This paper presents results of an investigation into the communicative function that the presence/absence of pronouns has within the sentence and beyond it into discourse.

This essay is concerned with a section of the suprasegmental phonology of English that has traditionally been called ‘sentence stress’: a domain that goes beyond the simple word and its accent, covering prominence relations within lexical compounds and syntactic phrases. Some almost commonplace assumptions are usually made about sentence stress in the phonological literature of English: first, that the distinction between compound stress and phrasal stress leads to a phonological contrast, so that in a compound noun like black board the left-hand constituent is the stronger one whereas in a phrase, black board for example, the right-hand one is. Second, that this prominence differentiation consists of a further contouring of the main stresses of the simple words involved so that word stress serves as input for sentence stress differentiation, as in Gérman tèacher vs.Gèrman téacher. Also frequently observed is a class of exceptions to this second assumption: the thìrteen mén cases, where the primary stress of a word in isolation, thirtéen, gets shifted in certain contexts for rhythmic reasons.

This paper is a quantitative study of the factors that determine the selection of passive constructions over active ones by English speakers. By examining a large body of passives used in spontaneous speech, together with the sentences that show an opposing choice, we are able to throw light on the crucial question of which syntactic and which semantic features of the environment act to constrain the choice and whether syntactic or semantic factors predominate in this case. In the course of the analysis, we will also have something to say about the social factors that have been reported to determine the use of the passive.

In this paper, we wish to address a class of problems connected with deletion under identity in coordinated structures; more specifically, we will endeavour to state the constraints which block deletion under identity in coordinated structures. A number of rules effecting deletion in coordinated structures have been formulated in the last two decades; the best-known ones are Gapping (Ross, 1970) and Coordination Reduction (e.g. Koutsoudas, 1971).

A thorough examination of the nature of the phonological portion of the lexicon must address at least two crucial issues. One has traditionally been termed the abstractness controversy, which concerns itself with the issue of the level of representation, or whether lexical entries are at a surface phonetic, phonemic, systematic phonemic, or some other level. The second issue deals with the unit of representation, or whether lexical entries are in the form of morphemes, words, or some of each.

The basis for phonological analysis is the notion of distinctiveness. In the structuralist period, attention was focussed on distinctions between phonemes. Since the beginning of the generative period, the primary unit has rather been the distinctive feature. The fundamental notion remains the same. It is constituted by the idea that a phonetic difference is to be regarded as a phonological difference if and only if it is linked with a difference in meaning. Thus, in the final analysis, the evidence for distinctiveness is to be found in linguistic communication. If a certain phonetic distinction is regularly used to convey distinctions in meaning, it is phonologically distinctive.

Jespersen (1894) was the first to attempt to provide an account of the changes that the Old English (OE) impersonal construction was subject to over a period of time, finally ending in its disappearance from the language. The analysis that he proposed, and that he worked out in greater detail in Jespersen (1927), has essentially been taken over by other linguists writing on the subject since then, the only difference lying in the type of explanation they had to offer for the loss of the construction. It seems to have been generally taken for granted that Jespersen's choice of data on which to base the explanation for the disappearance of the construction is correct. As Tripp (1978: 177) puts it, ‘The discussion of the loss of impersonal constructions has reached a point where additional data seem unlikely to alter competing explanations of their disappearance.’ We have a radically different view of the matter in that we claim that all previous explanations of the loss of the impersonal construction (that we know of) are based on the same incorrect starting-point, i.e. a data base that is unduly limited and consequently an incorrect view of the changes involved in the loss of the construction, therefore inevitably leading to the wrong explanation. Rather than assuming, with Jespersen and others, that ‘impersonal’ verbs had one meaning in OE and another, the converse, meaning in New English (NE), we uphold that in OE both meanings existed side by side, systematically associable with different syntactic constructions.

In generative–transformational theories of language, semantics has always played handmaiden to syntax. For example, the extended standard theory (EST) has as its core a component of base phrase structure rules and a lexicon which supplies lexical items for the deep syntactic trees generated by the base rules; ‘semantic representations’ are created from these lexicalized P-markers at various stages of their syntactic derivation from deep to surface structure (Jackendoif, 1972: 4 ff.). Similarly, the semantic representations of a rival theory, generative semantics (GS), are taken from deep pre-lexical syntactic P-markers generated by base PS rules (McCawley, 1971). Both of these models reflect the historical roots of generative–transformational grammar, for at its inception, this theory provided only a model of syntax with no description of semantic structure (Chomsky, 1957). So it is natural, though not necessary, that linguists working in this tradition would construct their semantic models as outgrowths of the original syntactic core.

The inflexional paradigm, as a linguistic entity or concept, has not been a major preoccupation of theoretical linguists (at least in the English-speaking world) for several decades. For example, it is scarcely mentioned by Zellig Harris in his classic Methods in structural linguistics (1951). Nor have generative grammarians devoted much attention to it. Being interested originally in syntax, semantics and phonology to the almost total exclusion of morphology, they had no immediate incentive to reconsider such a squarely morphological concept. Quite apart from this, a positive reason for continuing to neglect, or reject, the paradigm seemed to flow from their approach to phonology. If phonological organization and phonological change were properly understood (they thought), then it could be seen that there was no need to invoke explicitly non-phonological factors such as ‘paradigm pressure’ or ‘analogical levelling’ in order to account for ‘exceptions’ to ‘sound laws’.

