In certain Eastern Algonquian languages a nasal vowel developed from the long low vowel /a:/, regardless of consonantal context. A series of experiments showed that longer vowels (regardless of height) were perceived as more nasalized than shorter ones, but only when some nasalization was actually present. Further experiments showed no evidence of an increase in nasalization for long vowels in oral contexts. If some nasalization was nonetheless introduced (either randomly or by a general increase in nasalization) into these languages, the vowels most likely to be perceived as nasalized were the long ones. This perceptual process may have been responsible for this unusual historical development.

When children describe an event, they do not always make use of the conventional means for marking oblique arguments. In early attempts at passive constructions, for example, children often mark oblique agents with from instead of conventional by, as in He isn't going to get hurt from those bad guys. They also make use of from instead of because, as in From I put it under there. Such uses of from typically appear prior to by and because for agency and cause. We argue that these uses of from stem from children's conceptualization of agents and causes as types of source. If so, children should extend a similar analysis to other types of source as well. There is evidence that they do, both in longitudinal records of single children and in experiments on imitations and repairs.

The dative alternation poses a learnability paradox: when children hear give money to him and give him money, they could formulate a rule deriving the double object from the prepositional form, but the rule would allow overgeneralization from donate money to him to donate him money. Children are not corrected for speaking ungrammatically, so how do they avoid overgeneralizing? The ‘conservatism’ hypothesis proposes that children do not generalize at all; the ‘criteria’ hypothesis holds that children learn to constrain their rule to apply to monosyllabic verbs denoting possession changes. In a questionnaire study, adults rated double-object forms with novel verbs as sounding better if they met these criteria. In an analysis of speech transcripts, children were found to produce ungrammatical double-object sentences (though not very frequently). In two experiments children were taught novel motion verbs; they extended them to double-object structures, and did so more often for monosyllabic than for polysyllabic verbs and more often to denote a possession transfer than motion to a location. However, children also had a bias to use each verb in the construction they heard it in. Thus children are not invariably conservative but show conservative tendencies, and their generalizations are influenced by morphophonological and semantic criteria. We propose that speakers acquire a dative rule that operates on two levels: a broad-range rule defines the possibility of a verb meaning ‘cause to move’ to be changed into one meaning ‘cause to have’, and narrow-range rules license such extensions to be made for subclasses of semantically and morphologically similar verbs.

This paper offers a detailed survey of occurrences of English reflexive pronouns which are marked with respect to the binding theory of Chomskyan generative grammar. Through a large corpus of attested examples found in contemporary nonlinguistic prose, English reflexive pronouns are shown to violate Chomsky's Binding Principle A in a productive way. The proposed grammar of these violations draws a clear-cut line between syntax and discourse, and shows Chomsky's Binding Principle A to be (a) essentially correct for English if it is clearly defined as a theory of sentence-internal, discourse-independent anaphora; but also (b) crucially incomplete, since it ignores a whole component of the grammar of reflexives and thus fails to account for an open set of data.

This paper outlines three general tendencies in semantic change, and focuses on the third: meanings tend to become increasingly situated in the speaker's subjective belief state or attitude toward the proposition. Examples are drawn from the development of epistemic, including evidential, meanings in English in three domains: modal auxiliaries (e.g. must), assertive speech act verbs (e.g. insist that), and modal adverbs (e.g. apparently). It is shown that epistemics develop from less to more strongly subjective epistemicity. The process of change involved in the development of epistemics is hypothesized to be strengthening of pragmatic inferences to relevance, not, as has sometimes been suggested, generalization, bleaching, or metaphor.

This paper argues that theories of phonological underspecification requiring the underlying absence of all predictable values of features are doubly problematic: too radical for certain cases, not radical enough for others. Relevant evidence in favor of a Restricted Theory of Underspecification is found in the palatalization prosody operative in the mimetic (sound-symbolic) vocabulary of Japanese. It is shown that mimetic palatalization is the surface manifestation of an independent autosegmental micromorpheme mapped from right to left onto the mimetic root. We argue furthermore that cases calling for radically underspecified representations are more adequately accounted for by a Theory of Privative Features, which alone correctly predicts the desired underspecification not only underlyingly but also throughout the phonological derivation.

