Through a detailed examination of a particular sentence type, we outline a formal model in which grammatical description includes the description of use conditions on form-meaning pairs. The sentence type at issue is an exclamative construction we refer to as Nominal Extraposition (NE). This construction, exemplified by the sentence It's AMAZING the DIFFERENCE, bears a superficial resemblance to Right Dislocation (RD). However, NE must be distinguished from RD on syntactic, semantic and discourse-pragmatic grounds. The postpredicate NP represents a TOPIC in the case of RD, a FOCUS in the case of NE; this NP receives a metonymic scalar interpretation in the case of NE, but not in RD. We employ the framework of Construction Grammar and seek to demonstrate that it is uniquely suited to grammatical description of the type required here: NE represents a gestaltlike interaction of formal, semantic and pragmatic constraints. We argue for a compatible formalism akin to that found in recent versions of Lexical-Functional Grammar in which argument structure and syntactic constituency parallel a level of representation incorporating categories of INFORMATION STRUCTURE. In addition, we seek to validate the notion—central to Construction Grammar—that sentence types are a crucial basis for syntactic description. In particular, we argue that NE is an instance of the exclamative sentence type and that basic formal and semantic properties of NE follow from this categorization. We suggest that the relationship between NE and like exclamatives can be represented in an INHERITANCE NETWORK.

The Chamic languages of Vietnam have undergone phonological restructuring in the last two thousand years. In contact with the Mon-Khmer languages, all have developed final stress with consequent phonotactic restructuring. Since then, some languages have remained essentially unchanged (Roglai, Rade, and Jarai), but others have undergone radical restructuring: in contact with register languages, Western Cham has become a register language; in contact with the phonology of Bahnar, Haroi has become a restructured register language; in contact with the tonal Vietnamese, Phan Rang Cham has become incipiently tonal; and, in contact with the fully tonal languages of Hainan, Tsat has become fully tonal. The internal paths of change are relatively clear, because of their shallow time depth combined with the richness of the comparative data. However, despite the existence of phonetically plausible internal paths of development, the available evidence makes it clear that external contact set the changes in motion and determined their direction.

Theories about the representation and processing of regular and irregular past tense forms of verbs in English have disagreed as to whether they should be treated as a unified phenomenon (e.g. both rule-governed, or both generated by a connectionist net), or as two distinct types of linguistic entities (e.g. regulars formed by rules of the grammar, irregulars stored in lexical memory). In this article we present data from a positron emission tomographic study in which subjects were asked to produce the past tense forms of regular, irregular, and nonce stems. We find very different amounts and areas of cortical activation in the regular and irregular tasks, as well as significantly different reaction times in producing the past tenses. We interpret our findings as supporting the grammar/lexicon theories, and discuss the implications of our results for general linguistic theory.

Research in prosodic phonology, as well as experiments on adult speech production, suggest that segmental and suprasegmental processes in language are not governed directly by syntactic structure. Rather these processes reflect an independent prosodic structure, which includes prosodic categories such as metrical foot, prosodic word, and phonological phrase. Five experiments examined English-speaking two-year-olds' omissions of object articles in different prosodic structures. The data indicate that children omit unfooted syllables and that foot boundaries, in turn, are influenced by prosodic word and phonological phrase boundaries. Thus, it appears that children create prosodic structures remarkably similar to those proposed in theories of prosodic phonology.

It has been a locus of debate in the literature whether the so-called unergative-unaccusative split among intransitive verbs is syntactically or semantically based. Previously unnoticed data in Japanese show that the distinction between unergatives and unaccusatives is fully determined on the basis of verbs' inherent lexical meanings. In order to make the contrast, it is not sufficient to postulate that subjects of unaccusatives are derived syntactically from underlying direct objects.

This article examines the phenomenon of HEAD MOVEMENT in internally headed relative clauses (IHRCs). Most theorists working in a transformational framework consider the internal head to move to an external position. I show that in some cases, head movement to an external position need not take place; an internal head may move but remain within the sentence itself. I show that this movement of the head to a sentence-internal position is a consequence of (1) the quantificational nature of IHRCs and (2) the mapping hypothesis of Diesing (1990, 1992a,b).

