This article presents a typology of consonant harmony or LONG DISTANCE CONSONANT AGREEMENT that is analyzed as arising through correspondence relations between consonants rather than feature spreading. The model covers a range of agreement patterns (nasal, laryngeal, liquid, coronal, dorsal) and offers several advantages. Similarity of agreeing consonants is central to the typology and is incorporated directly into the constraints driving correspondence. Agreement by correspondence without feature spreading captures the neutrality of intervening segments, which neither block nor undergo. Case studies of laryngeal agreement and nasal agreement are presented, demonstrating the model's capacity to capture varying degrees of similarity crosslinguistically.

Two classes of intensional transitive verbs affect the interpretation of an indefinite object in the same way that stage- and individual-level predicates affect an indefinite subject. The contrast for objects is instantiated inside the scope of intensionality, that is, VP-internally. I claim that the differentiation of subject positions said to underlie the interpretational contrast for subjects recurs in the VP for objects, inside the domain of intensionality. The internal domain of a transitive verb is therefore somewhat syntactically articulated, containing at least two positions for indefinite objects. Quantified objects, however, are VP-external.

In Lezgian, a Nakh-Daghestanian language, final and preconsonantal ejectives and voiceless unaspirated obstruents are voiced in certain monosyllabic nouns. This article offers acoustic evidence confirming that the two coda-voicing series are indeed voiced in final position. Based on comparative evidence, it is demonstrated that this phonetically aberrant neutralization pattern is the result of a series of phonetically natural sound changes. Such ‘crazy rules’ (Bach & Harms 1972) undermine any direct phonetic licensing approach to phonology, such as LICENSING BY CUE (Steriade 1997).

English resultative expressions have been a major focus of research on the syntax-semantics interface. We argue in this article that a family of related constructions is required to account for their distribution. We demonstrate that a number of generalizations follow from the semantics of the constructions we posit: the syntactic argument structure of the sentence is predicted by general principles of argument linking; and the aspectual structure of the sentence is determined by the aspectual structure of the constructional subevent, which is in turn predictable from general principles correlating event structure with change, extension, motion, and paths. Finally, the semantics and syntax of resultatives explain the possibilities for temporal relations between the two sub-events. While these generalizations clearly exist, there is also a great deal of idiosyncrasy involved in resultatives. Many idiosyncratic instances and small subclasses of the construction must be learned and stored individually. This account serves to justify aspects of what we share in our overall vision of grammar, what we might call the CONSTRUCTIONAL view. To the extent that our treatment of the resultative can be stated only within the constructional view, it serves as evidence for this view as a whole.

Frequent words tend to shorten (see e.g. Schuchardt 1885, Hooper 1976), as do words that have a high probability of occurrence given a neighboring word (Jurafsky et al. 2001). This tendency has been cited in support of the claim that probabilities are an inherent part of grammar, and of syntax in particular. There is widespread consensus, however, that the syntax of natural languages cannot be captured in terms of item-to-item transitions (Chomsky 1957). Therefore, unless one considers probabilities of syntactic structures, rather than particular combinations of neighboring words, pronunciation variation cannot be said to reflect probabilistic effects in syntax. In this article, we report a case of pronunciation variation that reflects contextual probabilities of syntactic structures. The relevant probabilities are based on the probability of a given syntactic-structure, given a particular verb. We show that these probabilities affect American English /t,d/-deletion, as well as the durations of words and phrases. Our results are consistent with the notion that knowledge of grammar includes knowledge of probabilities of syntactic structures, and that this knowledge affects language production.*

Some, but not all, languages with fixed stress exhibit lexical exceptions to their stress rule. Under the assumption that lexical exceptions can occur in a language only if its native speakers can perceive stress contrasts, I argue that the presence of these exceptions depends on the age at which infants discover the stress rule of their language. If the stress regularity is easy to infer from the surface speech stream, then it will be acquired very early, and stress will not be encoded in the phonological representation of words in the mental lexicon; as a consequence, stress contrasts are not well perceived by adult speakers and lexical exceptions are excluded. If, by contrast, the regularity is difficult to infer, then it will be acquired relatively late, after the format of the phonological encoding of words has been fixed. That is, stress will be redundantly encoded in the mental lexicon, and lexical exceptions can thus be perceived and stored by adult speakers. A typological survey concerning the occurrence of exceptions in languages with fixed stress supports this proposal. A comparison with a metrical approach to exceptional stress is made, leading to a proposal about the division of labor between psycholinguistics and theoretical phonology.

