This article argues that identificational focus, which expresses exhaustive identification and occupies the specifier of a functional projection, must be distinguished in language description from information focus, which conveys new information and involves no syntactic reordering. The properties of the two types of focus are established on the basis of Hungarian and English material. It is argued that the cleft constituent is the realization of identificational focus in English. Only-phrases are analyzed as identificational foci carrying an evaluative presupposition. The feature specification of identificational focus is shown to be subject to parametric variation: the focus operators of various languages are specified for the positive value of either or both of the features [+exhaustive] and [+contrastive].

Normally, the negation of a sentence S serves to reverse the assertion that S would have made, and does not affect other types of information S would have conveyed, such as presuppositions, implicatures, and so on. Occasionally, however, it seems as if negation is directed precisely at presuppositions, implicatures, or even at purely formal aspects of a sentence (such as intonation, pronunciation, and so on). The following are cases in point: Mary didn’t visit the pizzeria in the Vatican, because there is no pizzeria in the Vatican./I’m not tipsy: I’m drunk./He didn’t call the police, he called the POLICE.

I call such sentences DENIALS, and I argue against the Unitarian approach advocated by Horn and van der Sandt, among others, according to which denial is a homogeneous phenomenon that calls for a unified analysis. According to the alternative theory proposed here, there are several mechanisms of denial, but each of these is needed for independent reasons, and therefore no ad hoc mechanisms are necessary.

Current work in syntax reexamines basic properties of movement. Under the minimalist assumptions of Chomsky (1995), movement is prohibited unless forced by grammatical considerations. From a set of comparable derivations, the one involving the least amount of moved material should therefore block other derivations. Within this framework, any cases of optional movement are problematic. We addressed this issue with experiments on stranding and pied-piping in relative clauses in 115 English learners, aged 3;5 to 11;11, and an adult control group. All subjects participated in an elicited production experiment and a grammaticality judgment experiment. Our findings suggest that pied-piping is possible in young children’s grammars only when stranding is ruled out, as predicted by minimalism. We claim the children’s responses represent the ‘natural’ grammar while the adults’ responses reflect a prescriptive artifact. We also found a discrepancy in all subject groups between production and judgments of the genitive pied-piping construction. We account for this finding with Kayne’s (1994) analysis of relative clauses.

One of the aims of linguistic theory is to account for language variation. This article contributes to that objective by examining resumptive restrictive relative clauses crosslinguistically. The major claims are (1) the core-grammar distinction between conventional and resumptive restrictive relatives is due to the feature composition of the relative complementizer; (2) the prohibition against pied-piping that some languages adhere to correlates with the lack of lexical relative pronouns; (3) particular grammars need to accommodate language-specific properties such as preferences for which elements may, must, or cannot acquire a phonological matrix; and (4) resumptive pronouns which appear in relatives in the absence of an island are inserted at PF for other than interpretive reasons.