A general typology of number systems has to confront the problem of variation both in the number values in different languages and in the inventories of nominals involved. We start from the Smith-Stark Hierarchy and extend this approach to additional numbers (such as dual and paucal). Associative plurals appear to undermine this typology, if we treat them as a third number. Either the associative plural or the ordinary plural proves to be exceptional.

Taking a cognitive perspective, and concentrating on instances of exophora (or so-called ‘antecedentless’ anaphora), where by definition there is no co-occurring expression in terms of which a given anaphor might be interpreted (i.e. a potential ‘antecedent’), I aim to show, firstly, that so-called exophora falls within the category of anaphora proper and not deixis; secondly, that it is in terms of a conceptual representation of the situation being evoked, and not in terms of the physical situation itself, that the anaphor is interpreted; and finally, that exophora is in reality a more central manifestation of anaphora than the ‘endophoric’ type, where the ‘antecedent’ expression co-occurs with the anaphor.

I will base the discussion on naturally occurring data from French and English, and will consider the contributions of gender- and number-marking within pronominal anaphors, as well as of such features of the anaphoric segment as the argument and referent-order statuses assigned to an anaphor by the governing predicator and its modifiers, and the stress and pitch characteristics of the anaphor. All these features play an important role in the assignment of a full interpretation to so-called ‘endophoric’ anaphors just as much as ‘exophoric’ ones, thereby weakening the theoretical basis for the distinction between the two types.

Underlying free (floating) features occur crosslinguistically. These features sometime function as morphemes. Such features, like segmental morphemes, often refer to specific edges of the stem, hence they are ‘featural affixes’. They get associated with the base to be prosodically licensed. We propose to account for the association of such features through a family of alignment constraints called ‘featural alignment’ which is a featural version of McCarthy & Prince's Align (MCat, MCat). Under featural alignment, an edge is defined for a feature based on a possible licensor, which may be a root node or a mora. We argue that misalignment takes place under pressure from feature co-occurrence constraints. Thus a featural suffix may get realized elsewhere in the stem, surfacing as a featural infix or even as a featural prefix. This constraints based approach is preferred to rule-based approaches since it does not require a variety of additional assumptions needed within rule-based approaches to account for the same phenomenon. These include structure preservation, prespecification, extrationality and filters.

An analysis of phonological speech errors in Arabic, English and German is carried out with a view to probing into the organization of segments within syllables and words. Arabic slips are shown to be less structure-sensitive than English and German ones. Being absent from underlying representation, suprasegmental structures are assumed to unfold gradually in real time. The erection of hierarchical representations is claimed to be slower in Arabic than in English and German because the nonconcatenative morphology of Arabic prevents an early assignment of consonants to structural slots. In contrast, English and German words allow the early build-up of hierarchical structures because sufficient phonological information is available from the beginning of the derivation.

It is commonly thought that (1) the description of English auxiliary inversions requires a feature with a default value, (2) that non-default values must be stipulated and learned as exceptions and (3) that when languages exhibit different values for a feature in different contexts, learning theory requires grammars to stipulate a default value. Distinguishing two perniciously confused uses of the term DEFAULT enables a demonstration that the first and third assumptions are incorrect. Conseqently, any argument that depends on them is invalid, and the absence in a theory of a mechanism for default-value declarations is not a deficiency. It is then shown that a comprehensive account of inverted structures has to encompass considerably more diversity of structural types than is generally recognized, but is entirely possible in a constraint-based grammar with monotonic multiple-inheritance and no overridable default specifications.

This paper aims to re-assess the notion DISCOURSE MARKER as it is applied to a subset of so-called apposition markers. It is argued that the classification of markers of reformulation as discourse markers alongside expressions like but and so is incoherent from a semantic point of view, since this ignores the distinction between PROCEDURAL and CONCEPTUAL meaning. Moreover, this classification is based on an account of discourse which is not only based on an insufficiently general account of context, but which is also difficult to maintain in the light of the use of these expressions in parenthetical nominal appositions. An alternative account is developed in the framework of Sperber & Wilson's Relevance Theory building on recent work on the meaning of parentheticals and sentence adverbials.

