In the modern Aramaic dialect of the Jews of Azerbaijan, emphasis (pharyngealization) behaves much like vowel harmony, though it affects consonants and vowels alike. An autosegmental analysis of its distribution shows that emphatic spans are underlyingly marked as such, whereas plain spans must have no initial specification as to emphasis, and are eventually pronounced as non-emphatic by default. In mixed words, which are part plain and part emphatic, emphasis is underlyingly associated with a particular syllable; but in words which are emphatic throughout, the underlying mark of emphasis is floating—not associated with any particular segmental position.

The likelihood that substrate languages play a key role in pidgin/creole genesis is widely acknowledged; still, because so many instantiations of substratal influence involve phenomena that occur widely in the world's languages, the question arises, for a given pidgin or creole, whether the responsible factor is the substrate or linguistic universals. To separate the specifically substratal from the universal, the present study examines highly marked substratal input and its impact. Resumptive pronouns in relative clauses are considered in two varieties of pidginized Liberian English and in the relevant Niger-Congo languages. The evidence indicates that degree of homogeneity in substratal input bears crucially on the extent of substratal influence in a pidgin or creole.

Research on ‘universals of union’, fueled by new data on causatives and by the recognition of non-causative unions, has taken an unexpected turn. For over ten years it presupposed a certain structure and sought LAWS SPECIFIC TO UNION. Remarkably, the empirical findings suggest the opposite: union has a structure never hypothesized for it before (one clause where TWO OR MORE PREDICATES occur successively)—and there is little to stipulate, since nearly all observed effects are entailed by broader laws of clause structure. Further, the new analysis delimits the class of unions more narrowly, and reconciles them with otherwise problematic rules in Italian, Quechua, Tamil, and Turkish.

Two peculiar properties of French voici/voilà are shown to be directly related: the fact that they are subjectless verbs follows from their not being marked for tense or subject agreement, although they are interpreted as present indicative. This in turn supports an analysis of the pro-drop phenomenon where empty category subjects are present at all levels in the structure of ‘subjectless’ sentences, albeit not an analysis which has ‘rich agreement’ as the major licensing factor for the empty category. Rather, it is absence of abstract case assignment that licenses the presence of a non-lexical category.

Bouchard 1988 offers a new theoretical analysis which addresses a problem raised by Morin 1985. However, his analysis is based on incorrect premises. Contrary to Bouchard's central claim, there exists at least one variety of French in which subjectless voilà has a person marker, namely the Marais-Vendéen dialect.

The Mon Tasiek dialect of Acehnese (Indonesia) was analysed by Lawler 1977 as having a passive in which the verb agrees with the initial, or underlying, subject. His argument was that the preverbal NP in Acehnese has the expected properties of a surface subject, but that verb agreement was controlled by the underlying subject—which, in ‘passive’ clauses, is not the preverbal NP. This analysis was based on limited and unrepresentative data. In the light of more extensive data, Lawler's claim that the preverbal NP in Acehnese acts as a final subject does not hold. The most obvious—and, for syntactic theory, the least problematic conclusion—is that the so-called ‘underlying’ subject is in fact a surface grammatical relation; Acehnese has no passive, and its verbal agreement is a surface phenomenon.

The paper of Durie 1988 raises interesting and useful questions about some work I did twelve years ago. Before I consider the substantive issues involved, however, some background is in order about the genesis of that work and the questions it raised.

This is as comprehensive a study of Italian syntax as I've seen in modern linguistics: it deals with verb classes, cliticization, impersonal si sentences, causatives, restructuring sentences (i.e. those which allow the phenomenon commonly known as ‘Clitic Climbing‘), perception verb complements, and the analysis of reflexive clitics, all in great detail. It also deals with innumerable other matters, sometimes rapidly, but always intelligently—including impersonal passives, there sentences, criticisms of VP analyses which allow a variety of projections of V, reconstruction in LF, theta role assignment, and Case assignment. The data, despite the title, are drawn from English as well as Italian, with interesting sections on Piemontese and French.