Our goal is to present, by means of the detailed analysis of a single grammatical problem, some of the principal commitments and mechanisms of a grammatical theory that assigns a central role to the notion of grammatical construction. To adopt a constructional approach is to undertake a commitment in principle to account for the entirety of each language. This means that the relatively general patterns of the language, such as the one licensing the ordering of a finite auxiliary verb before its subject in English, often known as SAI, and the highly idiomatic patterns, like kick the bucket, stand on an equal footing as data for which the grammar must account. An explicit grammar that covers the full range of constructions must represent all constructions, of whatever degree of generality or idiomaticity, in a common notation and must provide an explicit account of how each sentence of a language is licensed by a subset of the leaves of the inheritance hierarchy of constructions which constitutes the grammar of that language. Language-internal generalizations are captured by inheritance relations among constructions. Cross-language generalizations are captured by the architecture of the representation system and by the sharing of abstract constructions across languages. The particular grammatical phenomenon used here to introduce construction grammar (CG) is the construction that licenses the surprising syntactic and semantic features of a sentence like What are they doing resuscitating constructions?

This article examines the constraints on depictive predicates and their interpretation within the Aspectual Structure (AS) theory of the structural representation of aspect (Erteschik-Shir & Rapoport 1997). This model allows a simple expression of the relation between the depictive adjunct predicate and its host by means of a parallel-structures analysis. The depictive is contrasted with the resultative predicate and the similar but distinct modified result adjunct. AS structure type and aspectual focus account for the interpretations of the three types of secondary predicates. Their acceptability is shown to depend on interpretation rather than on grammaticality.

In many languages the definite article cannot occur when a possessive phrase is present in the NP (e.g. English the my book, John's the book). I argue that these patterns can be understood in terms of economic motivation because possessed NPs are very likely to be definite. A structural explanation in terms of a unique determiner position is insufficient to account for the full range of attested crosslinguistic patterns, and the universal generalizations that do seem to be valid can be derived from the economy-based explanation. Finally I show how the performance motivation of economy creates the competence pattern in diachronic change.

This article presents two questionnaire experiments that investigate the processing complexity of a variety of nested constructions in Japanese. The first experiment demonstrated that embedded structures containing a direct object NP in the most embedded clause were more complex than comparable nested structures that lacked an object NP in the most embedded clause. The second experiment demonstrated that a construction consisting of a relative clause embedded within a sentential complement is less complex than the reverse embedding, consisting of sentential complement embedded within a relative clause. These results are discussed in terms of the syntactic prediction locality theory (Gibson 1998).

Many Mayan languages use a special verb form, the agent focus form, when extracting the subject of a transitive clause. These verbs have a cluster of properties that have resisted satisfactory analysis. This article suggests that in Tzotzil, agent focus verbs are inverse, in the sense of Algonquian linguistics, and that their distribution is determined by the relative obviation status of agent and patient. Evidence for the analysis comes from syntactic constraints on agent focus verbs and on their use in discourse. The properties of these verbs provide further evidence that obviation can play a central role in languages where it is not a morphological category.

Vowels in stressed syllables in the West Germanic languages—e.g. Middle English, Middle Dutch and Middle High German—were lengthened under certain circumstances. There have been two different explanations for this change. The traditional assumption is that a process of open syllable lengthening (OSL) was introduced to standardize the quantity of stressed syllables (Prokosch 1939, among others). The second, quite different, approach assumes that the lengthening process (at least in Middle English) is not OSL but some sort of compensatory lengthening caused by the loss of a final schwa (Minkova 1982, 1985, Lass 1985, Hayes 1989, Kim 1993). We attempt to show that OSL was part of the grammar of all three languages, but that the motivation depended on the local contexts. We claim that all three languages endeavored to maintain and maximize the Germanic foot (Dresher & Lahiri 1991), and OSL contributed in different ways to do so.

The hypotheses that (1) with regard at least to scope, deep structure is identical to logical structure, e.g. a quantified expression is a sister of the S that is its scope, and (2) the rules relating deep structure to surface apply according to a strict principle of cyclicity, explain both why there are many systematic parallels between surface syntactic structure and logical structure (e.g. cases where surface c-command relations match logical scope relations) and why there are the derivations there are from these parallels (as where a tensed auxiliary verb in English can be in the scope of a following floated quantifier, contrary to an otherwise valid generalization).

The approach is put to work in accounting for distinctions (explored in Heycock 1995) between cases in which anaphora constraints seem to require 'reconstruction' of an underlying structure vs. those in which they do not. The resulting analysis, which exploits some hitherto overlooked details of the logical structures and an improved statement of the restrictions on anaphoric relations, has no need of reconstruction.

