Kuno, Takami, and Wu (1999) showed that Aoun and Li's (1993) syntactic analysis of quantifier scope interpretation in English, Chinese, and Japanese makes incorrect predictions about the grammaticality and ambiguity of certain types of sentences. They proposed instead an expert system based on the interaction of syntactic and other principles that ranks the relative strengths of the potential scope interpretations of a given sentence. Aoun and Li (2000) replied to Kuno et al. with a number of criticisms, which are refuted here.

Spoken language is not produced in a continuous flow; it is broken up into phrases. An understanding of phrase-boundary placement is critical for comprehension and of great importance in text-to-speech technology. The knowledge that speakers use to determine phrasal boundaries has been attributed in the literature to many seemingly competing factors, syntactic, semantic, phonological, discourse, and pragmatic. This article reports on a study of the boundaries of a single type of data, clause-final prepositional phrases (PPs). The study was done to improve the phrasing of a text-to-speech synthesizer. The syntactic constituency of the PP and its length as measured in accented syllables account for an overwhelming majority of the data. The few exceptions to this account fall into natural categories of semantics, discourse, and pragmatics, which suggests they have the status of marked forms.

A clitic occurring mainly in same-subject chaining constructions in Ingush (Northeast Caucasian) exhibits the following characteristics in terms of Klavans's 1985 clitic typology: it is positioned with respect to the final element of its domain, before that element, and is enclitic on a preceding element. The clitic therefore provides a good example of Klavans's Type 5 clitic, the existence of which is disputed. The search for evidence bearing on the status of the clitic also results in a more comprehensive treatment of clause chaining in Ingush than has previously been available.