Languages

This study examines how international students learning Romanian interpret and apply the Cooperative Principle in everyday and academic interaction. The research is grounded in the observation that pragmatic competence often develops unevenly in second-language learning, particularly in multilingual environments where learners rely on norms carried over from their first language. To investigate these dynamics, a small spoken and written corpus was compiled from classroom activities, recorded peer interactions, and informal conversations with students enrolled in Romanian language courses. The data were annotated for instances of maxim observance, weakening, and flouting, as well as for implicatures that required contextual inference. The analysis shows recurring patterns of pragmatic transfer, especially in the interpretation of relevance and quantity, and highlights areas where learners systematically misinterpret or underproduce implicatures. Several examples also reveal successful adaptation to Romanian communicative expectations, suggesting that exposure to diverse interactional settings supports the refinement of pragmatic cues. The findings contribute to a clearer understanding of how the Cooperative Principle operates in cross-cultural learning contexts and point to practical implications for teaching Romanian as a foreign language.

This paper develops a mechanism of PF-deletion within a probe–goal system that incorporates C-to-T feature inheritance. I propose that the phase head C enters the derivation not only with an edge feature (EF) and agree (φ-)features but also with a delete-feature, which licenses the deletion of an element at PF (PF-deletion). When C-to-T feature inheritance applies, the target of PF-deletion is determined through φ-probing from T; when it does not, it is determined through EF-probing from C. By linking PF-deletion to phase-internal probing, this approach dispenses with pro, traditionally assumed to exist in the lexicon of null subject languages such as Italian, as a theoretical primitive. Crucially, it offers a unified account of the distribution of null arguments in both Italian (a pro-drop language) and German (a topic-drop language), two language types that have traditionally resisted unified analysis under the principles-and-parameters approach. In addition to the synchronic study of the distribution of null arguments, I further argue that diachronic evidence from old languages such as Old French and Old English lends additional support to the proposal, and conclude that whether C-to-T inheritance applies or not is a crucial factor in explaining crosslinguistic variation in null argument phenomena.

Languages vary in expressing reflexivity and reciprocity. In some languages, reflexive and reciprocal constructions are formally identical, while in some other languages, they are distinct. The third group comprises languages that have non-reflexive and reflexive–reciprocal (REF-REC) constructions. This paper investigates marking reflexivity and reciprocity in Standard Arabic and Jordanian Arabic. It demonstrates that these two varieties possess a non-reflexive reciprocal category and a REF-REC category, placing them within the third group. However, these varieties are peculiar in terms of having three possible interpretations of a sentence embedding this category: only reflexive, only reciprocal, and simultaneously both. This peculiar case has been interpreted as a case of sentential vagueness: each of the two markers in the target varieties has a univocal meaning, and the range of possible sentential interpretations arises from contextual clues. From a cross-linguistic perspective, this paper also identifies a novel source of reflexive marking: the nominal ħaal in Jordanian Arabic. This nominal, which primitively means ‘(personal) state’, is the conceptual strategy for reflexivity in this variety.