I present a model of phonological representation which represents morphemes in terms of constraint violations rather than strings of segments or root nodes. The formalism allows representation to be uniform throughout the phonology, mandates permanent underspecification of unmarked structure, derives the linear order of segments within a morpheme, and allows representation and evaluation to be conflated. Marked types of morphology (infixes, circumfixes, zero affixes; subtractive, reduplicative and templatic morphology) are represented in exactly the same way as roots. The markedness of such morphology is argued to follow from the high ranking of the violated constraints in question.

Judgments of linguistic acceptability constitute an important source of evidence for theoretical and applied linguistics, but are typically elicited and represented in ways which limit their utility. This paper describes how MAGNITUDE ESTIMATION, a technique used in psychophysics, can be adapted for eliciting acceptability judgments. Magnitude estimation of linguistic acceptability is shown to solve the measurement scale problems which plague conventional techniques; to provide data which make fine distinctions robustly enough to yield statistically significant results of linguistic interest; to be usable in a consistent way by linguistically naive speaker-hearers, and to allow replication across groups of subjects. Methodological pitfalls are discussed and suggestions are offered for new approaches to the analysis and measurement of linguistic acceptability.

This article examines stative and passive constructions in Chichewa, finding that the syntax of the two constructions is best accommodated in a model that allows argument structure changing operations, such as stative, to be distinguished from operations, such as passive, that affect the mapping from argument structure to grammatical functions. The Chichewa facts recall observations made concerning the differences between English adjectival and verbal passives, first formalized in Wasow 1977, but provide more straightforward evidence for a distinction, due to the absence of surface homophony. The paper concludes by reconsidering English adjectival and verbal passive constructions, and showing them to be morphologically distinct.

Despite the crucial dependence of synchronic meaning on both historical and cognitive context, we have traditionally used different tools for expressing synchronic and diachronic generalizations in modeling a complex semantic category like the diminutive. This is due in part to the extraordinary, often contradictory range of its senses synchronically (small size, affection, approximation, intensification, imitation, female gender), and the difficulty of proposing a coherent historical reconstruction for these senses.

I propose to model the synchronic and diachronic semantics of the diminutive category with a RADIAL CATEGORY (George Lakoff 1987), a type of structured polysemy that explicitly models the different senses of the diminutive and the metaphorical and inferential relations which bind them. Synchronically, this model explains the varied and contradictory senses of the diminutive. Diachronically, the radial category acts as a kind of ARCHAEOLOGY OF MEANING, expressing the generalizations of the classic mechanisms of semantic change (metaphor, abstraction and inference) as well as a new one: LAMBDA-ABSTRACTION, which accounts for the rise of quantificational meaning and second-order predicates in the diminutive. The model also predicts that the origins of the diminutive cross-linguistically lie in words semantically or pragmatically linked to children. I test the model by considering the semantics of the diminutive in over 60 languages, examining the origins of the diminutive in many of these, particularly in Indo-European where the theory suggests a new reconstruction of the proto-semantics of the PIE suffix -ko-.

This study examines the productivity of five English derivational affixes in a British newspaper, the Times (London), in the period from September 1989 to December 1992. This diachronic corpus of roughly 80 million word tokens contains large numbers of neologisms. Thus, this corpus offers a good opportunity to test both qualitative and quantitative theories of morphological productivity. Our investigations support the usefulness of the quantitative formalization of the notion DEGREE OF PRODUCTIVITY developed in Baayen 1992, 1993a. At the same time, they illustrate that productivity is a function of both text type and real time. An investigation of the morphological structure of the neologisms provides strong support for Aronoff s (1976) claim that the productivity of an affix may vary significantly with the morphological structure of the base word to which it attaches.