In this paper I argue that there is no unique grammatical process called ‘stylistic locative inversion’ in English; its properties can be stated in purely syntactic terms if insights about similar constructions in Italian and Dutch are adapted to English. Stylistic locative inversion exemplifies what is sometimes referred to as ‘semi-pro-drop’, the existence in a language of an empty expletive subject. The language-particular trigger for this exceptional phenomenon in English is located in comp, explaining in part the root nature of the phenomenon. The proposed analysis sheds new light on a syntactic account of the related presentational there-construction, which is discussed briefly at the end of the paper.

The present study uses a multidimensional approach to trace the historical evolution of written genres of English. We briefly present a model of stylistic variation developed in our previous work, focusing on three empirically defined dimensions of linguistic variation that are associated with differences among ‘literate’ and ‘oral’ varieties: ‘Informational versus Involved Production’; ‘Elaborated versus Situation-Dependent Reference’; and ‘Abstract versus Nonabstract Style’. We then show how fiction, essays, and letters have evolved over the last four centuries with respect to these dimensions. Although they have evolved at different rates and to different extents, we show that all three genres have undergone a general pattern of ‘drift’ towards more oral styles—more involved, less elaborated, and less abstract. We discuss several possible functional and attitudinal influences on the observed patterns of drift; these include the rise of popular literacy and mass schooling, the demands of scientific and expository purposes, and conscious aesthetic preferences. In so doing, we extend Sapir's notion of drift to include the evolution of genres and the influence of nonstructural underlying motivations.

Certain structures containing comitatives appear to be counterexamples to the claim that only superficial constituents control agreement. Earlier treatments have given up the requirement that such controllers be superficial constituents in order to preserve the generalization that controllers are always constituents. In these analyses, the superficial nonconstituent controller corresponds to a deep constituent. In Tzotzil there is a better analysis for structures of this type, crucially involving the Plural Pronoun Construction, which requires neither nonconstituent nor nonfinal controllers. If this analysis can be maintained in other languages, it will make possible a more restrictive theory of agreement controllers.

In recent work Noun Incorporation has been argued to result from head movement, in which the head of an object noun phrase moves into the verb, creating a complex verb. This paper argues instead that NI derives from word formation rules applying in the lexicon, presyntactically. On the basis of clusters of grammatical properties associated with NI, it is apparent that there are two separate word formation processes that languages may choose. In one, when a noun root combines with a verb root, the argument structure of the verb is altered such that the complex verb takes one less argument. In the other form of NI, when a noun root combines with a verb root, the argument structure of the complex verb is unaltered. It is shown that the predicted grammatical properties associated with the change or lack of change in argument structure follow.

As in a number of other languages, certain psychological verbs in French display an interesting relation between thematic roles and surface grammatical relations: the theme appears as a superficial subject, while the experiencer acts as an indirect object. This paper argues that in French the superficial subject (theme) is a direct object at a deeper level, while the superficial indirect object (dative experiencer) is a subject at a deeper level. This contrasts with the analysis of Italian by Belletti & Rizzi 1988, which emphasizes that the dative experiencer is strictly an indirect object. In this paper, it is demonstrated that French dative experiencer verbs can be straightforwardly analyzed within Relational Grammar as Inversion predicates occurring in multilevel structures whose initial subject demotes to indirect object. These results provide a challenge to GB analyses of psychological verbs; Belletti & Rizzi's analysis, for example, does not extend from Italian to French.

