This article introduces a new way to explain how information structure is signaled prosodically in English. I claim that METRICAL STRUCTURE plays a central role (Ladd 2008, Truckenbrodt 1995). Information structure (defined as in Steedman 1991 and Vallduví & Vilkuna 1998) places strong constraints on the PROBABIILISTIC mapping of words onto metrical prosodic structure—that is, foci usually align with nuclear accents and theme/rheme units with prosodic phrases, and themes are less metrically prominent than rhemes. It is shown that focus position, scope, and pragmatic interpretation are then derived by manipulating EXPECTED PROMINENCE within metrical structure. Broadly, the more prominent a word than expected, the more likely a contrastive reading; the less prominent, the more likely a givenness reading. Both constructed and naturally occurring examples from the Switchboard corpus are used.

Collins et al. 2008 offers a principles-and-parameters-based analysis of an AAVE construction first described in Spears 1998, in which nominal phrases such as John's ass appear to have exactly the same denotation, and behavior with respect to familiar conditions on anaphora, as the possessor [John, and similarly for pronominal possessors. Agreement, however, reflects not the properties of the possessor, but of the possessed nominal ass, which belongs to a small, closed class of lexical items that behave in parallel fashion and which the authors call ‘mask’ nominals. Collins and colleagues convincingly argue that the class of NPs consisting of possessors attached to mask nominals have the same syntactic structure as ordinary NPs displaying (pro)nominal possessors. In order to account for the split between anaphora and agreement, however, they are apparently forced to invoke a very complex derivational mechanism that includes a lowering rule, along with a number of other highly stipulative components, in order to encompass certain related constructions. I offer a far simpler and empirically more comprehensive alternative treatment in which mask nominals are nothing more than semantically parasitic heads, based on Kathol's (1999) dichotomy between AGR(eement) and INDEX specifications within head-driven phrase structure grammar representations. Collins and colleagues adduce what they take to be empirical arguments against such an approach, but these arguments are, as I show, all predicated on a basic technical misinterpretation of the nature of indices in the HPSG syntax/semantics interface, and thus have no force.

Comparison of the two approaches is interesting not only in the context of the phenomenon described by Spears, but also in terms of broader, cross-framework issues—in particular, the question of whether or not movement and feature matching are merely two alternative, interconvertible ways of expressing linkages between structurally distant categories.

While affix ordering often reflects general syntactic or semantic principles, it can also be arbitrary or variable. This article develops a theory of morpheme ordering based on local morphotactic restrictions encoded as weighted bigram constraints. I examine the formal properties of morphotactic systems, including arbitrariness, nontransitivity, context-sensitivity, analogy, and variation. Several variable systems are surveyed before turning to a detailed corpus study of a variable affix in Tagalog. Bigram morphotactics is shown to cover Tagalog and the typology, while other formalisms, such as alignment, precedence, and position classes, undergenerate. Moreover, learning simulations reveal that affix ordering under bigram morphotactics is subject to analogical pressures, providing a learning-theoretic motivation for the specific patterns of variation observed in Tagalog. I raise a different set of objections to rule-based approaches invoking affix movement. Finally, I demonstrate that bigram morphotactics is restrictive, being unable to generate unattested scenarios such as nonlocal contingency in ordering.

The oldest form of Sanskrit has a class of expressions that are in some respects like asyndetically coordinated syntactic phrases, in other respects like single compound words. I propose to resolve the conflicting evidence by drawing on prosodic phonology, stratal optimality theory, and the lexicalist approach to morphological blocking. I then present an account of the semantic properties and the historical development of these expressions. The analysis points to a solution to the theoretical problem of nonmonotonic trajectories in diachrony, a challenge for causal theories of change that claim that analogical processes are simplifying or regularizing. The idea is that optimization of such a highly structured object as a language does not proceed monotonically, but via a sequence of local optima.

Locative inversion in English (under the bridge lived a troll) is ungrammatical in all of the contexts where Jo-support applies: subject-auxiliary inversion, sentential negation, emphasis or verum focus, VP ellipsis, and VP displacement. Importantly, it is ungrammatical in these contexts whether do-support applies or not: it is ungrammatical with other auxiliaries, and it is also ungrammatical in nonfinite clauses of these types, where do-support never actually applies. This indicates that all of these contexts have something in common, and that cannot be disruption of adjacency between tense/agreement and the verb because there is no such disruption with other auxiliaries or in nonfinite contexts. These facts therefore argue against the standard last-resort theory of do-support, which holds that it is inserted to save a stranded tense/agreement affix, and for a theory like that of Baker 1991. In this theory, VPs have corresponding SPECIAL PURPOSE ([SP]) VPs, and do heads a [SP] VP. All of the contexts for do-support have in common the featural specification [SP]. Locative inversion involves a null expletive subject, the licensing of which is blocked by a non-[SP] context. All of this argues for a view of syntax with language-particular licensing constraints, features, and rules, within a range of variation proscribed by universal grammar.

