This paper argues that the phonetic interpretation of phonological representations may be controlled as well as automatic, because contextual variation in the realization of distinctive feature values is a flexible and adaptive response to variation in the demands on the production or perception of these values between contexts. The principal evidence presented in support of this argument is that the variation in the phonetic realization of speech sounds between contexts or languages involves reorganization of articulations into distinct phonetic categories. Extensive evidence of such reorganization in the realization of the feature [voice] is presented.

This paper examines the major professional interests and accomplishments of the 31 women Foundation Members of the Linguistic Society of America and identifies the characteristics shared by those who established a presence within the profession, distinguishing their careers from the careers of those who did not. The inclusion of these women linguists in the history of the field for the decades beginning in 1924 brings a new focus to several areas of scholarship, pursued by both men and women, distinct from the concerns of the synchronic structuralism that came to be taken, in retrospect, as defining American work for this period.

In the literature of generative grammar, idiomaticity has been widely identified with noncompositionality. Such a definition fails to recognize several important dimensions of idiomaticity, including, among others, conventionality and figuration. We propose to distinguish IDIOMATICALLY COMBINING EXPRESSIONS (e.g. take advantage, pull strings), whose meanings—while conventional—are distributed among their parts, from IDIOMATIC PHRASES (e.g. kick the hucket, saw logs), which do not distribute their meanings to their components. Most syntactic arguments based on idioms are flawed, we argue, because they treat all idioms as noncompositional. A careful examination of the semantic properties of idioms and the metaphors that many of them employ helps to explain certain intriguing asymmetries in the grammatical and thematic roles of idiomatic noun phrases.

Quite a few researchers have used data on the acquisition of English reflexives by native speakers of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean as evidence for the claim that Universal Grammar (UG) is available to L2 learners and parameter resetting is possible in second language acquisition (SLA; cf. Finer & Broselow 1986, Finer 1990, 1991, Hirakawa 1990, Thomas 1989, 1991). In this discussion note, I will show that the acquisition of English reflexives by Chinese, Japanese, and Korean learners is not a valid test for parameter resetting in SLA, because English reflexives share the same setting as phrasal reflexives in Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and it is therefore very likely that no parameter resetting is involved in the acquisition of English reflexives by the learners.