Theories about the representation and processing of regular and irregular past tense forms of verbs in English have disagreed as to whether they should be treated as a unified phenomenon (e.g. both rule-governed, or both generated by a connectionist net), or as two distinct types of linguistic entities (e.g. regulars formed by rules of the grammar, irregulars stored in lexical memory). In this article we present data from a positron emission tomographic study in which subjects were asked to produce the past tense forms of regular, irregular, and nonce stems. We find very different amounts and areas of cortical activation in the regular and irregular tasks, as well as significantly different reaction times in producing the past tenses. We interpret our findings as supporting the grammar/lexicon theories, and discuss the implications of our results for general linguistic theory.

This article examines the phenomenon of HEAD MOVEMENT in internally headed relative clauses (IHRCs). Most theorists working in a transformational framework consider the internal head to move to an external position. I show that in some cases, head movement to an external position need not take place; an internal head may move but remain within the sentence itself. I show that this movement of the head to a sentence-internal position is a consequence of (1) the quantificational nature of IHRCs and (2) the mapping hypothesis of Diesing (1990, 1992a,b).

Despite the crucial dependence of synchronic meaning on both historical and cognitive context, we have traditionally used different tools for expressing synchronic and diachronic generalizations in modeling a complex semantic category like the diminutive. This is due in part to the extraordinary, often contradictory range of its senses synchronically (small size, affection, approximation, intensification, imitation, female gender), and the difficulty of proposing a coherent historical reconstruction for these senses.

I propose to model the synchronic and diachronic semantics of the diminutive category with a RADIAL CATEGORY (George Lakoff 1987), a type of structured polysemy that explicitly models the different senses of the diminutive and the metaphorical and inferential relations which bind them. Synchronically, this model explains the varied and contradictory senses of the diminutive. Diachronically, the radial category acts as a kind of ARCHAEOLOGY OF MEANING, expressing the generalizations of the classic mechanisms of semantic change (metaphor, abstraction and inference) as well as a new one: LAMBDA-ABSTRACTION, which accounts for the rise of quantificational meaning and second-order predicates in the diminutive. The model also predicts that the origins of the diminutive cross-linguistically lie in words semantically or pragmatically linked to children. I test the model by considering the semantics of the diminutive in over 60 languages, examining the origins of the diminutive in many of these, particularly in Indo-European where the theory suggests a new reconstruction of the proto-semantics of the PIE suffix -ko-.

I argue that the account of the coordination of unlike categories, such as wealthy and a Republican in become wealthy and a Republican, ought to be unified with the account of feature neutralization under phonological identity, in which (for instance) coordinations of dative- and accusative-taking transitive verbs are possible just when the object is ambiguous (or underspecified) between dative and accusative case. I argue that this unified account ought not to be couched in terms of strings (as in Chametzky 1987) or features (as in Sag et al. 1985) but rather in terms of the logic of categories, in the tradition of Lambek Categorial Grammar. I present and defend such an account.