This article examines crosslinguistic variation in FILLER-GAP DEPENDENCIES (WH-questions and relative clauses) from a processing perspective, and integrates research findings from psycholinguistics, language typology and generative grammar. Numerous implicational universals and hierarchies are proposed that receive a natural explanation in terms of processing and complexity. Filler-gap domains are complex in proportion to their size and in proportion to the amount of simultaneous syntactic and semantic processing that is required in addition to gap identification. They are simplified by making the gap easier to identify and process, or by avoiding a gap structure altogether. When grammatical variation is viewed from this perspective many descriptive insights and implicational patterns can be motivated that have either been stipulated or that have gone unnoticed hitherto. This approach provides an alternative to the assumption of innate parameterized subjacency constraints in this area.

This article critically examines Aoun and Li's (1993) syntactic analysis of quantifier scope interpretations in English, Chinese, and Japanese, and it shows that (i) there are serious theoretical problems with Aoun and Li's account of scope interpretations for the double object and topicalization constructions; (ii) there are ambiguous sentences that Aoun and Li's analysis predicts to be unambiguous; and (iii) there are unambiguous sentences which their analysis predicts to be ambiguous. While problem (iii) makes their analysis insufficient, problems (i) and (ii) make it untenable. We propose a quantifier scope analysis that is free from any of the above three problems. We claim that the quantifier scope interpretations of a given sentence result from the interactions of various principles, some syntactic, others nonsyntactic. We propose an expert system that takes all these principles into consideration, and arrives at a composite opinion of the relative strengths of the potential scope interpretations of a given sentence. We speculate that wide idiolectal variations in quantifier scope interpretations are due to differences among speakers on the relative weights these principles receive in their respective expert systems.

We tested two hypotheses about how English-speaking children learn to avoid making argument structure errors such as Don't giggle me. The first is that children base their usage of verbs on membership in narrow-range semantic classes (Pinker 1989). The second is that children make use of indirect negative evidence in the form of alternative expressions that preempt tendencies to overgeneralize. Ninety-six children (32 each at 2.5, 4.5, and 6/7 years of age) were introduced to two nonce verbs, one as a transitive verb and one as an intransitive verb. One verb was from a semantic class that can be used both transitively and intransitively while the other was from a fixed transitivity class. Half of the children were given preempting alternatives with both verbs; for example, they heard a verb in a simple transitive construction (as in Ernie's meeking the car) and then they also heard it in a passive construction—which enabled them to answer the question 'What's happening with the car?' with It's getting meeked (rather than generalizing to the intransitive construction with It's meeking). We found empirical support for the constraining role of verb classes and of preemption, but only for children 4.5 years of age and older. Results are discussed in terms of a model of syntactic development in which children begin with lexically specific linguistic constructions and only gradually learn to differentiate verbs as lexical items from argument structure constructions as abstract linguistic entities.

Efforts to determine the genetic relations among Tungusic languages have been dominated by a methodology that categorizes the entire family on the basis of a small number of sound correspondences and some shared inflectional morphology, despite the fact that this evidence can be interpreted in contradictory ways. The approach, styled after traditional classification, which uses a tree model, is even less successful in indicating the relationships among languages at a finer level of detail. This article demonstrates that two Tungusic languages, Evenki and Oroqen, which have long been treated as a single language for classification purposes, are better treated as distinct linguistic varieties. The article raises fundamental questions about the current classification of Tungusic languages and suggests a renewed examination of the role of dialect continua and contact languages in understanding the composition of the family. Finally, we question whether a tree-based model is appropriate for classifying languages that have had a high degree of contact and are found in families or branches of a shallow time depth.

The comparison of the moribund dialects of Ocracoke Island, North Carolina, and Smith Island, Maryland, demonstrates that valuable insight into the patterning of variation and change in language death can be obtained by investigating moribund varieties of healthy languages. In addition, it is crucial to investigate not only cases of death by linguistic decay (dissipation), but also cases of death by population attrition in which linguistic distinctiveness is maintained or heightened among fewer speakers (concentration). The comparative investigation of both types of language death lends insight into the macrolevel socioeconomic and microlevel sociopsychological factors that lead to the maintenance or demise of moribund languages and language varieties, as well as the nature of change in language death. It is demonstrated that change in both concentrating and dissipating varieties is rapid but otherwise indistinct from change in healthy varieties and that unusual patterns of variation and change can be explained by appealing to the social significance of language features.

This article discusses the grammaticalization of Tok Pisin laik 'want/like/desire' (from English like) and klostu 'near' (from English close to) as markers of what Heine (1994b) has called the proximative with the meaning 'almost', 'nearly', 'be about to', etc. I will show that although klostu was more generally a feature of Pacific Pidgin English and began to grammaticalize in the mid-nineteenth century, it is now in competition with laik, which is a development specific to twentieth-century Tok Pisin, a pidgin/creole language spoken in Papua New Guinea. The fact that Tok Pisin has two constructions, of different origin and time depth, expressing the proximative yields valuable data contributing to a typology of a much neglected grammatical notion and sheds some light on the grammaticalization paths along which proximatives develop.