This paper presents a parametric theory of poetic meter which defines a set of formally possible meters based on the prosodic constituents and categories given by universal grammar, and a functional principle that selects an optimal meter for a particular language on the basis of its lexical phonological structure. We support this theory by a detailed analysis of a favored meter in Finnish, a stress-based meter in which syllable count varies in accord with constraints on syllable weight, and show why partially similar meters are likewise favored in English.

Genius ipsius linguae Fennicae, copiosa vocum ponderosissimarum et elegantissimarum varietate superbientis, egregie vatum favet industriae. (H. G. Porthan, Dissertatio de Poesi Fennica, 1778.)

Personal pronouns with first person n and second person m have been claimed to be frequent in the native languages of the Americas, widespread there, and rare elsewhere, and thus to indicate genetic unity of Amerind. A controlled cross-linguistic survey shows that these pronouns have an extensive yet restricted geographical range limited to the western Americas, and that they recur (though not frequently) elsewhere around the Pacific rim. This distribution removes the strongest (and perhaps the only) evidence for genetic relatedness of Amerind. In addition, on statistical grounds the n:m paradigm fails as a diagnostic of genetic relatedness, though equally clearly it cannot be due to universals or random chance. Certain other linguistic features and one mitochondrial DNA lineage have much the same geographical and statistical distribution. Though the language families in which these features appear cannot be shown to be genetically related, the families have clearly had some shared history (the type and degree not precisely specifiable) in the distant past. The n:m pronouns reflect a single, datable, noninitial and nonterminal phase in the settlement of the Americas and are probably the best linguistic marker of that phase.

I argue that the account of the coordination of unlike categories, such as wealthy and a Republican in become wealthy and a Republican, ought to be unified with the account of feature neutralization under phonological identity, in which (for instance) coordinations of dative- and accusative-taking transitive verbs are possible just when the object is ambiguous (or underspecified) between dative and accusative case. I argue that this unified account ought not to be couched in terms of strings (as in Chametzky 1987) or features (as in Sag et al. 1985) but rather in terms of the logic of categories, in the tradition of Lambek Categorial Grammar. I present and defend such an account.

Research on causative and applicative constructions has identified a class of symmetrical languages, in which either of two arguments may pattern like the direct object of a primary transitive verb. To date, symmetry of this sort has been identified only in a small geographically contiguous group of Bantu languages. Bajau, an Austronesian language of Indonesia and the Philippines, is shown to be symmetrical. Unlike the Bantu languages previously described, Bajau permits a benefactive applied object to be treated like an ordinary direct object. The restriction on the extraction of benefactive applied objects must therefore not be universal, contrary to the assumption of previous theories.

Poeppel and Wexler (1993) present the Full Competence Hypothesis, which claims that German children very early (circa age 2) acquire finiteness, verb agreement, and verb movement. They also propose the Grammatical Infinitive Hypothesis, which states that children have the option of using either a finite or nonfinite form and randomly select verbs for one or the other. The data on which these claims are based consist of 282 sentences from a German child at 2;1. We present a more conservative alternative, the Lexical/Semantic Hypothesis, which proposes that early learning is more lexically oriented, and that early word combinations can be explained by more semantically oriented accounts. To replace the Grammatical Infinitive Hypothesis, we put forth the Modal Hypothesis, which states that the distinction between finite and nonfinite forms can be accounted for by the modality of the sentence. Nonfinite forms occur in modal contexts, and finite ones occur in nonmodal ones. Data to support this alternative are presented from the analysis of 1084 sentences from four German children, including the subject studied in Poeppel and Wexler.

Most sounds can be described in terms of a standard set of phonological features, or in terms of values of well-known phonetic parameters. But some languages, particularly the smaller endangered languages of the world, also contain many unusual sounds that test our traditional descriptive theories. An example is the dental plosive followed by a bilabial trill, found in the Chapakuran languages. We suggest that there is a set (with fuzzy boundaries) of more common sounds that participate in a wide range of general linguistic processes and another set of rarer sounds that have been observed in only one or two languages.