While a consensus has been reached about the monoclausality of the Romance construction with an auxiliary verb and its verbal complement, questions remain about its syntactic structure. We focus here on French auxiliaries—the past tense auxiliaries (avoir and être), and the passive auxiliary (être)—which are unique in French in contributing only tense and aspect and triggering obligatory clitic climbing. Three syntactic structures have been proposed for such auxiliaries: a VP complement analysis, a verbal complex analysis, and a 'flat' VP analysis. We show here, working within a head-driven phrase structure grammar framework and basing our arguments on classical constituency tests, bounded dependencies, and lesser-known properties of a subset of manner adverbs, that the flat-structure analysis is to be preferred for tense auxiliaries, which take as their complements the bare participle as well as the complements subcategorized by this participle and 'inherited' from it. In contrast, the passive auxiliary, which we identify with the copula, has a predicative complement with different realizations: either an ordinary phrase, 'saturated' for its complements, or a 'partial' complement, where the predicative head lets some or all of its complements be inherited by the auxiliary. Our analysis allows for a solution to the well-known problem of auxiliary selection, which, we argue, should not be taken as an indicator of syntactic structure but is best handled via lexical constraints.

Strict head-final surface order derives from underlying left-headedness in , a Niger-Congo language of Nigeria. A word order anomaly in serial verb constructions (SVCs) strongly suggests this, and left-to-right asymmetric c-command among internal arguments of SVCs confirms it. The anomaly is universal among surface right-headed languages with SVCs, indicating that deep left-headedness is universal, as antisymmetry theory predicts (Kayne 1994). Assuming complements are in Specs, and that a light verb v selects every VP (Chomsky 1999), I derive VOVO from OVOV by two instances of V-to-v movement. I argue for a nonuniform approach to SVCs, involving relations of both raising (Campbell 1989) and control (Collins 1997). Other aspects of SVC word order are predictable from a universal thematic hierarchy nontheme > theme, and short scrambling (Takano 1998).

It is becoming increasingly common for linguists to testify as expert witnesses in both civil and criminal trials. Often linguistic expertise is clearly helpful to the judge or jury. Based on published judicial opinions, from which we draw our data, it appears that courts have allowed linguists to testify on such issues as the probable origin of a speaker, the comprehensibility of a text, whether a particular defendant understood the Miranda warning, and the phonetic similarity of two competing trademarks. In other areas the admissibility of linguistic testimony has been more controversial, including author and speaker identification, discourse analysis, the meaning of legal texts, and the comprehensibility of jury instructions. Reasons for judicial reluctance to admit linguistic expertise include concerns that it is not sufficiently reliable, the belief that issues like the meaning of a text can just as well be decided by a jury, and sometimes even institutional and political considerations. Despite such reservations, courts generally recognize that there is a place for linguistic expertise in appropriate cases.

This article exemplifies language-internal explanation. It seeks to document and to explain the inability of Russian impersonal clauses to be infinitival. We argue that this gap is the consequence of two independent facts of Russian grammar: a case restriction on a silent expletive pronoun and the requirement that subjects of infinitival clauses be dative. These clash in infinitival contexts, which explains the gap. The explanation is language-internal in that it relies on no putatively universal principles. At the same time, each type of device posited is needed independently in the grammars of other languages. Our result bears on the issue of what language-particular properties expletives may have, on the issue of whether silent expletives exist, and on the more general theoretical issue of whether clauses are required to have subjects universally.

There are two types of truncation that yield shortening of a morphological constituent, fake truncation (templatic) and true truncation (a-templatic, subtractive). This article provides an analysis of true truncation in colloquial Hebrew imperatives. It is shown that true truncation cannot target a designated phonological unit, since in some forms CV is truncated and in others only V. In addition, there are cases where truncation is blocked. The framework of optimality theory adopted here allows a unified account of the data in terms of constraint interaction. It is argued that an antifaithfulness truncation constraint, which must be morphological, interacts with both faithfulness and markedness constraints. Truncation is minimized to one segment by a general antideletion faithfulness constraint, but markedness constraints may impose truncation of more than one segment. There are cases where truncation is blocked, which suggests that the truncation constraint is violable. The discussion includes regular and irregular verbs and instances of free variation.

This article investigates an external variable critical to the understanding of sociolinguistic variation in a rural, tri-ethnic community in the Southern United States. Cultural identity, the orientation of the speaker to the community, was first observed in variationist work by Labov (1963) but has not been regularly analyzed as have sex, age, and ethnicity. Cultural identity is postulated as a speaker's orientation to the local and larger regional cultures, and in Warren County, North Carolina, this orientation correlates strongly with vernacular variants of present and past tense be. For copula absence (e.g. They ∅ real nice people), was regularization (e.g. We was going), and past tense wont (e.g. We wont gonna go), the cultural identity of the speaker had statistically significant effects on language variation. To understand language variation in this community, the interactions of cultural identity and other external variables must be considered.

The author proposes that syllable weight is driven by considerations of phonetic effectiveness and phonological simplicity, and that the phonetically best distinctions are those which divide syllables into groups that are phonetically most distinct from each other. Phonologically complex distinctions are those which exceed an upper threshold in the number of phonological predicates to which they refer. It is claimed that languages adopt weight distinctions that are phonetically most effective without being overly complex phonologically. Syllable weight thus reflects a compromise between phonetic and phonological factors. The proposed model of weight further suggests that phonological weight distinctions are ultimately predictable from other basic phonological properties, such as syllable structure.