This article delineates and analyzes the syntactic and semantic parameters of variation exhibited by English filler-gap constructions. It demonstrates that a detailed, fully explicit account of the observed variation is available within a framework embracing the notion ‘grammatical construction’. This account, which explicates similarities and differences among topicalization, interrogatives, relatives, exclamatives, and comparative correlatives in terms of linguistic types and hierarchical constraint inheritance, is articulated in detail within the framework of sign-based construction grammar (SBCG), a version of head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) integrating key insights from Berkeley construction grammar. The results presented here stand as a challenge to any analysis incorporating transformational operations, especially proposals couched within Chomsky's ‘Minimalist program’.

This article discusses four grammatical constructions that have been appropriated from Chinese into Singapore English and spelled out with English morphosyntactic materials. These constructions have developed unique structural properties and usage patterns that differ in interesting ways from those of their respective Chinese sources and English exponents. While the structural properties of these constructions are shaped by the grammars of Chinese and English, the two languages with a constant presence in Singapore, the usage patterns are largely determined by the grammatical requirements associated with the English exponents. I argue that frequency of use in the contact language plays a crucial role in substratum-derived linguistic change, and propose a usage-based exemplar model of substratum transfer and stabilization that gives an adequate and cogent explanation of the facts discussed here.

This article offers a DE SE THEORY of person indexicals, wherein first- and second-person indexical pronouns indicate REFERENCE DE SE (also called SELF-ASCRIPTION). Long observed for first-person pronouns (Castañeda 1977, Kaplan 1977, Perry 1979, inter alia), self-ascription is extended here to second person as well. The person feature of a pronoun specifies the speech-act roles that must be played by the self-ascribers: the speakers (uttering a first-person pronoun), the addressees (interpreting a second-person pronoun), or both (for first-person inclusive). Other agents who are not among the designated self-ascribers for a given pronoun interpret the pronoun indirectly by inferring the self-ascriber's interpretation, a process requiring THEORY OF MIND, that is, the cognitive ability to impute mental states to others (Premack & Woodruff 1978). This de se theory is supported by convergent evidence from multiple domains: (i) It explains a typological universal: first- and second-person plurals always allow associative semantics (‘speaker(s) plus others’, 'addressee(s) plus others') rather than requiring regular plural semantics ('speakers only', ‘addressees only‘) (Greenberg 1988, Noyer 1992, Cysouw 2003, Bobaljik 2008). (ii) It belongs to a family of approaches that solve the problem of the essential indexical (Perry 1979). (iii) It correctly predicts observed patterns of indexical pronoun production and comprehension by two populations lacking a fully developed theory of mind: typically developing children in the stage before theory of mind has developed, and children with autism. (iv) It correctly predicts the interpretation of second-person pronouns in utterances with multiple addressees.

Object relatives (ORs) have been reported to cause heavier processing loads than subject relatives (SRs) in both pre- and postnominal position (prenominal relatives: Miyamoto & Nakamura 2003, Kwon 2008, Ueno & Garnsey 2008; postnominal relatives: King & Just 1991, King & Kutas 1995, Traxler et al. 2002). In this article, we report the results of two eye-tracking studies of Korean prenominal relative clauses that confirm a processing advantage for subject relatives both with and without supporting context. These results are shown to be compatible with accounts involving the accessibility hierarchy (Keenan & Comrie 1977), phrase-structural complexity (O'Grady 1997), and probabilistic structural disambiguation (Mitchell et al. 1995, Hale 2006), partially compatible with similarity-based interference (Gordon et al. 2001), but incompatible with linear/temporal analyses of filler-gap dependencies (Gibson 1998, 2000, Lewis & Vasishth 2005, Lewis et al. 2006).

The status of subject clitics in French has been heavily debated (Kayne 1975, Rizzi 1986, Roberge 1990, Auger 1994b, Miller & Sag 1997, De Cat 2007b, and many others). Distributional properties of French subject clitics have led Kayne (1975), Rizzi (1986), and others to analyze them as argument-bearing elements occupying canonical subject position, cliticizing to the verb only at the level of the phonology. While this hypothesis enjoys a wide following, a growing body of evidence suggests that it fails to capture patterns of subject-clitic use in colloquial French dialects/registers (Roberge 1990, Auger 1994b, Zribi-Hertz 1994, Miller & Sag 1997). Using new evidence from prosodic and corpus analyses, speaker judgments, and crosslinguistic typology, this article argues that (i) European Colloquial French exhibits differences from Standard French that impact how subject clitics are best analyzed, and more specifically (ii) subject clitics in European Colloquial French are affixal agreement markers, not phonological clitic arguments.

We show that Classical Greek HYPERBATON involves pervasive phonological movement. Hyperbaton moves prosodic constituents to prosodic positions, subject to prosodic boundaries and to prosodic conditions on well-formedness. Syntactic analyses of hyperbaton fail insofar as they require the movement of heads, phrases, and nonconstituents to positions that are difficult to define syntactically. Furthermore, hyperbaton disobeys anti-locality constraints and a host of well-studied syntactic island conditions. We propose that phonological movement arises as the result of constraint interaction in the phonological component, subsequent to the interface between syntax and phonology.

