This article proposes a novel account of noun incorporation in NorthernIroquoian. It is proposed that there is no special mechanism for nounincorporation and that this phenomenon falls out naturally from the geometry ofthe phrase structure under Moro’s theory of Dynamic Antisymmetry. In anutshell, when the verbal head and the nominal head undergo Merge, they form apoint of symmetric c-command, which is resolved by the nominal head moving tothe specifier of the verb phrase. Further, it is proposed that, in nounincorporation constructions with a full DP double, the incorporated noun and theDP form a constituent, which is merged in theta-position.

This article focuses on whether determiner omission by two-year-old children isconstrained at the level of the prosodic foot or whether it is a function of thedifferent levels of the prosodic hierarchy. Nine French-speaking children aged2;0 to 2;7 were asked to repeat 54 four- or five-word sentences of the form“Pronoun V NP” with three conditions: a) det + monosyllabicnoun; b) det + bisyllabic noun; c) det + monosyllabic adjective+ monosyllabic noun. The results show 1) more determiner omission incondition b than in a; 2) more determiner omission in c than in b. It is shownthat determiner omission is not accounted for by a low-level stress-alternationconstraint and that the level of prosodic structure to which the determiner isattached plays a role in determiner omission.

The postwar decades are well known for having brought dramatic change to American linguistics on many fronts. This paper explores an internally focused aspect of this change: conditions of explanation. The two questions at stake are, firstly, what counts as explanation in linguistics? and, secondly, how is this decided? I argue that transformational grammarians dominated the setting of explanatory criteria in 1960s American syntax, and that this dominance was essential to the overall success of that theory. Importantly, rival grammarians were forced to devote as much time and effort to fitting their theories to the transformational criteria as they were to advancing their own explanatory priorities. By successfully naming the conditions for explanation, transformationalists provided their own supporters with significant questions to pursue and, simultaneously, drew energy away from rivals. This monopoly over explanatory criteria was central to the dominant position transformational grammar established in the American academic linguistics community.

This article reexamines the puzzling issue of where subjects, lexical and null,are located in Spanish and offers a novel explanation for the incompatibility ofpreverbal lexical subjects with fronted focussed constituents. Both SpecIP andthe left periphery appear to be potential landing sites for subjects, accordingto discourse-pragmatic factors. Assuming that pro is a clitic,it is argued that the aforementioned incompatibility can be captured by a simplerule: SpecIP must be empty for focus fronting to occur. This is the case withpro, which adjoins to Infl, or with postverbal subjectssince they remain in SpecVP. From this analysis it follows that: 1) the subjectfield in Spanish is less articulated than is generally assumed, 2) thedifferences between Spanish and other null subject languages with respect to theavailability of preverbal subjets can be reduced to this rule and a differentordering of focus and topic phrases, and 3) it is unnecessary to posit twodifferent topic positions.

This study provides the first wide-scale, apparent time, instrumental description of the Canadian Shift in mainstream Toronto English. In contrast with some previous findings, the Toronto data suggest that for the last 70 years or more the shift has not affected the high front lax vowel (i). We observe that the movement of the nonhigh front lax vowels (ε) and (æ) involves both lowering and retraction in Toronto English, although retraction is the primary direction of more recent change and the shift appears to be slowing down. Our findings also suggest that continued retraction of the vowel resulting from the low back merger is involved in the final stage of the shift. We do not find evidence of a chain shift but instead propose that a parallel shift is occurring and make reference to Vowel Dispersion Theory in our discussion.

Subject honorification is one well-known diagnostic for subjecthood in Japanese,and is often thought to target “subjects”. In this squib, I willprovide a little more structurally oriented characterization of subjecthonorification, and propose that subject honorification involves agreementlicensed at the level of vP: that is, subject honorification is rendered licitwhen an honorific head successfully agrees with an argument located in Spec ofvP, comprising the honorific verb. It is suggested that the target of subjecthonorification can be defined without reference to the notion of“subject”, and that the “subject” orientation ofsubject honorification emerges as a natural consequence of vP-level agreement.The proposed analysis can capture one important exception for the“subject-orientation” generalization on subject honorification,which would remain unaccounted for if subject honorification were held to targetonly subjects. The facts of subject honorification also lead to the conclusionthat when arguments undergo A-movement to TP, they need to go through all typesof vPs in the clause.

The proper treatment of adjuncts has been a central issue in syntactic theory since the 1980s. In the X'-theoretic analysis in the Government and Binding (GB) Theory (Chomsky 1981, 1986), they were commonly treated as optional elements attached to an intermediate or maximal projection of the head they modify. However, this treatment has been shown to be no longer tenable in the more recent Bare Phrase Structure (BPS) Theory for several conceptual reasons (Chomsky 1995: ch. 4), which renders the status of adjuncts all the more puzzling. Recently, however, Hornstein and Nunes (2008) (henceforth H&N) have proposed a new theory of adjuncts that conforms to the precepts of the BPS. It proposes that adjuncts need not be labeled for purposes of syntactic computation in contrast to complements and specifiers, which require the result of concatenation to be labeled. This squib presents new evidence for H&N's theory from one-replacement.