This study addresses both the practical question of what forms of complementation are found with verbs expressing the notion of choice in English and the theoretical question of explaining the control and temporal effects found with these verbs. The explanation proposed is based on an approach in which syntax is taken to be driven by semantics. Semantics is defined in terms of the meaning-content associated with the linguistic forms occurring in the constructions examined, namely the to-infinitive, the gerund-participle, and the lexical content of the different verbs of choice themselves, together with the semantic value of the complement’s function with respect to the main verb. Although it does not utilize a corpus in the strict sense of the word, nor employ statistical argumentation, the study is based mainly on an examination of attested usage in Canadian English as reflected by Canadian websites accessed in the fall of 2006.

It is argued that the numerous “restrictive” lexical suffixes typifying the Wakashan languages today actually represent the result of influence from neighbouring Salishan languages. The evidence for this lies in their fluctuating status as lexical head or dependent within Wakashan as opposed to their typological normalcy in Salishan (where they simply modify the stem, the lexical head). A historical framework is suggested that would explain this and a number of other divergences from typological expectations in Wakashan, namely a development from an earlier SOV (dependent-head) stage to VSO order under areal influence. From this perspective, the “governing” suffixes of the Wakashan languages (with no counterpart in Salishan) are in the expected order vis-à-vis dependent stems. This has a bearing on the contribution to the Northwest Coast areal mix made by individual languages in — or moving into — the area in prehistoric times.

This article is centred on the concept of the deictic feature embedded in demonstratives. A principled taxonomy of deictic features attested cross-linguistically is proposed, with the aim of being as comprehensive as possible. The list of deictic features previously identified is greatly expanded to include 15 features, with which 52 deictic values are associated. The morphological strategies for encoding deictic features in demonstratives are also examined. Three techniques are identified: (i) isolating; (ii) agglutinative or serial; and (iii) inflectional encoding. A number of the deictic features discussed in this article, along with their morphological realization strategies, are illustrated with data from the Miao Group of languages, spoken in the People’s Republic of China.

To explain why English compounds generally avoid internal inflectional suffixation (e.g., key-chain rather than keys-chain), linguists have often invoked the Level Ordering Hypothesis, that is, that particular types of morphology, in this case inflectional suffixation, are derivationally ordered after compounding. However, a broad range of counter-examples and conceptual objections to Level Ordering have emerged. We propose an alternative account, based on the observation that certain English inflectional suffixes are more perceptible than others (-ing > -s > -ed), and that these suffixes are less crucial to lexical access and recovery of meaning than corresponding root-final segments. This proposal was tested in perception and production experiments. In the perception experiment, compounds with a nonsense word as modifier (e.g., dacks van, dacked van) were auditorily presented to native English speakers, who were asked to spell what they heard. The participants omitted significantly more -ed than -s or -ing. In the production experiment, native English speakers read these compounds. The speakers dropped significantly more -ed than -s or -ing. Furthermore, they dropped more of these sounds when they were spelled as affixes than as part of the root (e.g., dacked van vs. dact van). These results suggest that English speakers’ avoidance or inclusion of inflection in compounds is based not on Level Ordering but on perceptibility, as well as the status of the consonant as an affix. We further present a formal analysis capturing these factors in terms of Steriade’s Licensing-by-Cue proposal.

This article presents the results of a study on articulatory and acoustical correlates of contrastive focus in French in five children aged 4 and 5 and five adults. The speakers repeated the sequence [baba] in two prosodic contexts: neutral conditions and contrastive focus. The acoustic signal and the trajectories of three sensors placed on the subjects’ upper lip, lower lip, and chin were recorded using an Optotrak system. Articulatory movements were analyzed for the two syllables in the sequence, in each of the two prosodic conditions. Formant measurements, sound intensity, fundamental frequency, and acoustic duration of the segments were also extracted from the acoustic signal. The results show that the effects of contrastive focus are smaller in the children than the adult speakers. The results are interpreted in light of recent theories on the emergence of spoken language in children.

This article argues that the realization of agreement in subjunctive and imperative verbs is a consequence of the syntactic status of Tense in these two moods. Crucially, certain agreement paradigms across Romance languages show very a close resemblance: the subjunctive and imperative paradigms are identical, in most cases, to the indicative paradigms. Systematically, moods such as the subjunctive and the imperative do not show specific tense affixes or specific tense-induced allomorphy on their agreement affixes. The proposal is illustrated with Romanian verbal agreement, which is analyzed within the Distributed Morphology framework. The analysis shows that tense information is not used in subjunctive and imperative agreement morphology, unless it is exactly the same information as in another paradigm — the present indicative. It is proposed that at the syntactic level, Tense is unspecified in the subjunctive and absent in the imperative, and that the realization of agreement affixes is a consequence of this syntactic representation.