The meaning of the Russian perfective-imperfective opposition is usually characterized in terms such as ‘the situation is seen in its totality vs. not in its totality, with a boundary vs. without a boundary’, and similar ones. These characterizations, while expressing important intuitions, fail on a number of grounds. Aspects are purely temporal relations between the time at which some situation obtains and the time for which an assertion is made by the utterance which describes this situation. This leads to simple and precise definitions of the two Russian aspects. The intuitive characterizations familiar from the literature follow in a natural way from these definitions.

Noun Incorporation in Chukchi is shown to exhibit many of the characteristics that would be expected on a syntactic analysis of incorporation (e.g. Baker 1988): it is productive, the incorporated element may be referential, subjects can only be incorporated from unaccusative verbs, and noun incorporation feeds a process of Dative Shift, just as predicted on Baker's syntactic account.

However, several properties are incompatible with this. In particular, Chukchi freely allows incorporation of adjuncts (which would violate the ECP on Baker's account). In addition, nouns incorporate their modifiers/specifiers, in a way not predicted by a syntactic (head movement) theory. Moreover, Chukchi permits incorporation of aspectual/ temporal elements, which contradicts even the much weaker version of Baker's thesis proposed by Rivero 1992 to handle adverb incorporation in Greek. The data are, however, broadly compatible with a lexical analysis along the lines of Rosen 1989.

This study argues that both Shanghai and Taiwanese have a metrical system, that compound stress is left-headed in Shanghai and right-headed in Taiwanese and that a tonal domain is a metrical domain. It predicts tonal domains better than previous studies and explains some asymmetries between Shanghai and Taiwanese. It also supports the view that metrical structure can be determined in languages that lack data on phonetic stress. In addition, it shows that compound stress is not universal, contrary to the proposal of Cinque 1993. Finally, this study has implications for the theory of prosodic structure.

The phenomena that classic transformational syntax handled by means of ‘raising’ rules pose an interesting challenge to theories that do not posit movement or derivation from underlying structures. An account of these phenomena is formulated in the context of cognitive grammar. Raising is analyzed as a special case of the metonymy that virtually all relational expressions exhibit in regard to their choice of overtly coded arguments. The transparency of these constructions—the fact that the main clause imposes no restrictions on the ‘raised’ NP—is explained with reference to the semantics of the governing predicates.

Most processual theories of morphology propose that inflectional operations apply to a pair involving a phonological form and a fully specified morphosyntactic feature array. This interpretation of inflectional operations denies the existence of any structure intervening between a stem and a word. Drawing on insights developed in information-based syntactic theories, this paper proposes an alternative processual theory. Articulated Morphology, which requires that inflectional operations apply to informationally impoverished representations and increase information. An analysis of Potawatomi verb morphology within this theory, contrasted with Anderson's 1992 analysis, shows that positing intervening structure has clear benefits.

Functional analyses of grammatical phenomena, and the functionalist approaches that promote them, are appealing to those who believe that an integrated view of language structure and language function is desirable. But functional analyses have been held to founder on basic grammatical facts that are taken to support the autonomy of grammar. The concept of autonomy is a complex one, and at least two different notions are found in current linguistic theory: arbitrariness and self-containedness. These notions of autonomy apply either to the syntactic component of the grammar, or (a more recent claim) to the grammar itself, with respect to change, use, and acquisition. The arbitrariness of syntax must be accepted; and many functional analyses are compatible with self- containedness. However, mixed formal/functional analyses provide an argument against the self-containedness of syntax, and in fact even many formal theories of syntax accept non-self-containedness. The arbitrariness of grammatical knowledge must also be accepted; and many functional analyses of the dynamic process affecting grammar are compatible with self-containedness. An argument against the self-containedness of grammar comes not from these functional analyses but from sociolinguistics.

Moribund dialects threatened by the encroachment of healthy varieties of the same language have been overlooked in establishing the language endangerment canon. Endangered varieties of languages as safe as even English exhibit structures not found in mainstream language varieties and so are an invaluable resource to scholars of language variation—and, indeed, of language patterning in general. Further, the insights into language variation and change that we gain from studying moribund dialects inform our study of the types of changes that characterize endangered and dying languages. Our arguments are based on the examination of Ocracoke English, a dialect of American English which is spoken on Ocracoke Island, located off the coast of North Carolina and inhabited by about 600 year-round residents. This dialect developed in relative isolation from mainstream varieties of American English but is now threatened by encroachment from mainland dialects as the island becomes more accessible to the outside world. Using the case of the Ocracoke production of the /ay/ diphthong as , we present linguistic and sociolinguistic evidence that Ocracoke English is indeed an endangered dialect. We also describe the development of a community-based preservation program that parallels the type of proactive programs that have been implemented thus far only for endangered language situations.