A colloquial English sentence like Fooled us, didn't they? contains a finite main verb but no expressed subject. The identity of the missing subject of fooled is recovered from the tag subject they: compare Fooled us, didn't she?, Fooled us, didn't you? This article argues (1) that such subjectless tagged sentences (STSs) pose a problem for grammatical approaches based on movement and empty categories and (2) that STSs receive a revealing analysis as part of a finely articulated family of tagged sentence constructions when viewed within a nonderivational, constructional, multiple-inheritance-based approach.

Are linguistic signs really as arbitrary as they are assumed to be, and how exceptional are semantically motivated lexical patterns? These old questions are re-addressed with the help of new quantificational data on two genetically unrelated languages, Kambera (Austronesian) and Dutch (Indo-European). The hypothesis is that semantically complex items such as expressives favor a structurally complex form, and vice versa. An examination of seven distinct types of lexical items found statistically robust semantically motivated lexical patterns. Linguistic signs appear to be less arbitrary than is commonly assumed.

This article argues for a particular understanding of feature class behavior—the recurrent patterning together of certain phonological features, such as place of articulation and laryngeal features. The proposals build on the well-known work of feature geometry in assuming the importance of feature classes in phonology, but differ in that features of a class are targeted directly and individually by constraints (or rules), even when a feature class such as Place is mentioned. Further, constraints mentioning feature classes are gradiently violable. Evidence for this view of feature classes comes from two sources. First, assimilation involving feature classes is sometimes only partially successful; an adequate understanding of such cases requires the proposed view of feature classes. Second, there are broad categories of feature class generalization that require it, including dissimilatory effects usually handled by the obligatory contour principle. Overall, the proposals broaden the explanatory potential of the feature class idea due to feature geometry. At a more general level, the results here suggest that linguistic representations sometimes need to be reconsidered in the context of optimality theory (Prince & Smolensky 1993), since they can effectively function as inviolable constraints and so hinder our understanding of the more subtle kind of phenomena revealed by analyses employing gradiently violable constraints.

The representation of regular morphological processes has been the subject of much controversy, particularly in the debate between single and dual route models of morphology. I present a model of morphological learning that posits rules and seeks to infer their productivity by comparing their reliability in different phonological environments. The result of this procedure is a grammar in which general rules exist alongside more specific, but more reliable, generalizations describing subregularities for the same process. I present results from a nonce-probe (wug) experiment in Italian, in which speakers rated the acceptability of novel infinitives in various conjugation classes. These results indicate that such subregularities are in fact internalized by speakers, even for a regular morphological process.

The set of person and number features necessary to characterize the pronominal paradigms of the world's languages is highly constrained, and their interaction is demonstrably systematic. We develop a geometric representation of morphosyntactic features which provides a principled explanation for the observed restrictions on these paradigms. The organization of this geometry represents the grammaticalization of fundamental cognitive categories, such as reference, plurality, and taxonomy. We motivate the geometry through the analysis of pronoun paradigms in a broad range of genetically distinct languages.

This article reconsiders the development and licensing of agreement as a syntactic projection and argues for a productive developmental relation between agreement and the category of focus. The authors suggest that focus projections are initially selected by a variety of functional heads with real semantic content. Over time however such selected focus frequently decays into a simple concord shell, and when this occurs, the lower half of the shell becomes a simple agreement projection parasitically licensed by the higher functional head, which does have a genuine semantic value.

This article is devoted to the anatomy of an unnatural syntactic change. It presents the life history of the Welsh predicative particle yn—its diachronic genesis in Indo-European, its synchronic status, and (much more centrally) what happened along the way, and why what happened happened specifically in Welsh. Synchronically, I give syntactic, semantic, typological, and textual arguments—some rather new—that both predicative yn and verb-periphrastic yn are adverbializers and count as grammatically polysemous subsenses of the preposition 'in'. Diachronically, I argue that the pan-Celtic adverbializing particles yn/ent/int/ind (thence ultimately Welsh predicative yn) all derive from an article-like demonstrative sindo-/sinto- (and not from a preposition endo/ento). Radical categorial changes must therefore have occurred. I trace these changes and motivate a multistage metanalysis (not involving grammaticalization) whereby the original quasi-article first became an adverbializer and then was attracted into the orbit of the preposition 'in'. Though each microstage in the process makes good structural sense vis-à-vis the evolving système of the language, the achieved macrochange is highly unnatural.

Mayali has four genders and five morphological classes, with formal identity between the gender prefixes and four of the morphological class prefixes. Gender and morphological class are assigned according to different but largely overlapping semantic principles. We analyze these partially overlapping systems within the network morphology framework; an implemented model demonstrates that the analysis gives the correct forms for the majority of nouns in a basic lexicon, and further extends to understanding assignment in the avoidance register. Our account depends on recognizing two different types of default: normal case default, the expected outcome in a given domain, and exceptional case default, the last resort short of full lexical specification.

This article presents corpus and experimental evidence in support of a parsability-based account of affix ordering in English: an affix that tends to be easily parsed out during speech perception should not occur inside an affix that does not. This generalization holds both at the affix level and the word level. At the affix level, this maxim, when combined with an understanding of the role of frequency and phonotactics in morphological processing, can account for the patterns generally attributed to level ordering. At the word level, it can explain the so-called dual-level behavior of some affixes—an affix may resist attaching to a complex word that is highly decomposable but be acceptable when it attaches to a comparable complex word that favors the direct access route in speech perception. Only a parsing account can afford this set of phenomena a unified explanation.