According to the PRONOMINAL ARGUMENT HYPOTHESIS, the characteristic features of many so-called nonconfigurational languages may be accounted for on the assumption that affixes of verbs or auxiliaries in such languages either function as syntactic arguments or identify null pronouns that fill this role. Overt NPs then stand as adjuncts to clauses that are formally complete without them. Several studies have proposed analyses of Algonquian languages that incorporate versions of this hypothesis. This article explores data from several areas of the morphology and syntax of the Eastern Algonquian language Maliseet-Passamaquoddy that suggest that it is not such a pronominal argument language.

A key mechanism in the organization of turns at talk in conversation is the ability to anticipate or PROJECT the moment of completion of a current speaker's turn. Some authors suggest that this is achieved via lexicosyntactic cues, while others argue that projection is based on intonational contours. We tested these hypotheses in an on-line experiment, manipulating the presence of symbolic (lexicosyntactic) content and intonational contour of utterances recorded in natural conversations. When hearing the original recordings, subjects can anticipate turn endings with the same degree of accuracy attested in real conversation. With intonational contour entirely removed (leaving intact words and syntax, with a completely flat pitch), there is no change in subjects' accuracy of end-of-turn projection. But in the opposite case (with original intonational contour intact, but with no recognizable words), subjects' performance deteriorates significantly. These results establish that the symbolic (i.e. lexicosyntactic) content of an utterance is necessary (and possibly sufficient) for projecting the moment of its completion, and thus for regulating conversational turn-taking. By contrast, and perhaps surprisingly, intonational contour is neither necessary nor sufficient for end-of-turn projection.

Within the framework of optimality theory (Prince & Smolensky 2004), Steriade (2001a,b) proposes the P-map hypothesis, whose fundamental tenet is that the rankings of faithfulness constraints are grounded in perceptual-similarity rankings. This article provides empirical support for this hypothesis. In Japanese loanword phonology, a voiced geminate, but not a singleton, devoices to dissimilate from another voiced obstruent within a single stem. Based on this observation, I argue that the [+ voice] feature is protected by two different faithfulness constraints, IDENT(+ voi)Sing and IDENT(+ voi)Gem, and they are ranked as IDENT(+ voi)Sing » IDENT(+ voi)Gem in Japanese. I further argue that this ranking is grounded in the relative perceptibility of [+ voice] in singletons and geminates, and this claim is experimentally supported. The general theoretical implication is that phonetic perceptibility can directly influence patterns in a phonological grammar.

The main focus of this article is the occurrence of some polarity items (PIs) in the complements of emotive factive verbs and only. This fact has been taken as a challenge to the semantic approach to PIs (Linebarger 1980), because only and factive verbs are not downward entailing (DE). A modification of the classical DE account is proposed by introducing the notion of nonveridicality (Zwarts 1995, Giannakidou 1998, 1999, 2001) as the one crucial for PI sanctioning. To motivate this move, it is first shown that two solutions in the direction of weakening classical monotonicity do not work: Strawson DE (von Fintel 1999) and weak DE (Hoeksema 1986). Weakening DE systematically either overgenerates or undergenerates, in either case failing to characterize the correct set of licensers. Nonveridicality is introduced as a conservative extension of DE and is shown to account for PIs also in contexts that are not DE (i.e. questions, modal verbs, imperatives, directive propositional attitudes). This theory, augmented with the premise that certain PIs (i.e. the liberal class represented by any) are subject to a weaker polarity dependency identified not as LICENSING but as RESCUING by nonveridicality, explains the occurrence of this particular class with only and emotive factive verbs. Crosslinguistic comparisons illustrate that the occurrence of PIs with only and emotive factives is not a general phenomenon, and further support the dual nature of polarity dependency and the semantic characterization of the elements that license or rescue PIs.

This article addresses general questions about the organization of grammar via a detailed discussion of a small, but well-explored, area of English: the contraction of want to to wanna. It distinguishes three general approaches to the analysis of wanna: a phonological rule, lexicalization, or a derivational rule. Each approach has a different set of strengths, but they all have weaknesses as well. The article then offers a new analysis in terms of REALIZATION, which combines the strengths of all the previous analyses. This analysis, which is based on the theory of word grammar, accounts not only for all the well-known syntactic and morphological constraints on this contraction, but also for a fact that has not been noted before: that, for some speakers, the last vowel alternates in just the same idiosyncratic way as that of to, which suggests strongly that in some sense wanna contains to as well as want. For these (but not all) speakers, the proposed analysis recognizes two words (sublexemes of WANT and TOinf) at the level of syntax and a single form ({wanna}, containing variants of {want} and {to}) at the level of form; the relations between these words and forms, and between the forms and their phonological realizations, are defined by a declarative network.