One of the central issues in morphology/morphosyntax has been the locus of the mechanisms responsible for word formation. LEXICALISM claims that the mechanisms employed for word formation are distinct from those found in other domains (e.g. syntax). I examine in this article so-called ‘lexical’ V-V compound formation in Japanese from a lexicalist point of view and show that it is indeed LEXICAL (some claim that it is syntactic). Though Japanese V-V compounds have been studied extensively, a principled and unified account has not been proposed due to their complexities, especially one that deals with the question of how arguments of component verbs are to be synthesized into a single argument structure. The current proposal embodies the notion of THEMATIC PROTO-ROLE and devises semantically driven argument matching giving rise to an argument structure of a V-V compound as a whole. In such a process, syntactic apparatuses or grammatical relations per se play no central role.

This article investigates whether certain animacy effects are an artifact of syntactic weight (because statistically, animate referents tend to be short) or whether animacy is an independent variable in grammatical variation. The empirical domain of investigation is a case of grammatical variation in the noun phrase, specifically, English genitive variation. Data from a corpus study as well as the results of an experimental study are brought forward, showing that animacy and weight are independent factors. These data are further supported by typological evidence. Moreover, the analysis of the interaction of animacy and weight provides evidence that animacy can even dominate weight up to a certain cut-off point. Finally, it is argued that animacy is a processing factor influencing grammatical variation, just as weight is.

This article focuses on the grammatical properties of a Madurese structure in which an argument of a complement clause appears to occur in a nonthematic position in its dominating clause. RAISING-TO-OBJECT (or its analogue in nonderivational theories) has been proposed over the past thirty years or so for the corresponding construction in the closely related Austronesian languages of Balinese, Indonesian/Malay, and Javanese. Close examination of the Madurese data reveals that a proleptic NP analysis, in which the matrix NP is generated in the matrix clause, proves superior to the raising analysis and shares virtually all of the same properties as the parallel English construction (I believe about Marlena that she left for Jakarta on Wednesday). Enumeration of these properties and comparison with both RAISING and COPY RAISING provide the initial step in identifying the hallmarks of each construction and how they might differ typologically.

It is widely believed that the difference between regular and irregular verbs is restricted to form. This study questions that belief. We report a series of lexical statistics showing that irregular verbs cluster in denser regions in semantic space. Compared to regular verbs, irregular verbs tend to have more semantic neighbors that in turn have relatively many other semantic neighbors that are morphologically irregular. We show that this greater semantic density for irregulars is reflected in association norms, familiarity ratings, visual lexical-decision latencies, and word-naming latencies. Meta-analyses of the materials of two neuroimaging studies show that in these studies, regularity is confounded with differences in semantic density. Our results challenge the hypothesis of the supposed formal encapsulation of rules of inflection and support lines of research in which sensitivity to probability is recognized as intrinsic to human language.