This article explores the architecture of the interface between morphosyntax and lexical semantics, in particular the semantic underpinnings of argument realization. Many theories of lexical meaning assume that argument realization is derived from underlying event structure: the relative prominence of coarguments in a clause follows from their relative semantic prominence in how the event unfolds. I show that event structure is not sufficient to capture certain generalizations about argument realization, however, focusing on arguments that alternate between direct and oblique realization. I show that for these alternations the relevant semantic contrast is in strength of truth conditions: direct realization encodes a monotonically stronger set of truth conditions associated with the alternating argument than oblique realization. This, I suggest, follows if word meanings are built from basic units that are related to one another implicationally, and the relative implicational strength of such components figures into argument realization. I use as a case study English locative and conative alternations, which, I argue, reflect stronger and weaker degrees of affectedness along an independently motivated affectedness hierarchy. I also show that similar contrasts are found with other alternations on other hierarchies. I conclude by suggesting that a theory of weakening truth conditions is not incompatible with event-structural analyses of verb meaning, and in fact the two augment one another.

We investigate the development of word order in German children's spontaneous production of complement clauses. From soon after their second birthday, young German children use both verb-final complements with complementizers and verb-second complements without complementizers. By their third birthday they use both kinds of complement clauses with a variety of complement-taking verbs. Early in development, however, verb-final complements and verb-second complements are used with separate sets of complement-taking verbs, and they are used with separate sets of item-specific main-clause phrases. For example, initially phrases such as ‘I want to see’ were used exclusively with verb-final complements, whereas phrases such as ‘do you see’ and ‘you have to say’ were used exclusively with verb-second complements. Only later in development—when specific complement-taking verbs were used with both verb-second and verb-final complements, with a greater variety of main-clause phrases, and when specific main-clause phrases were used with both verb-second and verb-final complements—was there evidence for structural links between these various, item-based, complement-clause constructions.

Competence-based theories of island effects play a central role in generative grammar, yet the graded nature of many syntactic islands has never been properly accounted for. Categorical syntactic accounts of island effects have persisted in spite of a wealth of data suggesting that island effects are not categorical in nature and that nonstructural manipulations that leave island structures intact can radically alter judgments of island violations. We argue here, building on work by Paul Deane, Robert Kluender, and others, that processing factors have the potential to account for this otherwise unexplained variation in acceptability judgments.

We report the results of self-paced reading experiments and controlled acceptability studies that explore the relationship between processing costs and judgments of acceptability. In each of the three self-paced reading studies, the data indicate that the processing cost of different types of island violations can be significantly reduced to a degree comparable to that of nonisland filler-gap constructions by manipulating a single nonstructural factor. Moreover, this reduction in processing cost is accompanied by significant improvements in acceptability. This evidence favors the hypothesis that island-violating constructions involve numerous processing pressures that aggregate to drive processing difficulty above a threshold, resulting in unacceptability. We examine the implications of these findings for the grammar of filler-gap dependencies.

The present study uses probabilistic models of corpus data in a novel way, to measure and compare the syntactic predictive capacities of speakers' of different varieties of the same language. The study finds that speakers' knowledge of probabilistic grammatical choices can vary across different varieties of the same language and can be detected psycholinguistically in the individual. In three pairs of experiments, Australians and Americans responded reliably to corpus model probabilities in rating the naturalness of alternative dative constructions, their lexical-decision latencies during reading varied inversely with the syntactic probabilities of the construction, and they showed subtle covariation in these tasks, which is in line with quantitative differences in the choices of datives produced in the same contexts.

Some conceptual metaphors common in spoken languages are infelicitous in sign languages. The explanation suggested in this article is that the iconicity of these signs clashes with the shifts in meaning that take place in these metaphorical extensions. Both iconicity and metaphors are built on mappings of two domains: form and meaning in iconicity, source domain and target domain in metaphors. Iconic signs that undergo metaphoric extension are therefore subject to both mappings (Taub 2001). When the two mappings do not preserve the same structural correspondence, the metaphorical extension is blocked. This restriction is formulated as the double-mapping constraint, which requires multiple mappings to be structure-preserving. The effects of this constraint go beyond explaining possible and impossible metaphors in sign languages. Because of the central role of metaphors in various linguistic processes, constraints on their occurrence may affect other linguistic structures and processes that are built on these metaphors in both sign and spoken languages.

Although many previous studies have tried to explain the English perfect's various readings, none of them have been entirely successful. In this article, we argue that the perfect is pragmatically, rather than semantically, ambiguous. The meaning of the perfect introduces a base eventuality and a perfect state whose category is underspecified semantically. Neo-Gricean reasoning leads hearers to appropriately fill in the value of that variable. We present the results of a corpus study of over 600 present perfect examples. The results of this study suggest that (i) most English present perfects receive entailed resultative or continuative readings, (ii) the English perfect need not elaborate on a preexisting topic, and (iii) the English perfect plays a role in establishing discourse coherence by helping hearers establish discourse relations between discourse segments.