This project is an NSF-funded (BCS-2116343 and BCS-2116344) cross-linguistic investigation of lexical, morphological, and syntactic properties of exceptive constructions. Exceptives are constructions that express exclusion, as shown by the following English example:
(1) Everyone left, except/but/except for/with the exception of Kim.
Descriptively, an exceptive construction can be broken up into an exceptive phrase, an exception, and an associate:
(2) Everyone left except Kim
associate exception
exceptive phrase
Exceptives have received much attention in the semantic literature, which attempts to get the correct truth conditions for these constructions (see, for example, Hoeksema 1987, 1995, Keenan & Stavi 1986, von Fintel 1993, Moltmann 1995, Lappin 1996, Zuber 1998, Peters & Westerståhl 2006, Gajewski 2008, García Álvarez 2008, Hirsch 2016, Vostrikova 2019, 2021). In contrast, there is relatively little syntactic work on exceptives (Reinhart 1991, Sava 2009, O’Neill 2011, Pérez-Jiménez & Moreno-Quibén 2012, Soltan 2016, Potsdam & Polinsky 2017, 2019, Potsdam 2018a,b, 2019, Al-Bataineh 2020), and no typological studies. This project seeks to fill existing gaps in our understanding of the morphosyntax of exceptives.
In the empirical domain, the project team will carry out in-depth investigations of exceptives in diverse languages in order to develop a typological picture. The findings will certainly deepen and enrich the current picture. In the theoretical domain, we will examine the consequences of the findings for syntactic theory, most notably, for theories of ellipsis.