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.

I argue that the Tiberian system of accents which annotate the text of the Hebrew Bible has a prosodic basis. Accentual representations are constructed in terms of units somewhat similar to the modern prosodic hierarchy, and they deviate from syntactic constituency in ways that are characteristic of prosodic representations. They are constrained by the effects of syntactic edges, geometric properties of prosodic phrases, principles for organizing phrases into higher-level constituents, and position in the phrase, associated with variations in tempo. It is shown that the Tiberian representation can best be understood by integrating results of phonological, phonetic, and psycholinguistic research on prosodic structure.

It has been widely assumed that linguistic heterogeneity reflects social heterogeneity, with differences in the use of linguistic variants corresponding to social groupings and sensitive to social self-presentation in terms of one or more prestige norms. This assumption is challenged by patterns of variation within the former fishing communities of East Sutherland, Scotland. In these Gaelic-speaking communities exceptionally homogeneous single-village populations show well established patterns of intravillage and intraspeaker variation that do not correlate with such familiar social factors as socioeconomic status, sex, social network, or style, and only in a limited number of cases with age. Absence of any locally workable prestige norm (the result of geographical isolation, low literacy, dialect aberrance, and minority-language enclavement) is considered as a factor in the absence of social weighting of village-internal variants. High-proficiency, Gaelic-dominant speakers participate fully in the variation, making the obsolescence of the dialect unlikely as an explanation. Reasons for inattention to individually patterned variation within small and homogeneous speech communities are considered.

This paper presents a discourse-functional account of English inversion, based on an examination of a large corpus of naturally-occurring tokens. It is argued that inversion serves an information-packaging function, and that felicitous inversion depends on the relative discourse-familiarity of the information represented by the preposed and post-posed constituents. The data moreover indicate that evoked elements and inferrable elements are treated alike with respect to inversion; both are treated as discourse-old information. Finally, it is suggested that discourse-familiarity correlates not with subjecthood, but rather with relative sentence position.

This paper provides an analysis of the syntax of Straits Salish, according to which these languages lack a noun/verb contrast at the word level. Main clauses consist of an initial predicate, minimally containing a lexical root, a functional head where valence [± TRANSITIVE:] is marked, and possibly a pronominal suffix marking an internal argument. The predicate is followed by a second position clitic string of inflectional elements, the subject pronoun and tense. Determiner phrases are derived subordinate structures, adjuncts to the main clause. We present evidence against a copular verb analysis as further substantiation of the lack of a noun/verb distinction at the lexical level. We identify certain properties of quantified contexts in Straits Salish which provide important evidence for our analysis of argument structure.

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 experiments requiring sentence comprehension, young children sometimes appear to accept coreference in sentences such as Thelma touched her. This has motivated the claim that 4- and 5-year-olds lack knowledge of the principles of binding and coreference. Another option, however, is that the requisite principles are present from the very start and children's poor performance is due to performance factors. We test this claim through a longitudinal analysis of the spontaneous speech of three children, analyzing their usage of the pronoun me and the reflexive myself. Even 2- and 3-year-olds virtually always use these forms in accord with the adult grammar—they will say John hit me and not John hit myself (obeying Principle A) and I hit myself and not I hit me (obeying Principle B). We argue that the best explanation for these results is that children understand the principles of binding and coreference at the earliest stages of language development.

This article reports a nine-month longitudinal study of fifteen children who, at the beginning of the study, ranged in age from 3;10 to 4;11. In the course of the study we traced the development of principles of control in their grammars and tested hypotheses about the linguistic analyses underlying the observed nonadult interpretations of constructions such as Grover tries pro to jump over the fence, Big Bird tells Ernie pro to jump over the fence, and Ernie kisses Cookie Monster before pro jumping over the fence. The study also investigated the children's judgments of pronominal reference in sentences such as Ernie kisses Cookie Monster before he jumps over the fence. The results confirm a developmental sequence that is driven by lexical learning and changing structural analyses. They also provide further information about a period experienced by some children in which pronominal reference is constrained in a manner that is clearly related to control phenomena.

One motivation for nonlinear phonology is the potential for eliminating the devices of linear phonology needed to allow rules to apply to nonadjacent segments. Imposing hierarchical structure on the organization of features within a segment and allowing segments to be unspecified for certain features makes it possible to view apparently longdistance rules as rules operating between segments which are adjacent at a specified level, even though the segments are not adjacent at all levels of representation. This paper presents a theory of phonological adjacency requirements. Locality Theory is defined by a universal Locality Condition, which requires elements to be local within a plane, the Adjacency Parameter, which in turn allows rules to impose further constraints on the maximal distance between interacting segments, and by Transplanar Locality, which bans certain types of relations across featural planes. A survey of phonological processes demonstrates the generality of this theory across feature tiers.

Locative inversion in English and Chicheŵa shows remarkable similarities which can be explained by hypothesizing the same underlying argument structures and principles for mapping argument structure roles into syntactic functions. However, the alignment of roles with syntactic categories reflects a profound typological difference between the two languages: Chicheŵa categorizes locatives in a gender class system; English, in an abstract case-like system. The resulting syntactic differences defy analyses within a widely-assumed architecture of Universal Grammar and support the alternative adopted by Bresnan & Kanerva 1989.

Clark's 1987 Principle of Contrast (‘Every two forms contrast in meaning’) seems inconsistent with the widespread synonymy exhibited by inflectional affixes in languages with inflection classes. But if inflection class membership is counted as part of the ‘meaning’ of an inflectional affix under tight conditions—namely if it unambiguously identifies the inflection class of the lexemes to which it attaches—then inflectional affixation is found to comply with the Principle of Contrast after all. A version of the principle extends to covert gender systems too, although apparently not to overt gender systems. Far- reaching implications for morphological theory and grammatical change are suggested. Evidence is drawn in particular from English, German, Icelandic, Latin, Rumanian, Amo, Archi, Andi, Zulu, Georgian, and Afrikaans.

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.