The stage-level/individual-level distinction, which has so far been limited to verbal and adjectival predicates, should be extended to (underived) nominal predicates as well. Specifically, while simple nominals are individual-level predicates, event nominals and inalienable possession nominals are stage-level predicates. The currently prevailing distinction between the stage-level and individual-level predicates, that is, whether a predicate denotes a transitory state or an inherent and unchangeable stage, must be reconsidered. Current suggestions in line with this move will be discussed.

Some researchers argue that the ability to acquire and use language is largely the result of innate predispositions that are specific to language (the INNATENESS HYPOTHESIS). If the innateness hypothesis is correct, these predispositions must be encoded for in our DNA. This article reviews more than one hundred genetic studies of language. The results of these studies strongly suggest that genetic factors play a role in the variation in the rate of language acquisition and linguistic proficiency attained by children and adults. Genetic factors account for much of the variance in linguistic abilities among people with written or spoken language disorders and some of the variance in linguistic abilities among normal people. In addition to heritable factors that influence both nonverbal and verbal abilities, there appear to be genetic factors that specifically influence linguistic abilities. Furthermore, some studies suggest that different genetic factors are involved in different aspects of language (e.g. written language vs. spoken language; lexical vs. syntactic abilities).

This article examines the ordering distribution of main and adverbial clauses in crosslinguistic perspective. Using a representative sample of forty languages, the author shows that the ordering of main and adverbial clauses correlates with the position of the subordinator in the subordinate clause. In languages in which adverbial clauses have a final subordinator, adverbial clauses tend to precede the main clause, whereas in languages in which adverbial clauses are marked by an initial subordinator, adverbial clauses commonly occur in both sentence-initial and sentence-final position. In the latter language type, the position of an adverbial clause varies with its meaning or function: conditional clauses precede the main clause more often than temporal clauses, which in turn are more often preposed than causal, result, and purpose clauses. The distributional patterns are explained in terms of competing motivations; it is suggested that they arise from the interaction between structural and discourse-pragmatic factors.

This article provides empirical evidence against the claims that [voice] is a privative feature and that word-internal devoicing can occur in a language without word-final devoicing. The study of voice patterns in a number of languages shows that the feature value [– voice] although it is the unmarked value of the laryngeal feature [voice], can be active phonologically in a fashion parallel to the marked value [+ voice]. Across languages, voice assimilation may occur independently of devoicing and, although it normally affects both [+voice] and [– voice], it may affect only one value in some languages.

In Hoan, nouns and verbs can be pluralized. This article investigates various syntactic and semantic aspects of plurality in Hoan: first, the formation of plurals of inalienable nouns, then, how the plurals of verbs (termed PLURACTIONAL VERBS) are formed in much the same way as the plurals of inalienable nouns. The phenomenon of pluractional verbs strongly supports the event argument analysis of verbal semantics.

One aspect of the relationship between meaning and interaction is explored here by taking the English particle actually, which is characterized by flexibility of syntactic position, and investigating its use in a range of interactional contexts. Syntactic alternatives in the form of clause-initial or clause-final placement are found to be selected by reference to interactional exigencies. The temporally situated, contingent accomplishment of utterances in turns and their component turn-constructional units shows the emergence of meaning across a conversational sequence; it reveals syntactic flexibility as both a resource to be exploited for interactional ends and a constraint on that interaction.

This article explores lexical polysemy through an in-depth examination of the English preposition over. Working within a cognitive linguistic framework, the present study illustrates the nonarbitrary quality of the mental lexicon and the highly creative nature of the human conceptual system. The analysis takes the following as basic: (1) human conceptualization is the product of embodied experience, that is, the kinds of bodies and neural architecture humans have, in conjunction with the nature of the spatio-physical world humans inhabit, determine human conceptual structure, and (2) semantic structure derives from and reflects conceptual structure. As humans interact with the world, they perceive recurring spatial configurations that become represented in memory as abstract, imagistic conceptualizations. We posit that each preposition is represented by a primary meaning, which we term a PROTOSCENE. The protoscene, in turn, interacts with a highly constrained set of cognitive principles to derive a set of additional distinct senses, forming a motivated semantic network. Previous accounts have failed to develop adequate criteria to distinguish between coding in formal linguistic expression and the nature of conceptualization, which integrates linguistic prompts in a way that is maximally coherent with and contingent upon sentential context and real-world knowledge. To this end, we put forward a methodology for identifying the protoscene and for distinguishing among distinct senses.

