Dewell (1994), following Brugman (1981) and Lakoff (1987), provides a semantic analysis of over by relying more exclusively on image-schema transformations than did Brugman and Lakoff. The Brugman-Lakoff-Dewell analysis, however, can be improved by using simpler image-schemas, more natural image-schema transformations, and metaphorical extensions. A key idea adopted in the present article is to capture both trajectors and landmarks three-dimensionally and topologically. This modification brings about the elimination of unessential features such as the shape and size of the trajector and the landmark, contact/non-contact between the trajector and the landmark, and physical properties of the trajector. Its main advantage is that a central image-schema for a semicircular path provides the basis for explaining all of the senses of over using natural image-schema transformations and metaphorical extensions. The proposed image-schema transformations include: segment profiling, profiling the endpoint of access paths, the profiled peak position of the semicircular path with the constraint that the rest of the semicircular path is excluded, and the extension of the semicircular path-trajectory to an image of covering. The proposed metaphorical senses are time, means, and control. In addition, the radial category relating each sense of over is presented.

This article questions the view that phonetics governs exclusively gradient phenomena. Experimental data from an ultrasound study of English flap allophones show unconditioned categorical variation in the production of everyday words. Individual variation is discussed as an essential area of empirical investigation in uncovering emergent categorical properties of language.

Linguistic analyses of aphasic patients’ performances have developed to the point where interesting, non-trivial descriptions and explanations of pathological performances are available in linguistic and processing terms. The purpose of this paper is to present a short synopsis for linguists of several recent analyses of aphasic patients’ disturbances in the sphere of comprehension of syntactic form. This presentation is designed to illustrate some of the logical and methodological issues regarding the analysis of aphasic data, as well as to present specific results of our investigations. On the basis of our case studies, we also suggest several aspects of syntactic structure and parsing.

This article investigates the varied uses of wh-words in Chuj, an understudied Mayan language of Guatemala. Cross-linguistically, wh-words are commonly used not only for question formation but also in a range of other constructions, including wh-quantification, indefinites, and the formation of relative clauses. In Chuj, we will show that wh-words are used to form indefinites (in certain limited environments), universal quantifiers, free choice items, and two kinds of free relatives: definite free relatives, but also the typologically rarer indefinite free relatives. We sketch an analysis of each construction, and discuss generalizations concerning their distribution. The varied uses of wh-words in Chuj support the view that wh-words are used in two capacities: to generate alternatives, and to create a movement/binding relation.

It is commonly noted that standard French is losing the contrast between its two low vowels /a/ and /ɑ/, due to the fronting of the back vowel. The difference in length, which accompanied the qualitative difference of this pair, is affected as well. In mainland France, this tendency can be found to various degrees across the country, and is spreading throughout the speech community. This article further develops the picture of the current status of the low vowel contrast by investigating Belgian and Swiss French, where length is known to play overall a far more prominent role in the vowel inventories than it does in standard French. Are Belgian and Swiss French also affected by the merger of the two low vowels? To what extent can a difference in length and/or timbre still be found? And how do the patterns of contrast neutralisation/preservation relate to the developments in France?

The New Zealand accent belongs to the British group of English accents. There are three main divisions: General New Zealand, which is spoken in most parts of the country, and the accents of Otago, in the south of the South Island, and on the West Coast of the South Island. The three divisions follow the original pattern of settlement. In the North Island, settlement was directed by the New Zealand Company, which founded Auckland and Wellington in 1840; other settlements followed in the late 1840s. In the South, the Anglican Church founded Christchurch and Nelson in the early 1850s. These settlements had the common aim of reproducing English society as it existed in the south of England and drew most of their settlers from persons dispossessed by the Industrial Revolution. The difficulties of life in early New Zealand effectively levelled out social differences, with important effects on the language. Otago was founded in 1848 by the Scottish Free Church. The West Coast was not settled until the Gold Rush of the 1860s attracted miners from the goldfields of Victoria and California. Since that time there has been considerable immigration from the British Isles, at first a mere trickle from Europe and then a flood of Central European refugees after the Second World War. In general the willingness of the average New Zealander to travel for reasons of work or promotion has prevented the growth of regional accents; but the West Coast and Otago tend to keep to themselves, isolated by rough country and their own sense of community.