Borer & Wexler 1987 explain the apparent late acquisition of verbal passive in English and Hebrew by hypothesizing that the principle governing A-chain formation matures relatively late in language development. However, in Sesotho, a Bantu language, verbal passives are acquired early, by at least 2;8 years. This suggests either that English- and Hebrew-speaking children actually acquire the ability to form verbal passives early in language development, and that other nonmaturational factors influence its late appearance, or that the acquisition of the verbal passive is not determined by maturation, contrary to the claims of Borer & Wexler.

This paper offers an account of the distributional possibilities of Hungarian preverbal particles in the autolexical framework proposed in Sadock 1985. We show how a complex range of facts can be predicted from the interaction of a few independently motivated assumptions once autonomous modules of the grammar are allowed to assign partially noncongruent representations to the same linguistic entity. In the course of the discussion the Incorporative Principle of Sadock 1985 is extended and turned into a general constraint on allowable discrepancies between representations contributed by various components of the grammar.

On one view of syntactic structure, the expression of the grammatical relation subject is associated with an NP position. On another, this grammatical relation is expressed by a bound pronominal form. Discussion of the choice of one or the other of these has focused exclusively on the reflex of what is traditionally termed ‘subject/verb agreement’ and an ‘agreeing’ NP. This paper offers a theory, exemplified through an analysis of Luiseño, which accommodates a range of ‘subject agreement’ forms. The analysis is based on the idea that subject information can flow from a number of distinct sources. Languages might differ in regard to how many of these sources are used. One consequence of this idea is to deny a simple bifurcation into subject-pro-drop / non-subject-pro-drop or pronominal-subject / nominal-subject languages. The Luiseño analysis, therefore, forces a reconsideration of the roles of subject/verb agreement and the agreeing NP in grammatical composition.

Among the distinctive features for consonants, we distinguish a set of primary features that are perceptually the most salient. The strength with which a primary feature is manifested in a given sound is influenced by the secondary features that co-occur with it. The features [sonorant], [continuant] and [coronal] are designated as primary, and this designation applies in all of the eight possible configurations in which they occur. The features [anterior] and [lateral] are also designated as primary, but only under restricted conditions. We examine systematically which combinations of secondary features provide maximal enhancement of the acoustic manifestations of the primary features. This analysis leads to an inventory of eleven preferred feature combinations or segments. There is a close fit between this preferred inventory and a list of the most frequently occurring segments in the languages of the world, based on Maddieson 1984. This match constitutes support for the view that the frequently occurring feature combinations in the languages of the world come about because those combinations maximize perceptual distinctiveness through the mechanism of feature enhancement. It is suggested that these concepts of enhancement and of preferred feature combinations are directly relevant to the notion of markedness.

The Comparative Method in historical linguistics may in favorable circumstances be extended to comparative historical poetics and comparative historical ethnosemantics—the ‘new comparative philology’. The vocabulary of some cases is examined in the texts: ‘custom’ from ‘own (∗swe/o-) established usage’ and its pragmatic linkage to reciprocal interpersonal relations in Indo-European society. Examination of new facts in this light motivates the inclusion of Hittite in the same Indo-European ideology. Linguistic comparison may extend to higher units than sounds and forms; several are proposed which permit the reconstruction of formulaic phrases, whole complex sentences, and even proto-texts or text fragments. The new parameters of poetics and ethnosemantics permit a precision in historical linguistics hitherto impossible.

Complementary distribution between SVO and clitic-VSO word orders in Yagua receives a natural explanation from independent principles of Case and X'-theories of the Principles-and-Parameters theory of grammar. Word-order variation in Yagua results from the fact that both clitics and arguments compete for a single Case. This conflict is resolved by moving the head of the phrase to the phrase-internal AGR[eement] position and allowing the clitic to acquire morphological visibility via incorporation into the head. Independent justification for this analysis is adduced from reflexives: all and only those arguments whose heads raise to AGR (subject, genitive, and oblique, but not direct objects) may serve as antecedents for reflexive clitics. This is explained if we require that the indices of the head, AGR, and the argument be connected. This analysis sheds new light on phrase structure, Case theory, and clitics in Universal Grammar.