The paper presents a unified account of a number of superficially very different cases from Japanese, Serbo-Croatian, German, and Dutch where a phonologically weak element is stranded without a host. It proposes a new typology regarding when a phonologically weak element can be stranded where adjacency to a prosodic boundary is necessary for such stranding, with parametrization regarding the strength of the prosodic boundary: it can be an utterance boundary (║) or an intonational-phrase boundary (#), or either║or # (in the last case, both boundaries can license the stranding). Furthermore, the difference in the direction of adjacency to the prosodic boundary mirrors the difference in the adjacency to the host: if the relevant element is a prefix/proclitic, both the host and the prosodic boundary follow it, if it is an enclitic/suffix, they both precede it.

The paper investigates the morphosyntax of Polish synthetic comparative adjectives and adverbs. It is argued that we can predict the distribution of different classes of adjectival roots and suffixes if we adopt the idea that both types of morphemes lexicalize syntactic constituents, the central tenet of Nanosyntax. The paper makes a case for two central claims. One is that the syn-sem properties of adjectives can be described with a finegrained syntactic sequence proposed for Slovak in Vanden Wyngaerd et al. (2020). The other one is that the lexical properties of Polish gradable adverbs follow from the syntactic representation of the adverb as properly containing the syntactic representation of the adjective.