This paper is about the licensing conditions on empty categories in DP, dealing in particular with the distribution of the null noun pro in adjectival contexts. I will show that N-pro is submitted to requirements of formal licensing and identification, in which inflexional morphology plays a crucial role. Under this scenario, the contrast between English and other languages with respect to N-pro can be attributed to the absence versus presence of inflexional morphology within the nominal domain.

In the present article the problem of the position of the adjectives in the noun phrase in Modern Greek is addressed. Rather than starting from their alleged ‘asymmetrical’ distribution, according to which postnominal adjectives are only allowed in indefinite DPs, I concentrate on the possible interpretations that the adjective can have relative to the noun. The differences between prenominal and apparently postnominal adjectives in indefinite DPs suggest a predicative reading of the latter. This semantic account motivates a corresponding syntactic one, according to which the noun moving upwards to a head DEF, formally distinct from D, enters a predicative relationship with the AP generated uniquely prenominally. Such a movement is precluded in definite DPs, because the DEF position is occupied by the definite article. In this way, a number of differences observed between definite and indefinite NPs, as far as ‘postnominal’ adjectives are concerned, are seen as consequences of their predicative nature and the way this interacts with the definiteness/indefiniteness of what serves as their subject.

Starting from the traditional distinction between R(elational) and Q(ualifying) adjectives, we divide the former into two major subclasses: Th(ematic) and C(lassificatory) adjectives. This distinction has effects on semantic interpretation and word order. Th-adjectives obey the thematic hierarchy and C-adjectives follow patterns of subclassification of objects in different domains. R-adjectives are maximal projections mapped into specifier positions. Spanish, contrary to English, has overt raising for gender and number checking on the noun and the adjectives. R-adjectives are argued to form syntactic clusters by a series of adjunctions that satisfy antisymmetric c-command requirements and minimality constraints on movement.

This paper is concerned with the phenomenon labelled ‘metalinguistic negation’ (MN) by Horn (1985). The interaction of MN with negative polarity items, lexically incorporated negation, and accentuation, is considered in order to establish its exact scope and range of applicability. The relationships between MN and various types of implicature are advanced in support of the use of MN as a diagnostic for aspects of an utterance which are properties of the linguistic expression used. The implications of this for the status of accent are assessed. Finally, the particularly stylistic effects of MN are considered, in relation to the topics discussed.

This paper addresses the relationship between phonology and morphology, using the vowel alternations of Standard German Umlaut and Ablaut as relevant examples. Umlaut is analysed as a completely unified process of vowel fronting which can be found in a wide variety of morphologically derived environments. A number of non-linear phonological analyses of Umlaut, involving a floating feature, are presented and compared. While Umlaut is interpreted, in current analyses, as a morphological rule, the present paper argues for its status as a lexical phonological rule.

Ablaut, on the other hand, is, synchronically, a totally unpredictable vowel change found mostly in the paradigms of so-called strong verbs. On the grounds of its internal and external behaviour, it is argued that this phenomenon must receive a completely different description by means of additional specifications for lexical entries.

The main aim of this paper is to discuss the claim that discourse connectives are best treated as indicators of coherence relations between hierarchically organized discourse units. It will be argued that coherence relations cannot be seen as cognitively real entities. Furthermore, there is no evidence for hierarchical organization in discourse. The intuitions underlying the notion of hierarchical discourse structure are instead explained in terms of consequences of processing a text in the search for optimal relevance. This account draws attention to a hitherto not widely discussed set of data.

Recent work in a variety of different theoretical traditions has tended to emphasize the close match between syntax and semantics (Dixon 1991; Langacker 1987, 1990, 1995; Levin & Rappaport Hovav 1991, 1992; Wierzbicka 1988). It is very easy to be left with the impression that, if only we could analyse the relevant syntactic and semantic structures correctly, this match would be total. The following are fairly typical statements:

The picture that emerges is that a verb's behavior arises from the interaction of its meaning and general principles of grammar. Thus the lexical knowledge of a speaker of a language must include knowledge of the meaning of individual verbs, the meaning components that determine the syntactic behavior of verbs, and the general principles that determine behavior from verb meaning. (Levin 1993: 11)