In recent years, considerable attention has been devoted to the mismatches that often exist between a word's morphological structure and its semantics. Here, I argue that the full range of mismatches can only be resolved within the framework of a paradigm-based theory of morphology in which morphological rules are formulated as operations on morphological expressions and in which the formal relations between the root of a paradigm and the words in that paradigm are defined by a set of paradigm functions. I demonstrate that this kind of framework affords a straightforward resolution of certain morphosemantic mismatches from Breton which nevertheless present insuperable difficulties for structure-based approaches to ‘bracketing paradoxes’ such as that proposed in Pesetsky 1985. The paradigm-based approach is shown to apply with equal success in the domains of inflection and derivation. Moreover, paradigm functions are shown to be more adequate for the resolution of certain kinds of mismatches than either the head operations of Hoeksema 1985 or the process of analogical back-formation proposed by Spencer 1988.

It is commonly assumed that words are grammatically prohibited from containing antecedents for anaphoric elements, and thus constitute ‘anaphoric islands’ (Postal 1969). In this paper, we argue that such anaphora—termed OUTBOUND ANAPHORA—is in fact fully grammatical and governed by independently motivated pragmatic principles. The felicity of outbound anaphora is shown to be a function of the accessibility of the discourse entity which is evoked by the word-internal element and to which the anaphor is used to refer. The morphosyntactic status of the antecedent is but one factor affecting the accessibility of that entity. A series of psycholinguistic experiments support the analysis.

This article addresses the debate about whether adult language learners have access to the principles and parameters of universal grammar in constructing the grammar of a foreign or second language (L2). I investigate the interpretation of English reflexive pronouns by native speakers of Japanese and of Spanish, and the interpretation of the Japanese reflexive zibun by native speakers of English and of Chinese. The data suggest that L2 learners observe constraints defined by universal grammar, constraints which they could not have derived solely from inspection of the input data, nor from the treatment of anaphors in their native language. Thus these results support the proposal that adult learners have access to universal grammar.

This paper explains the Greenbergian universals of modifier and adposition ordering as accidental side-effects of diachronic derivation, arguing that disparate diachronic processes can conspire to give the effect of synchronic universals. The ordering of modifiers, for example, may result from their generation by means of a binding anaphor strategy. This strategy produces similar patterning for genitive-noun and relative-noun constructions; and these, in turn, are potential diachronic sources for adjectivals. Constrained by the normative ordering of the language, this strategy will result only in preposed modifiers in verb-final languages and only in postposed modifiers in verb-initial languages. In SVO languages, it results in either preposed or postposed modifiers.

Semantic change is carried forward by specific individuals who think in particular ways. although it can be constrained by physiology and guided by social values. The measurement of color categories provides a close look at the various propelling incentives in a domain that is probably universal. Newly refined descriptive methods enhance such observations, because they permit verification of cognitive differences on the basis of correspondence between independently elicited orders of quantifiable data. Measurable change progresses through diverse trajectories in closely related Mayan languages whose social milieux are radically distinct. In Tzeltal, variation can be explained in terms of individual cognitive shifts within universal physiological parameters. But in Tzotzil a socially enforced conservatism creates tension between the preservation of traditional categories and the addition of new ones. The tension produces a taxonomy that is deeper than any others encountered by the major world color surveys. While a model of individual cognition explains how color categories change at the basic level, a social model accounts for differences between communities.

In Oceanic languages, elements that function or used to function as directional verbs of motion—‘go’, ‘come’, and ‘return‘—undergo a variety of grammaticalization processes. This study is an investigation of the semantic aspects of those developments, the factors that motivate the functional extensions, and the relations among the meanings/functions of the etyma. It is human conceptualization of phenomena (viz. metaphor and metonymy) that directly motivates the developments. Even though the various meanings/functions of an etymon are all historically related, synchronically there need not be any property exclusively shared by all of them. The nature of the motivations for the functional extensions provides support for the view of meaning as essentially subjective and open-ended.

This paper is concerned with the representation of stress that poetic meter refers to. Hayes 1983 argues that meter is sensitive to the metrical grid of Liberman & Prince 1977; here it is argued that meter is sensitive to the arboreal grid of Hammond 1988. This argument is made on the basis of two constraints that hold for the meter of James Thomson. These constraints are unstatable in terms of the metrical grid or metrical tree.

One problem in linguistic theory concerns the way in which the properties characterizing parenthetical or disjunct constituents are formally recorded in linguistic descriptions. The goals of this paper are to describe the interaction between disjunct constituents and sentential structures and to argue for an extension of the theoretical apparatus initially postulated in autosegmental phonology in order to represent complex syntactic structures containing disjunct constituents with a number of independent phrase markers that intersect at the linear axis.

