation or an emphatic interpretation of the doubled quantifier do not explain why listeners fail to apprehend the ‘extra meaning’ added by the potentially redundant material only in limited circumstances.

In this article we offer up a particular linguistic phenomenon, quantifier-variable binding in Kannada ditransitives, as a proving ground upon which competing claims about learnability can be evaluated with respect to the relative abstractness of children's grammatical knowledge. We first identify one aspect of syntactic representation that exhibits a range of syntactic, morphological, and semantic consequences both within and across languages, namely the hierarchical structure of ditransitive verb phrases (Barss & Lasnik 1986, Larson 1988, Harley 2002). Next we show that while the semantic consequences of this structure are parallel in English, Kannada, and Spanish, the word order and morphological reflexes of this structure diverge. Thus, although it is clear that the same structures are exhibited crosslinguistically, the evidence available to learners that would allow them to identify these structures is variable. We then turn to an examination of children learning Kannada, demonstrating that they have command of the relation between morphological form and semantic interpretation in ditransitives with respect to quantifier-variable binding. Finally, we offer a proposal on how a selective learning mechanism might succeed in identifying the appropriate structures in this domain despite the variability in surface expression.

States are measured and ranked on an ever-expanding array of country performance indicators (CPIs). Such indicators are seductive because they provide actionable, accessible, and ostensibly objective information on complex phenomena to time-pressed officials and enable citizens to hold governments to account. At the same time, a sizeable body of research has explored how CPIs entail ‘black boxing’ and depoliticisation of political phenomena. This article advances our understanding of the consequences of governance by indicators by examining how CPIs generate specific forms of politicization that can undermine a given CPI’s authority over time. We contend that CPIs rely upon two different claims to authority that operate in tension with one another: i) the claim to provide expert, objective knowledge and ii) the claim to render the world more transparent and to secure democratic accountability. Analysing CPIs in the field of education, economic governance, and health and development, we theorize and empirically document how this tension leads to three distinct forms of politicisation: scrutiny from experts that politicises the value judgements embodied in a CPI; competition whereby rival CPIs contest the objectivity of knowledge of leading CPIs; and corruption, where gaming of CPIs challenges its claim to securing transparent access to social reality. While the analysis identifies multiple paths to the politicization and undermining of specific CPIs’ authority, the article elaborates why these processes tend to leave intact and even reproduce the legitimacy of CPIs as a governance technology.

The analysis of similarities does not involve meaningless description but rather the more systematic use of Most Different Systems Designs, temporal variation and large-scale comparative designs. Parallel to this the quantification of comparative politics should progress further. Congruence analysis between data and competing theories can be a (or the) solution with N=1, but cannot be applied in settings with N>1 without risks of selection bias and limitations to multiple causation.

The quantifiers most and more than half pose a challenge to formal semantic analysis. On the one hand, their meanings seem essentially the same, prompting accounts that treat them as logically equivalent. On the other hand, their behavior diverges in a number of interesting ways. This article draws attention to some previously unnoticed contrasts between the two and develops a novel semantic analysis of them, based on principles of measurement theory. Most and more than half have logical forms that are superficially equivalent (per Hackl 2009), but that place different requirements on the structure of the underlying measurement scale: more than half requires a ratio scale, while most can be interpreted relative to an ordinal scale or one with a semiordered structure. The latter scale type is motivated by findings from psychophysics and by psychological models of humans’ approximate numerical abilities. A corpus analysis is presented that confirms the predictions of the present account.

We argue that DISTRIBUTIONAL MODIFICATION is one strategy that language affords for composing propositions about the quantity of entities that participate in a given situation. Distributional modifiers apply to kind descriptions, contributing the entailment that the kind is instantiated by a SET of tokens with a particular distribution. As a case study, we analyze frequency adjectives (FAs, e.g. occasional). We show that previous work, including our own, has suffered for focusing on the paraphrases of FAs rather than on their morphosyntax. We argue for two subclasses of FAs: those that are intersective modifiers sortally restricted to events, and those that are not. The study reinforces two novel theoretical claims in Gehrke & McNally 2011: sometimes kinds are realized by sets of tokens, rather than individual tokens; and some clauses constitute descriptions of EVENT KINDS, rather than EVENT TOKENS.

Typologically, the world's languages vary in how they express universal quantification and negative quantification. In patterns of concord, a single distributive or negative meaning is expressed redundantly on multiple morphological items. Sign languages, too, show semantic variation, but, surprisingly, this variation populates a specific corner of the full typological landscape. When we focus on manual signs, sign languages systematically have distributive concord but tend to not have negative concord in its canonical form. Here, I explain these typological facts as the reflection of an abstract, iconic bias. Recent work on distributive concord and negative concord has proposed that the phenomena can be explained in relation to the discourse referents they make available. The use of space in sign language also invites iconic inferences about the referents introduced in discourse. I show that these iconic inferences coincide with the meaning of distributive concord but contradict the meaning of negative concord. The sign language typology is thus explained based on what is easy and hard to represent in space.