Based on the distribution of vowel qualities in medial and final syllables, I argue that there is phonological gemination in English. The analysis is cast in terms of optimality theory and has important implications in several domains: first, ambisyllabicity is not the right way to capture aspiration and flapping; second, languages where stress is dependent on vowel quality are perhaps best treated in terms of the kind of covert gemination proposed here.

Some researchers have claimed that WH-movement in ASL is rightward, contrary to the apparent universality of leftward WH-movement. In contrast to this claim, we argue that WH-movement in ASL is to a leftward specifier of CP. We account for the occurrence of rightward WH-elements by independently motivated syntactic and discourse factors which lead to the appearance of WH-elements in sentence- or discourse-final positions—not by rightward WH-movement. Our analysis provides an account for a variety of ASL direct and indirect WH-questions and is in accord with cross-linguistic generalizations.

Pro-drop languages have restrictions on the reference of pro not found with the overt pronominals of non-pro-drop languages. In particular, while the overt pronouns of non-pro-drop languages may take clausal antecedents, C/IPs, pro may not take these elements as linguistic antecedents. This restriction on the referential properties of pro follows from a mismatch in Phi-features; pro, which is or is licensed by Phi-features, cannot corefer with a clause, which is Phi-featureless. We discuss implications of our analysis for linguistic theory.

The forms represented orthographically as 〈wanna〉, 〈hafta〉, 〈gonna〉, 〈gotta〉, 〈oughta〉, 〈usta〉, and 〈sposta〉 have standardly been analyzed as involving a syntactic rule or cliticization operation called to-contraction. Occasionally it has been suggested that the forms in question have been iexicalized', i.e., WANNA and HAFTA are synchronically distinct lexemes from WANT and HAVE. I argue here that neither approach is correct. The syntactic accounts are wrong to assume that the relation between wanna and want to must be syntactic, and the lexicalization accounts are wrong to assume that there is no synchronic relation: the link is one of derivational morphology. A morpholexical rule suffixes /tu/ ~ /tə/ to the base lexemes to form derived lexemes such as WANNA. These to-derivatives are headed morphological structures, as described by Stump 1994. They inflect on their heads, not their edges; they are synonymous with their bases but have different subcategorization and more colloquial style associations. Various morphological and phonological idiosyncrasies indicate that the derived lexemes are morphologically compound, but their sharing of the lexical idiosyncrasies of the base lexemes show that they contain those bases as heads. All the syntactic phenomena that have been claimed to be relevant to the debate over to-contraction fall into place under the assumptions advocated here, and some new insights emerge, particularly with regard to the ‘liberal dialects’ where the pronunciation written 〈wanna〉 has a wider distribution than in most American dialects.

This article examines four different approaches to prosodic acquisition: Gerken's S(W) production template; Fikkert's and Archibald's theories of stress acquisition, and Demuth and Fee's prosodic hierarchy account. The predictions of prosodic circumscription, template mapping, and development according to the stages of the prosodic hierarchy are evaluated using a database of English-speaking children's multisyllabic word productions. The results show that current approaches are unable to account for robust findings in the data such as the increased preservation of final over nonfinal unstressed syllables, segmental and prominence effects on truncation rate, and the relative infrequency of epenthesis and stress error patterns. Findings reveal a complex interaction between prominence, edge-based factors, and segmental effects in phonological development. The discussion explores how these findings may be accounted for within a constraint-based theoretical framework.