A computer is used to count the number of new vocabulary words introduced into a text over a moving interval thirty-five words long. The number of new words in each successive interval is plotted at the midpoint of the interval, generating a curve called the Vocabulary-Management Profile (VMP). Analysis of VMPs for passages from James Joyce and George Orwell illustrates that clearcut peaks and valleys on VMPs correlate closely with constituent boundaries and information flow in discourse. VMPs for these authors show surprisingly regular alternations between peaks and valleys (that is. between new and repeated vocabulary), reflecting two competing principles that necessarily underlie all normal discourse: innovation and coherence.

A kind of case marking—termed variously active, active-neutral, active-inactive, active-static, stative-active, agentive, agent-patient, split S. and split intransitive—is shown to be less arbitrary than is sometimes assumed. Its semantic bases can be missed if sought only in immediate one-to-one correspondences between meaning and form. Case systems of this kind are often the products of successive diachronic developments, each individually motivated. Several factors can obscure the motivations, including not only crosslinguistic differences in detail, but also shifts of defining features over time, grammaticization, and lexicalization. To explain why these case systems have the shapes they do, we must appreciate both the diversity of features that can underlie them and the dynamic processes that mold them.

Rules for assigning phrasal intonation to sentences are often assumed to require an autonomous level of intonational structure', distinct from what is usually thought of as surface syntactic structure. The present paper argues that the requisite notion of structure can be subsumed under the generalized notion of surface structure that emerges from the combinatory extension of Categorial Grammar. According to this theory, the syntactic structures and the intonational structures of English are one, and can be captured in a single unified grammar. The interpretations that the grammar provides for such constituents correspond to the entities and open propositions that are concerned in certain discourse-related aspects of intonational meaning that have variously been described as ‘theme’ and ‘rheme’ ‘given’ and ‘new’, and ‘presupposition’ and ‘focus’.

This paper presents an integrated theory of the syntax and semantics of complement control that treats unexpressed subjects in verbal and nominal constructions uniformly, in terms of semantic control constraints that are shown to apply across discourse as well. Our account includes an explanation of the long-standing problem of be allowed to … exceptions to Visser's Generalization (that subject-control verbs do not passivize). Moreover, semantic control constraints are shown to interact with a principle governing the binding of overt and covert anaphors in such a way as to deduce the correct predictions of both Visser's Generalization and Manzini's Generalization (that VP complements are controlled by an argument of the governing verb).

Differences among languages offer a way of studying the process of infant adaptation from broad initial capacities to language-specific phonetic production. We designed analyses of the distribution of consonantal place and manner categories in French, English, Japanese, and Swedish to determine (1) whether systematic differences can be found in the babbling and first words of infants from different language backgrounds, and, if so, (2) whether these differences are related to the phonetic structure of the language spoken in the environment. Five infants from each linguistic environment were recorded under similar conditions from babbling only to the production of 25 words in a session. Although all of the infants generally made greater use of labials, dentals, and stops than of other classes of sounds, a clear phonetic selection could already be discerned in babbling, leading to statistically significant differences among the groups. This selection can be seen to arise from phonetic patterns of the ambient language. Comparison of the babbling and infant word repertoires reveals differences reflecting the motoric consequences of sequencing constraints.

As a novel attack on the perennially vexing questions of the theoretical status of thematic roles and the inventory of possible roles, this paper defends a strategy of basing accounts of roles on more unified domains of linguistic data than have been used in the past to motivate roles, addressing in particular the problem of ARGUMENT SELECTION (principles determining which roles are associated with which grammatical relations). It is concluded that the best theory for describing this domain is not a traditional system of discrete roles (Agent, Patient, Source, etc.) but a theory in which the only roles are two cluster-concepts called PROTO-AGENT and PROTO-PATIENT, each characterized by a set of verbal entailments: an argument of a verb may bear either of the two proto-roles (or both) to varying degrees, according to the number of entailments of each kind the verb gives it. Both fine-grained and coarse-grained classes of verbal arguments (corresponding to traditional thematic roles and other classes as well) follow automatically, as do desired ‘role hierarchies’. By examining occurrences of the ‘same’ verb with different argument configurations—e.g. two forms of psych predicates and object-oblique alternations as in the familiar spray/load class—it can also be argued that proto-roles act as defaults in the learning of lexical meanings. Are proto-role categories manifested elsewhere in language or as cognitive categories? If so, they might be a means of making grammar acquisition easier for the child, they might explain certain other typological and acquisitional observations, and they may lead to an account of contrasts between unaccusative and unergative intransitive verbs that does not rely on deriving unaccusatives from underlying direct objects.