This article discusses IOTATION, a process that has been analyzed in generative phonology as a palatalization rule. We argue that optimality theory predicts the treatment of this process in terms of allomorphy, which in fact is desirable for a synchronic analysis. The consequence is that, with regard to iotation effects, the task of phonology is to account for the distribution of allomorphs rather than to derive them from a single underlying representation. While, as a result of diachronic changes, the allomorphs are arbitrary, their distribution is not. It follows from the interaction of universal phonological and morphological constraints, and from the considerations of segment markedness.

The applicative is a construction in which a verb bears a particular morpheme which licenses an oblique, or non-core, argument that would not otherwise be considered a part of the verb's argument structure. Abaza, a Northwest Caucasian language, has an applicative construction which differs systematically from applicative constructions reported in many other languages. The properties of the Abaza applicative construction include the ability of both transitive and intransitive verbs to host applicative prefixes, the stability of the underlying argument structure despite the presence of applicatives (i.e. the underlying direct object is not demoted to an oblique argument), the ability of a single verb complex to host multiple applicatives, and the use of additional agreement morphology in the verbal complex corresponding to applied object(s), beyond the normal agreement requirements of the verb. This paper attempts to present a thorough description of the applicative construction in Abaza, as well as a brief analysis along the lines of Baker (1988).

The telic-atelic distinction has been argued to hinge on the presence of a (bounded) internal argument measuring out the event, or, alternatively, a resultative small clause providing an end point for the event. Both perspectives are partially correct and partially incorrect. On the one hand, the resultative is more adequately seen as a measure than an end point; on the other, it is the resultative predicate rather than the internal argument that performs this measuring function. Empirical evidence is adduced in support of this point of view: resultative predicates are subject to the requirement that they denote a bounded scale. Only bounded predicates can delimit an event by providing it with minimal parts. As a matter of conceptual necessity, unbounded predicates, though potentially denoting end points, cannot function as event measures.

We explore the predictors of early mastery versus error in children's acquisition of American Sign Language. We hypothesize that the most frequent values for a particular parameter in prelinguistic gesture will be the most frequent in early signs and the most likely sources of substitution when signing children make errors. Analyses of data from a longitudinal study of the prelinguistic gestures of five Deaf and five hearing children and a longitudinal study of four Deaf children's early signs have revealed evidence of significant commonalities between prelinguistic gesture and early sign. This apparent continuity between prelinguistic gesture and early sign reflects constraints operating on the infant—in all likelihood, motoric constraints—that seem to persist into the first-word period in both major language modalities. In sign, as in speech, the production of first signs uses building blocks that are available to the prelinguistic child.

Current syntactic accounts of English resultatives are based on the assumption that result XPs are predicated of underlying direct objects. This assumption has helped to explain the presence of reflexive pronouns with some intransitive verbs but not others and the apparent lack of result XPs predicated of subjects of transitive verbs. We present problems for and counterexamples to some of the basic assumptions of the syntactic approach, which undermine its explanatory power. We develop an alternative account that appeals to principles governing the well-formedness of event structure and the event structure-to-syntax mapping. This account covers the data on intransitive verbs and predicts the distribution of subject-predicated result XPs with transitive verbs.

The existence of substantive parametric variation in syntax, as characterized in Chomsky 1981, has been questioned in the more recent generative literature, notably in Borer 1984, Fukui 1986, and Chomsky 1993. This article provides converging evidence from child language acquisition and comparative syntax for the existence of a syntactic parameter in the classical sense of Chomsky 1981, with simultaneous effects on syntactic argument structure (e.g., verb-particle constructions) and complex word-formation (root compounding). The implications are first that syntax is indeed subject to points of substantive parametric variation as envisioned in Chomsky 1981, and second that the time course of child language acquisition is a potentially rich source of evidence about the innate constraints on language variation.

The hypothesis that children's errors in interpreting adjunct PRO clauses are due to their use of a nominal structure was tested in two act-out experiments. Four- to six-year-old English-speaking children permitted a by phrase inside an adjunct clause containing an intransitive verb to be interpreted as agentive, and they gave such an interpretation for a construction for which a nominal analysis is not permitted in the adult grammar (when PRO clauses). This behavior can be accounted for if children have knowledge of general principles governing the interpretation of nominal and PRO constructions, and use a nominal analysis in interpreting adjunct clauses. In the second experiment, children distinguish between constructions that are unambiguously nominal and those that are ambiguous between a nominal and PRO structure, permitting agentive readings of by more frequently in the former case. This argues that adjunct PRO may be acquired by some children at a point during the preschool years. Overall the results fit a view of acquisition in which the language learner actively analyzes the input data, using knowledge of general grammatical principles, and is not narrowly bound by his or her current knowledge of the lexicon of the language.