Métif is a language spoken in the Canadian prairie provinces and the American prairie states bordering Canada. There are probably between 3000 and 5000 people who speak Métif as their first language, most of them of advanced age. They are living mostly in scattered Métis settlements. The Métis are a nation of mixed Amerindian and European descent. From the 17th century on French Canadian fur traders and voyageurs travelled west-wards from French Canada. Many of them married Amerindian women, who were often Cree speaking. Around 1860 the Métis were the largest population group of the Canadian West, many of them multilinguals. From the first decades of the 19th century the Métis started to consider themselves as a separate ethnic group, neither European nor Amerindian (see e.g., Peterson and Brown 1985). The Métis are still a distinct people. The Métis nowadays often speak Cree, Ojibwa, Métif, French and English or a combination of these. They often speak particular varieties of these languages. Not only is the French spoken by the Métis markedly different from other North American French dialects the language called Métif is uniquely spoken among the Métis people. For more information on Métif and Métis languages, see the publications listed in Bakker (1989).

This paper summarizes the findings of an extensive study of Haitian Creole morphology as compared with that of contributing languages: French, the lexifier language, and Fon, the West African language selected as the substratum language. The proposal we want to argue for in this paper is that, although the phonetic matrices of Haitian Creole lexical items are recognizable as being from French, at a more abstract level the productive affixes of Haitian Creole pattern in a significant way with the model of contributing West African languages, in this case Fon. This being the case, the widespread assumption in the creole literature that creole languages have undergone morphological simplification is not borne out by the Haitian data (cf. several discussions on this topic in Hymes 1971).

Most research on Algonquian languages, of which Cree is a typical example, is based on collections of narrative texts (Wolfart 1973; Dahlstrom 1986; James 1986). Although there is nothing intrinsically wrong with this approach, the use of one particular type of database in such an extensive amount of research lends itself to a genre-biased description of the language. In oral cultures, many narrative texts are typically preplanned (Chafe 1985) and therefore will have, according to researchers in discourse analysis, many of the features of preplanned texts such as complete and longer sentences, higher clause density and a larger proportion of subordinate clauses (Brown and Yule 1985:151–117; Biber 1988:47). In addition, other language-specific features may occur.

Over the past few years, research in language acquisition has shifted away from the view that linguistic structures are learned independently of semantic concepts and grammatical functions and toward a more cognitively based perspective (cf. Slobin 1973 ; Clark and Clark 1977). In the latter approach, cognitive principles are assumed to govern the acquisition of linguistic structures, and the earlier autonomous view of language acquisition is replaced by a more catholic attitude encompassing both formal and psychological aspects of language. This perspective is adopted for the analyses presented below.

This article presents a novel analysis of Negative Auxiliary Inversion (NAI) constructions such as didn't many people eat, in which a negated auxiliary appears in pre-subject position. NAI, found in varieties including Appalachian, African American, and West Texas English, has a word order identical to a yes/no question, but is pronounced and interpreted as a declarative. We propose that NAI subjects are negative DPs, and that the negation raises from the subject DP to adjoin to Fin (a functional head in the left periphery). Three properties of NAI motivate this analysis: (i) scope freezing effects, (ii) the various possible and impossible NAI subject types, and (iii) the incompatibility of NAI constructions with true Double-Negation interpretations. Implications for theories of Negative Concord, Negative Polarity Items, and the representation of negation are discussed.

Morpheme structure constraints (MSCs or, equivalently, morphemic constraints), i.e., constraints on underived items, pose a logical problem to any theory claiming that the first input list to the lexicon, i.e., the dictionary (DICT), may contain material which is considered ill-formed by the MSCs of the language. This problem is related to Scobbie’s (1991:1) “interaction problem”, i.e., the need to make explicit the way in which constraints, rules and representations interact. In the case of MSCs, the interaction problem can be stated as follows: how can ill-formed material be present in the DICT if the DICT contains constraints, i.e., MSCs, against ill-formed material? The Theory of Constraints and Repair Strategies (TCRS) proposed by Paradis (1988a, 1988b, 1990, 1993, this volume), along with Optimality Theory (e.g., Itô and Mester, this volume, and McCarthy, this volume) but in contrast with Declarative Phonology (e.g., Scobbie, this volume), claims explicitly that the DICT can contain material which is identified as ill-formed by post-morphemic constraints (see Paradis and Prunet 1989a:331; Bagemihl 1991:641; Paradis and El Fenne 1991, 1992, 1993; and Ulrich 1991 for other instances of underlying ill-formedness). To solve this interaction problem, Paradis (1993, this volume) suggests that phonological constraints are active in the lexicon (the component where words are morphologically derived) and the post-lexical level alone, not in the DICT. Structures of the DICT may be identified as ill-formed only when going through the lexicon. The theory of phonology which emerges from this position clearly contradicts the commonly-held view that DICT entries are constrained by MSCs.