A number of recent attempts by nonlinguists to reconstruct linguistic evolutionary trees have made news. Reconstructions of the phylogeny of the Indo-European (IE) family of languages are especially well represented; well-known examples include Rexová et al. 2003, Gray & Atkinson 2003—which is discussed by Searls (2003) and briefly reported in U.S. news & world report (10 December 2003)—and Forster & Toth 2003, which also generated considerable attention in the popular media. Scientific linguists have not been impressed for a variety of reasons. Though no two of the publications in question exhibit exactly the same weaknesses, all can be impugned on one or more of the following grounds: the linguistic data employed have not been adequately analyzed, or—in some cases—even competently analyzed; the model of language change employed has not been shown to fit the known facts of language change; attempts to fix the dates of prehistoric languages have ignored the fatal shortcomings of glottochronology discovered by Bergsland and Vogt (1962; see further §4); the researchers assume that vocabulary replacement is governed by a LEXICAL CLOCK (similar to the controversial MOLECULAR CLOCK posited by some biological cladists); and/or the data set used is too small to yield statistically reliable conclusions.

It is a general assumption in linguistic theory that the categories of tense, aspect, and mood (TAM) are inflectional categories of verbal classes only. In a number of languages around the world, however, nominals and other NP constituents are also inflected for these categories. In this article we provide a comprehensive survey of tense/aspect/mood marking on NP constituents across the world's languages. Two distinct types are identified: propositional nominal tam, whereby the nominal carries TAM information relevant to the whole proposition, and independent nominal tam, in which the TAM information encoded on the nominal is relevant only to the NP on which it is marked—independent of the TAM of the clause as a whole. We illustrate these different types and their various properties using data from a wide range of languages showing that, while certainly unusual, the phenomenon of nominal tense/aspect/mood marking is far less marginal than is standardly assumed. Nominal TAM inflection must be accepted as a real possibility in universal grammatical structure, having significant implications for many aspects of linguistic theory.

Syncretism, where a single form corresponds to multiple morphosyntactic functions, is petvasive in languages with inflectional morphology. Its interpretation highlights the contrast between different views of the status of morphology. For some, morphology lacks independent structure, and syncretism reflects the internal structure of morphosyntactic features. For others, morphological structure is autonomous, and syncretism provides direct evidence of this. In this article, I discuss two phenomena that argue for the second view. Directional effects and unnatural classes of values resist attempts to reduce them to epiphenomena of more general rule types and require purely morphological devices for their expression.

Many factors affect the ease or difficulty of understanding a word in a sentence, including the lexical frequency of the word, the syntactic context, the discourse context, the intonation of the sentence, and the plausibility of the situation described by the sentence thus far (see Gibson & Pearlmutter 1998 and Tanenhaus & Trueswell 1995 for summaries of relevant factors and evidence). In order to investigate any one of these factors, it is therefore necessary to control for the others. One factor that has recently begun to be investigated in the psycholinguistics literature is the derivational complexity of different lexical structures. In order to investigate lexical derivational complexity, researchers have compared reading times and sentence-acceptability judgments for different kinds of noun-verb pairs. Unfortunately, these measures are necessarily contaminated by potential differences in plausibility between the real-world situations described by the particular sentences that are used to instantiate the structures. For example, consider McKoon and Macfarland's (2000; henceforth M&M) evidence that externally caused change-of-state verbs are more complex than internally caused change-of-state verbs (see Levin & Rappaport Hovav 1995 for a lexical-semantic distinction between the two types of verbs). M&M demonstrated that participants were slower in deciding that externally caused sentences like la were acceptable than they were in deciding that internally caused sentences like 1b were acceptable.

DeGraffs Discussion Note in Language 79.2.391-410 (‘Against Creole exceptionalism’, henceforth ACE) combines an accusation that the views of many, perhaps most of his creolist colleagues are vitiated by (perhaps unconscious) racial prejudice with the espousal of a theory of Creole genesis that has been around for a century or more without earning the support of more than a handful of creolists. ACE represents a striking volte-face from the moderate and open-minded approach of DeGraff 1999. In this work, DeGraff sought out the best points from a variety of approaches and attempted to synthesize them. In contrast, ACE mounts a single-minded crusade against what is probably a majority of creolists, including several of the invited contributors to DeGraff 1999, on the basis of seriously flawed evidence.