Locally free reflexives in British English are best analyzed as intensified nonnominative pronouns, subject to two conditions that regulate English intensive NPs generally: (a) a contrastiveness requirement and (b) a requirement that the character being referred to be more important or more central than other characters included in the contrast set. The latter ‘discourse prominence’ requirement is similar to the one that regulates proximate marking in the Algonquian languages. The extent to which discourse prominence marking can mimic locality marking may explain historical conversions of intensives to anaphors, as well as certain anomalies in child language. This frequent formal overlapping makes it necessary to take marking for discourse prominence into account whenever locality-marking is under investigation.

The construction as far as NP is a common topic restrictor in modern English, but its verbal coda (goes/is concerned) is often omitted. We examine potential constraints on this variation and find significant effects for syntactic, phonological, discourse mode, and social variables. The internal effects are also relevant to ‘Heavy NP Shift’ and other weight-related phenomena. Diachronic data on the as far as construction, and the evidence of synchronic age distributions and usage commentators, suggest that the verbless variant has become markedly more frequent in recent decades, allowing us a rare opportunity to study syntactic change in progress. In addition to documenting the nature of variation and change in this construction, our study has larger implications for the study of syntax and sociolinguistic variation, and demonstrates the value of integrating methods from different linguistic subfields (in this case, sociolinguistics and variation theory, historical linguistics, corpus linguistics, and syntax).

The English progressive passive (e.g. is being carried) is first attested in the second half of the eighteenth century. The paper offers a new interpretation of this development as integrated into a series of changes which affected be (and have) at this period. It arose not as a combination of progressive and passive constructions but (with the other changes) was a consequence of the reduction of inflection in auxiliaries which followed the loss of thou in informal speech. This is interpreted as a parametric change, for which there is an overt triggering difference in the primary linguistic data, and the account is formalized within HPSG.

Numerous attempts have been made to place restrictions on the occurrence of formally definite NPs in English existential there-sentences. The wide range of definite NPs found in this construction, however, precludes any (noncircular) characterization of such a definiteness effect based on linguistic form alone. Nonetheless, previous functional analyses of definites in there-sentences have also failed to account for all of the problematic data in a unified way. We present an account of existential there-sentences in which the postverbal NP is required to represent a hearer-new entity; based on a large corpus of naturally occurring data, we identify five types of formally definite yet hearer-new NPs that may felicitously occur in there-sentences. The alleged restriction against definite NPs in there-sentences is shown to be the result of a mismatch between the cognitive status to which definiteness is sensitive and that to which the postverbal position in there-sentences is sensitive.

This paper presents an analysis of the constraints on pronominal anaphora in English within the framework of Cognitive Grammar in terms of semantic distinctions between pronouns and full noun phrases. Semantic notions of prominence and conceptual interconnection are used to develop a model of conceptual reference points which defines the contexts within which coreference is acceptable or unacceptable. The analysis provides a conceptual-semantic account of the ‘core’ anaphora facts which have previously been explained in terms of structural notions such as c-command, as well as certain data which have long been problematic for structural accounts.

This paper examines the acquisition of tense-aspect morphology in three children acquiring English. It was found that (1) children start using past inflections predominantly with achievement verbs, and progressive inflections with activity verbs; and (2) the same distributional bias is found in the speech by caretakers addressed to children. The result shows that despite claims to the contrary, early development of tense-aspect morphology is strongly influenced by the inherent aspect of the verbs, and suggests that the pattern of the development should be attributed to input and to prototype formation by children.

We support the theory of level ordering by demonstrating, on the basis of productive morphology and phonology, that Turkish has four lexical levels. The evidence, however, motivates modifications in the way level ordering is implemented. The first is the principle of Level Economy, according to which a form is subject to the phonology only of those levels at which it is morphologically derived. The second is level prespecification, which exempts a root entirely from early lexical levels. Level Economy accounts for systematic exceptionality, while level prespecification accounts for idiosyncratic exceptionality, to the entire phonology of given levels. These mechanisms yield analyses of facts in Turkish that prove intractable in other theories. Both rely on a structural, rather than a temporal, approach to level ordering.