The phonology of French continues to command widespread attention in the development of linguistic theory. The most recent, and most novel, contribution to the explicit description of sound patterns in this language is Anderson (1982), who demonstrates the central rôle played by syllabic structure in alternations obtaining between null and ‘e-instable’, or schwa. In expected contrast to the natural generative phonology approach advocated, for example, by Klausenburger (1978), Anderson advances the more orthodox generative position (cf. Schane, 1968; Dell, 1973) that characterizes such alternations as petit m. ‘pəti]/petite f. [pətit] ‘small’ in terms of the phonological deletion of basic word-final consonants (masculine forms) and final ‘protective’ schwas (feminine forms). This familiar, ‘abstract’ kind of account has been challenged most comprehensively by Tranel (1981), but it still represents the standard alternative within more or less traditional generative phonology, which, without further elaboration, Anderson and the comments that follow here share as a point of departure.

This article argues for the hypothesis that the location of the nucleus of the intonation contour is rule-governed. The term ‘nucleus’ is taken to refer to what has elsewhere been discussed as the ‘nuclear syllable’ (Crystal, 1969), ‘tonic’ (Halliday, 1967a), ‘sentence stress’ (Schmerling, 1976), ‘[I stress]’ (Chomsky & Halle, 1968), and ‘Designated Terminal Element’ (Liberman & Prince, 1977) (ignoring certain differences of analysis, such as that between double-nucleus and single-nucleus interpretation of some contours). Drawing on the facts of English and Dutch, it does so by attempting to identify the linguistic options available to speakers that are relevant to the location of the nucleus. The main argument hinges on the assumption that the chief functions of the location of the nucleus are (1) to signal the focus distribution of the sentence and (2) to signal whether the sentence is or is not meant as a counter-assertion, with the proviso that in many instances the location of the nucleus allows of more than one interpretation of one or both variables. Section 1 devotes some discussion to the problem of predictability, while the concepts of ‘focus’ and ‘normal stress’ are explored in Sections 2 to 4. Section 5 states the sentence accent assignment rule (SAAR), giving illustrations of its application. In Section 6, special attention is devoted to the pragmatic effects of SAAR in subject + predicate sentences. Section 7 attempts to give a fuller definition of the constituents the rule refers to and puts a general condition on its application. Section 8 introduces the variable mode, while Section 9 defines the problem of the location of the nucleus in sentences with minimal focus and introduces another accent assignment rule (PFR). A summary in the form of a set of propositions concludes the article. I should like to point out that most of the examples in this article are attested; it is only the more pedestrian ones that have been made up for the purpose of illustrating certain points.

This paper is concerned with the analysis of sentences such as (1) in terms of the Wh- Movement transformation as proposed in Chomsky (1977: 102–110) and, in a revised form, in Chomsky (1981: 308–314):

(1) John is easy to please.

A highly unusual set of voice alternations obtains in the Lac Simon dialect of Northern Algonquin (Kaye, 1979, 1981). Here the distribution of voiced and voiceless obstruents reveals phonemic contrast in morpheme-internal positions (e.g. a:sɨbi: ‘net’, a:nɨpi:č ‘when’), but the initial obstruents only of morphemes which may begin the word are invariably voiceless when they do begin the word, voiced when they do not. The peculiar complementation, Kaye (1979: 276–277) reports, is due to the following historical developments affecting the Proto-Algonquian obstruent inventory.

In this paper we argue that it is possible to account for sentential stress in English in terms of the pragmatic property of Dominance, which is assigned to a constituent in discourse contexts. We have shown elsewhere (Erteschik-Shir & Lappin, 1979) that constraints on extraction from syntactic islands, and conditions on certain rules of semantic interpretation are best formulated in terms of the notion of Dominance. In the first part of the paper we review our definition of Dominance and provide operational tests for discerning its presence. In part 2 of the paper we state a rule which assigns primary stress to the constituent of the sentence which is marked for Dominance. We illustrate the operation of this rule with examples of stress patterns which it generates. In part 3 we then compare our analysis of stress with various other proposals for dealing with this phenomenon which are current in the literature. In part 4 we defend the distinction between contrastive and non-contrastive stress, while rejecting the notion of normal sentence stress. We claim that contrastive stress is, in fact, an instance of a distinct set of stress patterns which we refer to as restrictive stress. The assignment of restrictive stress is not marked, but is independently conditioned by three pragmatic features. We characterize these features and formulate rules for the prediction of restrictive stress. We also discuss the relationship between Dominant and restrictive stress. Finally, in the last section of the paper we indicate how the occurrence of primary stress on pronouns and reflexives can be analysed within the framework of our theory.

This paper attempts to account for the existence of two phonological rules (consonant gemination and a type of metathesis) and for the suspension of a third (truncation), all of which occur in very limited grammatical environments. A close examination of these three cases suggests that we must recognize the possibility of phonetically unmotivated morphophonological rules, which can perhaps be explained in functionalist terms: the rules examined here appear to be designed essentially to preserve the canonical forms of sets of morphemes which would otherwise be in danger of clashing with other sets of morphemes in the language. These findings lead us to elaborate on Hooper's (1976) notion of MP-rules (rules which require grammatical information to be given in their structural description), and to question her hypothesis concerning the origins of such rules.

Taylor and Wolf (1981) seek to show that Edmondson (1979) makes the position of the descriptivist ‘if anything, worse’, and that the dilemma for the descriptivist posed by Harris (1978) is ‘inescapable’. The authors seek to facilitate discussion by analysing my theory ‘rather more clearly’ than I managed to myself, and in doing so establish that its claims are ‘either contradictory or absurd’ (329).