In this article, I make two theoretical claims. (i) For some form to be grammatical in language L, it is not necessary that the form satisfy all constraints that are active in L; that is, even grammatical forms can violate constraints. (ii) There are degrees of ungrammaticality; that is, not all ungrammatical forms are equally ungrammatical. I first show that these claims follow straightforwardly from the basic architecture of an optimality-theoretic grammar. I then show that the surface sound patterns used most widely in formal phonology cannot be used to test the truth of these two claims, but argue that results from speech processing experiments can. Finally, I discuss three experiments on the processing of nonwords of the form [stVt], [skVk], and [spVp] in English that were designed to test these claims, and show that both claims are confirmed by the results of the experiments.

The central goal of this article is to propose a systematic description of differental function marking (DM) in Korean, a language in which both subject and object markers may fail to be spelled out. Taking Aissen's theory of DM (Aissen 2003) as a starting point, we show that although its predictions seem mostly consistent with the statistical results of corpus-based research on Korean (and Japanese), this model does not accurately account for the Korean data. We argue that subject and object bareness (the lack of a functional particle) regularly correlates with interpretive effects that should be captured in terms of information structure (focus structure). Adapting Erteschik-Shir's (1997, 2007) framework to represent f(ocus)-structure, we argue that bare subjects and objects in Korean fail to be visible at this level. Consequently, they may be construed neither as active topics nor as foci, and thus must either be left out of f-structure or incorporated within larger f-structure constituents in order to be interpreted. We show that bare objects are never construed as topics or foci and always exhibit a form of semantic incorporation, while leul-marked objects always stand as f-structure constituents construed as focused at some level. Bare subjects, unlike neun-marked topical subjects and GA-marked subjects, can be construed neither as active topics nor as foci, and always occur in tense-deficient clauses construed as thetic and anchored to speech time. We argue that our assumptions correctly predict the results of corpus studies, and we suggest that as regards nominal arguments, f-structure visibility might ultimately stand as the crucial interpretive correlate of functional positions in syntax.

As an outsider, I would feel very uncomfortable if I were to advocate to a speech community that it ought to try to keep its language alive. It is entirely up to the community or to individuals within a community as to whether they want to put in the effort to develop new speakers for their language. Community members have the right to advocate within their community for the survival of their language; someone from outside the community does not. The right to language choice includes the right to choose against a language. This is the logical result of believing that maintaining an indigenous language is a matter of human rights, a belief virtually all language advocates must share. The outside expert's role is to assist in providing the means for language survival or revival to motivated community members and perhaps to provide encouragement and a sense of hope that it can be done. (Leanne Hinton, 2002:151–52)

In her recent Language paper, Tonhauser (2007, henceforth T07) provides a comprehensive in-depth discussion of the semantics of two nominal temporal markers occurring in Paraguayan Guaraní, based on her fieldwork study and subsequent Ph.D. T explicitly situates her article as arguing against the claims of our Language article (Nordlinger & Sadler 2004, henceforth NS04), which presents a crosslinguistic study of the inflectional categories of tense, aspect, and mood on nominal categories, and classified Guaraní as having nominal tense markers. T argues that while the Guaraní nominal markers can be shown to ‘affect the temporal interpretation of the noun phrase they attach to’ (p. 831), they are not in fact markers of nominal tense.

Taking stock. Nordlinger & Sadler 2004 (NS04) brought nominal tense/aspect/mood (TAM) markers across languages to the attention of the linguistic community and raised many important questions about noun-phrase temporality, lexical categories, and other research areas. In the theoretical literature on noun-phrase temporality, the idea that tense might be a category of noun phrases was considered as early as Enç 1981. In her analysis of the temporal interpretation of noun phrases, Enç (1981:41–45) briefly entertains the possibility of noun phrases being interpreted by nominal tense operators that locate the time relative to which a noun phrase is interpreted (i.e. Tonhauser 2007's (T07) noun-phrase time tnp) relative to the utterance time. Enç ultimately rejects the proposal since nominal tense operators ‘do not correspond to tense morphemes’ (1981:44), that is, do not have overt morphological counterparts, but also because an analysis according to which the noun-phrase time is contextually determined is more adequate. The primary focus of subsequent literature on noun-phrase temporality was to identify structural, semantic, and pragmatic constraints on the location of the noun-phrase time (e.g. Enç 1986, Musan 1995, 1999, Demirdache 1997, Tonhauser 2002). In the context of this research, the empirical domain of which is English, German, and St‘át'imcets, that is, languages that do not have nominal temporal markers, N&S's claim that there are languages with nominal tenses is exciting because these languages would provide overt evidence for Enç‘s nominal tense operators and promise insight into the way that the noun-phrase time is located.