In this paper we will discuss several cases of the phonology of loan words. We will show that loan words are adapted phonologically to meet certain constraints on possible words or morphemes imposed on them by the borrowing language. Most significantly, such constraints are defined on the level of lexical representation. To our knowledge so-called “surface phonetic constraints” (henceforth SPC’s) play no role in the phonology of loan words, nor indeed in any other part of phonology. Our examples show that deep phonotactic constraints, constraints not necessarily reflected on the surface, are the drums to which loan words must march. This is not to say that all aspects of loan word phonological behaviour are now understood. Many mysterious facts still remain unexplained. We do claim that substantial aspects of this phenomenon may be understood by assuming that the systematic phonemic level of generative phonology is the level on which the constraints controlling loan word phonological behaviour are defined.

On définit généralement les séries verbales (ou constructions verbales sérielles) comme des constructions dans lesquelles apparaît une séquence de deux ou plusieurs lexèmes verbaux pour former le prédicat de la proposition.

La problématique des séries verbales a reçu de la part des auteurs plusieurs interprétations parfois divergentes. Dans cet article nous allons proposer une analyse des constructions dites à verbes sériels en les reliant d’une part à la possibilité qu’ont les verbes pleins de fonctionner parfois comme auxiliaires et d’autre part à la possibilité pour un V′, c’est-à-dire une projection de niveau 1 d’un verbe en termes de X-barre, de recevoir en position adjointe des constituants syntaxiques de type CP, IP, VP, V′ et V.

Nous soutiendrons l’hypothèse que certaines constructions verbales sérielles qu’on observe dans les langues Gbe2 sont à relier à la possibilité pour ces langues de présenter des sujets nuls dans le cas d’adjonction d’un CP ou d’un IP à un V′.

It is proposed that failure to consistently produce inflectional morphology by Mandarin-speaking learners of English is due to properties of the LI prosodic phonology which are transferred into the interlanguage grammar. While English requires inflection to be adjoined to the Prosodic Word, Mandarin does not permit this structure. Inflection in Mandarin is instead incorporated into the PWd of the stem to which it attaches. It is shown that Mandarin speakers fall into two groups in their treatment of English inflectional morphology. One group of learners is sensitive to the need for a unified analysis of inflection. They recognize that English does not permit a stem-internal analysis of this morphology, but as their grammars do not permit adjunction, inflection is deleted across-the-board. For the other group, inflection surfaces variably, for those stimuli where the shape of the stem enables it to be incorporated into the PWd, as in the L1.

This article argues that VOS structures in Romanian are derived from a basic VSO word order and, consequently, involve object raising out of VP, across the subject left in situ. Binding interactions and the availability of raising quantified NPs clause-medially provide syntactic support for an A-movement analysis of the raised objects. In contrast to other languages that allow (or require) movement of objects to argumental positions, it is argued that in Romanian VOS structures the object does not move for the purposes of Case checking nor does object raising entail a strong, definite interpretation of the moved NP. Rather, object raising is an instance of de-focussing, made possible by a strong nominal feature on the abstract verb v.

This article explores long head movement configurations in Breton. Its purpose is twofold. First it contributes to existing work by demonstrating that Breton long head movement is motivated by information structure. The operation of general economy principles, made sensitive to information structure, determines many of the properties of the Breton construction. Secondly, it is argued that the derivation of the Breton construction does not involve movement per se; minimality conditions on movement are not central to the derivation. Instead, the remaining properties of the construction are attributed to a semantic property of tense-aspect markers which is represented at the LF interface. This work bears on the issue of how to model the interpretive dependency between auxiliaries and main verbs and raises questions concerning the interaction between the stylistic component, information structure, and the LF interface.

This article argues for the existence of expressive palatalization (E-Pal) – a phonologically unmotivated process that applies in sound symbolism, diminutive constructions, and babytalk registers. It is proposed that E-Pal is grounded in iconic sound-meaning associations exploiting acoustic properties of palatalized consonants and thus is inherently different from regular phonological palatalization (P-Pal). A cross-linguistic survey of patterns of E-Pal in 37 languages shows that it exhibits a set of properties different from P-Pal. The case study focuses on patterns of palatalization in Japanese mimetic vocabulary and babytalk. Two experiments testing native speaker intuitions of these patterns revealed that both patterns exhibit place and manner asymmetries typical of cross-linguistic patterns of E-Pal. The cross-linguistic survey, the two experiments, and analysis of the origins and structural differences of E-Pal and P-Pal provide strong empirical and theoretical motivation to distinguish the two.

Does phonological conditioning have a privileged status in allomorphic alternations? Most synchronic descriptions appear to assume that if simple phonological conditions can account for some alternation, they automatically constitute the relevant factors chosen by speakers in their internalized grammars (but cf. Hooper 1976:87 or Klausenburger 1979:29–36 for divergent views). Intuitive notions of simplicity cannot provide a solution because simplicity is actually an empirical issue (cf. Chomsky 1965:37–47). The answer can only come from the analysis of external evidence, i.e., errors, language acquisition, historical changes, etc.