It is a truism that people speak 'loosely'—that is, that they often say things that we can recognize not to be true, but which come close enough to the truth for practical purposes. Certain expressions, such as those including exactly, all and perfectly, appear to serve as signals of the intended degree of approximation to the truth. This article presents a novel formalism for representing the notion of approximation to the truth, and analyzes the meanings of these expressions in terms of this formalism. Pragmatic looseness of this kind should be distinguished from authentic truth-conditional vagueness.

This article presents a new set of experimental data from brain-damaged aphasic patients as well as from normals on the processing of two nominal suffixes in Japanese, i.e. -sa and -mi. Their difference with respect to productivity, as confirmed by the experiment on normal adults, provides evidence for the existence of a productive rule-like process in derivational morphology and supports the validity of the dual-mechanism model by integrating derivational morphology in its scope. The experiment on aphasic patients revealed a dissociation, which demonstrates that the two suffixation processes involve two different neurological mechanisms, and provides crucial evidence for the claim that the difference in the productivity of these two suffixes is of a qualitative nature and not a matter of degree.

In a recent issue of Language (March 1998) Sarah Julianne Roberts attributed to me many claims that I never made and grossly misrepresented what I actually stated about the role of a worldwide nautical pidgin English in the formation of Hawaiian Creole English. Apart from a brief restatement (see below), everything that I wrote concerning that specific topic was contained in a single paragraph (Goodman 1985:111), which I reproduce here in its entirety (minus two nongermane footnotes):

Clark (1979), in a detailed comparative study of various forms of Pacific pidgin English utilizing much linguistic and historical documentation, has demonstrated obvious links between Hawaiian pidgin English and the others and even between these and New World creole English. Some are purely lexical (e.g., the ubiquitous savvy 'to know' and pickanniny 'child, small' as well as Hawaiian kaukau 'eat' from Chinese pidgin English chauchau, recorded as early as the late eighteenth century; Carr 1972:4), but others are structural (e.g., the use of been as a past or anterior marker, found in Hawaiian and Melanesian pidgin English and virtually all forms of Atlantic creole English). No doubt, these similarities are traceable to a worldwide nautical pidgin English, with which Hawaiians had considerable contact throughout most of the nineteenth century. Chinese pidgin English, itself evidently an outgrowth of the same nautical pidgin, had at least some direct impact on the emerging Hawaiian pidgin toward the end of the eighteenth century. Samples of the early Hawaiian pidgin are rare, but Clark (1979) has unearthed some interesting ones from Dana's (1840) Two Years Before the Mast, for example, "by-' em-by money paw-all gone; then kanaka work plenty .... We no all'e same'a' you! Suppose one got money, all got money. You-suppose one got money-lock him up in chest." It seems clear that it was out of this type of English, known as hapa haole or 'half white' (see below) that the plantation creole developed. According to W.C. Smith (1933:18): "The plantation foremen were often Hawaiians who spoke the Hawaiian-English pidgin." Thus, it is undeniable that there are historical links between Hawaiian creole English and forms of pidgins and creole English in other parts of the world, though to what extent these links explain structural similarities is a matter for further investigation.

This report describes the unique behavior of two clitic particles in a moribund Amazonian language. In Chamicuro na and ka are basically definite articles, yet they contrast for tense (ka indicates a past action while na is used in present and future contexts). The prosodic eneliticization of na and ka is completely predictable from general phonological constraints alone and thus does not depend on any syntactic factors. Consequently, the stranding of an article in a different clause from its head noun follows automatically from the posited constraint system without any need to stipulate additional formal devices.

In this article we consider the relationship between phonetic possibility and phonological permissibility of segment types. We ask (i) are any phonetically impossible segments phonologically permissible? and (ii) are any phonetically possible segments phonologically impermissible? Our main focus is on answering (ii). We analyze the implications of the only relevant case we can find, which is in Cohn's (1990, 1993a) examination of nasality spreading in Sundanese, and relates to the description of glottal nasals (produced with glottal place of articulation and lowered velum). Cohn tentatively proposes that nasalized [h] and [?] occur phonetically but not phonologically. We show that a persuasive theory of nasality spreading suggests otherwise, and it is supported by evidence from several languages. Our conclusion is that no sound argument exists for excluding any pronounceable segment from phonology on theoretical grounds. The relation between the phonetically possible and the phonologically possible accordingly becomes somewhat more straightforward.