The psychological reality of an abstract consonant dissimilation constraint is demonstrated in an experiment with native speakers of Jordanian Arabic. In this experiment, novel verbs containing constraint violations and those without violations were presented orthographically for judgments of well-formedness. Native speaker well-formedness judgments reflected knowledge of the phono-tactic constraint. Systematic gaps were rated much less wordlike than accidental gaps that were equivalent in their lexical characteristics. Judgments for novel verbs containing constraint violations were also gradiently influenced by consonant pair similarity. The experimental study supports previous dictionary-based phonotactic analyses that propose that the native speaker's knowledge of consonant cooccurrence constraints in Arabic is based on emergent generalizations over the lexical items in an abstract root lexicon.

The existence of OBLIGATORY ADJUNCTS in both predication and modification constructions is best understood as following from general conversational pragmatics, rather than from grammatical factors. In the case of clausal predication, adjuncts are used to satisfy the often-cited requirement that every utterance have a focus that serves to convey new information in the discourse; adjuncts are just one of several ways in which the focal requirement can be satisfied. We argue that as a pragmatic constraint, the focal requirement is derivative from Grice's maxim of quantity or Horn's R-principle. This allows us to account for the fact that while utterances do normally require a successful focus, there can be certain principled exceptions. The appeal to conversational maxims also allows us to account for the appearance of obligatory adjuncts within nominal modification structures, in which focus is not the relevant notion.

I am grateful to Juan Uriagereka (2000) for his thorough and thoughtful review of my book The Origins of Complex Language (henceforth Origins; Carstairs-McCarthy 1999). The book tackles fundamental questions about the relationship among syntax, semantics, and cognition, and Uriagereka is not persuaded by all my suggestions about the prehistory of this relationship. I will not pursue these large issues here; rather, I want to address a more circumscribed issue that is nevertheless crucial to the argument of the book, so that my failure to discuss it is an important omission, as Uriagereka points out. This issue is whether the syllable, as a unit of phonological description, is modality-neutral (so as to be equally at home, with fundamentally the same sense, in descriptions of signed and spoken languages), or whether the syllables of signed and spoken languages are really different phenomena, so that the use of the term SYLLABLE for both draws attention to resemblances that are more accidental than fundamental. I will argue that the evidence supports the latter view more strongly than the former; therefore, when discussing language evolution, it is legitimate to appeal (as I do) to aspects of spoken syllables that are undoubtedly modality-dependent, such as their physiological underpinnings in the vocal apparatus.

Before addressing this issue directly, I would like to summarize briefly why it is important in the context of my book. Second, by way of reassurance, I will explain why the conclusion that I reach does not belittle sign languages, nor imply any old-fashioned skepticism about their entitlement to be recognized as real manifestations of the human language capacity.

The selection of clausal complement type by embedding predicates constitutes a privileged domain for the assessment of interface issues between different modules of the grammar. This article addresses the selectional problem posed by embedded if-questions (of semantic type 〈t, t〉) appearing as arguments of noninterrogative predicates like ‘admit’ or ‘say’ (which are assumed to select a that-clause of type t). We show that such UNSELECTED EMBEDDED QUESTIONS (UEQs) are semantically sensitive to the same set of elements as POLARITY SENSITIVE ITEMS, and this sensitivity constrains their distribution and interpretation. The proposal is that UEQs are headed by a semantically sensitive determiner Δ, which is covert in English (a counterpart of either) but overt in Basque. After raising, the UEQ leaves a variable of type t, thus solving the selectional problem. The interplay between s-selection, c-selection and lexical semantic specifications is argued to account for a number of other puzzles in clausal complementation.

The authors investigate how morphological relationships between inflected word forms are represented in the mental lexicon, focusing on paradigmatic relations between regularly inflected word forms and relationships between different stem forms of the same lexeme. We present results from a series of psycholinguistic experiments investigating German adjectives (which are inflected for case, number, and gender) and the so-called strong verbs of German, which have different stem forms when inflected for person, number, tense, or mood.

Evidence from three lexical-decision experiments indicates that regular affixes are stripped off from their stems for processing purposes. It will be shown that this holds for both unmarked and marked stem forms. Another set of experiments revealed priming effects between different paradigmatically related affixes and between different stem forms of the same lexeme.

We will show that associative models of inflection do not capture these findings, and we explain our results in terms of combinatorial models of inflection in which regular affixes are represented in inflectional paradigms and stem variants are represented in structured lexical entries. We will also argue that the morphosyntactic features of stems and affixes form abstract underspecified entries. The experimental results indicate that the human language processor makes use of these representations.