Stager and Werker (1997) show that fourteen-month-olds engaged in a word-learning task fail to respond to a switch between the minimal pair [bI] and [dI], though they do respond to a switch between [IIf] and [nim] in the same task. In this article we show that the [bI]/[dI] results extend to stimuli that respect English phonotactics ([bIn] vs. [dIn]), to a voicing contrast ([pIn] vs. [bIn]), and to voicing and place combined ([pIn] vs. [dIn]). Our interpretation of these results is that when a phonological contrast like place or voicing is first acquired, it remains only partially integrated and can be lost under the processing demands of word learning. We formalize partial integration in terms of unranked optimality-theoretic constraints and discuss the predictions of this account for further research.

This article investigates coordination of verbal adjuncts and complements in English, considering coordinations of adjunct with adjunct, complement with complement, and adjunct with complement, for both non-wH and WH elements, using the conjunctions or, and, and but. Previous analyses have never to my knowledge covered all of these cases. It is shown that syntactic or (compositional) semantic constraints on coordination fail to cover all the facts, as do ambiguity-based explanations. Better (though still incomplete) coverage is provided by an analysis based on event semantics and neo-Gricean conversational implicature.

This article focuses on the relatively neglected grammar of names, including their morphosyntax, which has not aroused the kind of interest and controversy associated with the (putative) semantics of names. It also focuses on a few Indo-European languages (French, Greek, and particularly English), but refers to a wider range of language types. While not an exhaustive account of the variations in name syntax and morphology, significant variation is nevertheless encountered and analyzed. The suggested universal aspects have some plausibility. I propose that names belong universally, with pronouns and determiners, to a category of determinative. The behavior of names as vocatives and in predications of nomination suggests that they are, unlike pronouns and determiners, inherently neither definite nor indefinite. Moreover, in such circumstances names do not function as regular arguments of the predicator; they do not bear a specified semantic relation to the predicator: they are either EXTRASENTENTIAL or appositive. In order to figure as arguments in other types of predication, and be assigned a specified semantic relation, names must acquire definiteness. Languages differ in whether definiteness is signaled overtly or not: in English, for instance, definite names are not distinguished in form from nondefinite, whereas in Greek definite use of a name is marked by an accompanying article. Other languages vary.

This article presents a typology of consonant harmony or LONG DISTANCE CONSONANT AGREEMENT that is analyzed as arising through correspondence relations between consonants rather than feature spreading. The model covers a range of agreement patterns (nasal, laryngeal, liquid, coronal, dorsal) and offers several advantages. Similarity of agreeing consonants is central to the typology and is incorporated directly into the constraints driving correspondence. Agreement by correspondence without feature spreading captures the neutrality of intervening segments, which neither block nor undergo. Case studies of laryngeal agreement and nasal agreement are presented, demonstrating the model's capacity to capture varying degrees of similarity crosslinguistically.

English resultative expressions have been a major focus of research on the syntax-semantics interface. We argue in this article that a family of related constructions is required to account for their distribution. We demonstrate that a number of generalizations follow from the semantics of the constructions we posit: the syntactic argument structure of the sentence is predicted by general principles of argument linking; and the aspectual structure of the sentence is determined by the aspectual structure of the constructional subevent, which is in turn predictable from general principles correlating event structure with change, extension, motion, and paths. Finally, the semantics and syntax of resultatives explain the possibilities for temporal relations between the two sub-events. While these generalizations clearly exist, there is also a great deal of idiosyncrasy involved in resultatives. Many idiosyncratic instances and small subclasses of the construction must be learned and stored individually. This account serves to justify aspects of what we share in our overall vision of grammar, what we might call the CONSTRUCTIONAL view. To the extent that our treatment of the resultative can be stated only within the constructional view, it serves as evidence for this view as a whole.

A number of recent attempts by nonlinguists to reconstruct linguistic evolutionary trees have made news. Reconstructions of the phylogeny of the Indo-European (IE) family of languages are especially well represented; well-known examples include Rexová et al. 2003, Gray & Atkinson 2003—which is discussed by Searls (2003) and briefly reported in U.S. news & world report (10 December 2003)—and Forster & Toth 2003, which also generated considerable attention in the popular media. Scientific linguists have not been impressed for a variety of reasons. Though no two of the publications in question exhibit exactly the same weaknesses, all can be impugned on one or more of the following grounds: the linguistic data employed have not been adequately analyzed, or—in some cases—even competently analyzed; the model of language change employed has not been shown to fit the known facts of language change; attempts to fix the dates of prehistoric languages have ignored the fatal shortcomings of glottochronology discovered by Bergsland and Vogt (1962; see further §4); the researchers assume that vocabulary replacement is governed by a LEXICAL CLOCK (similar to the controversial MOLECULAR CLOCK posited by some biological cladists); and/or the data set used is too small to yield statistically reliable conclusions.

Many factors affect the ease or difficulty of understanding a word in a sentence, including the lexical frequency of the word, the syntactic context, the discourse context, the intonation of the sentence, and the plausibility of the situation described by the sentence thus far (see Gibson & Pearlmutter 1998 and Tanenhaus & Trueswell 1995 for summaries of relevant factors and evidence). In order to investigate any one of these factors, it is therefore necessary to control for the others. One factor that has recently begun to be investigated in the psycholinguistics literature is the derivational complexity of different lexical structures. In order to investigate lexical derivational complexity, researchers have compared reading times and sentence-acceptability judgments for different kinds of noun-verb pairs. Unfortunately, these measures are necessarily contaminated by potential differences in plausibility between the real-world situations described by the particular sentences that are used to instantiate the structures. For example, consider McKoon and Macfarland's (2000; henceforth M&M) evidence that externally caused change-of-state verbs are more complex than internally caused change-of-state verbs (see Levin & Rappaport Hovav 1995 for a lexical-semantic distinction between the two types of verbs). M&M demonstrated that participants were slower in deciding that externally caused sentences like la were acceptable than they were in deciding that internally caused sentences like 1b were acceptable.