According to a standard view, the reciprocal pronoun has a fixed semantic value that defines a relation of weak reciprocity, and any stronger readings it may appear to have are pragmatic or lexical interactive effects (Fiengo & Lasnik 1973, Langendoen 1978). Dalrymple et al. 1995 counterproposes that the reciprocal pronoun has a flexible semantic value defining a range of readings of varying logical strength and that a semantic principle determines the reading required for a given reciprocal sentence on the basis of the meaning of its predicate. This article presents psycholinguistic evidence from adult speakers of English, Norwegian, and Dutch, and from child speakers of Dutch and Norwegian, which supports Dalrymple et al.'s analysis of the lexical content of the reciprocal pronoun but which also strongly suggests that the interpretive principle they posit is pragmatic rather than semantic in nature.

Variations in postverbal constituent ordering have been attributed to both grammatical complexity (heaviness) and discourse status (newness), although few studies compare the two factors explicitly. Through corpus analysis and experimentation, we demonstrate that both factors simultaneously and independently influence word order in two English constructions. While past investigations of these factors have focused on their effects in language comprehension, we argue that postponing heavy and new constituents facilitates processes of planning and production.

We propose an account of linking patterns that does away with intermediary mechanisms such as thematic or actor/undergoer hierarchies. Instead, constraints on word classes, defined by both syntactic and semantic criteria, encode generalizations between semantic roles and syntactic arguments. We show that the generalizations a linking theory needs to capture can be modeled via the same mechanisms as other lexical generalizations, using conditions specified within the hierarchy of word classes. Each condition provides a partial specification of the mapping between semantic roles and syntactic arguments. We argue that this constraint-based, verb-class-based view of linking offers several empirical advantages: partial regularities and exceptions are easily accommodated, fine-grained semantic distinctions relevant to linking are countenanced, and cross-cutting similarities between semantic and syntactic verb classes are economically captured.

The advent of nonlinear phonology has resulted in an explosion of studies relating to Spanish syllable structure and stress placement, but most of these studies claim to represent linguistic competence and language structure, not actual mechanisms used by speakers in speech production and comprehension.

The present study is couched within Skousen's ANALOGICAL MODELING OF LANGUAGE (AML) (1989, 1992, 1995). AML attempts to reflect how speakers determine linguistic behaviors such as stress placement. According to AML, when an unfamiliar word needs to be stressed, speakers access their mental lexicon, search for words similar to the word in question, then apply the stress of the word(s) found to the word in question.

The 4,970 most common Spanish words served as the database for the study. AML correctly assigned stress to about 94% of these words. The errors it made closely reflect the pattern of errors made by Spanish-speaking children in a study by Hochberg (1988). Moreover, Aske's nonce word probe (1990) showed that native speakers are sensitive to a certain subpattern in Spanish stress assignment—a subpattern which does not receive representation in rule models. The analogical model of Spanish stress mirrors Aske's findings.

The introductory linguistics course is the primary antidote that academic linguists can offer to commonly held, yet basically wrong-headed, views about language. It is essential, therefore, that this course be meaningful to the nonmajor student. Through a series of five vignettes, each by a different author and representing a variety of institutional types, we explore options other than ‘baby’ theoretical linguistics to the introductory linguistics course. A fundamental conclusion to these vignettes is that success in reaching the nonmajor turns on taking account of the institutional context and the student population and tailoring courses to be sensitive to these variables. This conclusion is driven home with an administrative view as to why every academic linguist and linguistics program should find the search for a successful introductory course compelling.

In this descriptive report we outline the structural pattern of exclamative clauses in Paduan. Because of the close similarity between exclamative and interrogative clauses in this language, we begin by developing a number of tests which allow us to distinguish these two clause types. We then present the range of exclamative structures. A variety of factors interact to mark a clause as an exclamative, yielding a quite complex array of facts. We view this work as the basis for future study in the syntax and semantics of exclamatives.

This article is a reply to Kuno et al. 1999, which claims that a structural approach to scope should be replaced by an expert system. But the alleged theoretical and empirical problems faced by the structural accounts for scope are based on assumptions or interpretations that are not adopted in the structural accounts. Further, there are problems with the characterization and execution of the expert system, causing difficulty in the understanding and application of the system intra- and interlinguistically; the expert system is not empirically adequate and does not accommodate idiolectal variations. Finally, the expert system misses important correlations between scope and other properties in the grammar, such as binding, that follow straightforwardly from a structural approach. A structural approach to scope should not be abandoned in favor of an expert system.