The status of subject as a linguistic universals is commonly assumed. For example, the classification of the word order of a language as SVO, SOV, etc. presupposes the universal occurrence of subject; many language universale such as Mithun’s (1984) hierarchy for noun incorporation are stated in terms of subject; and, some theories such as Relational Grammar take subject as a primitive.

This paper offers an account of the different behaviour of prenorninal constituents such as his and su in the examples in (1) which are associated with one of the thematic roles assigned by the nouns picture and foto respectively. I argue that the prenominal element su is base-generated as a clitic adjoined to a nominal head in Spanish, whereas his in English attains its prenominal position via NP-movement to a nominal specifier.

Cet article étudie la dérivation de deux types de dépendances Aʹ – les relatives et les structures à dislocation à gauche – dans le cadre du programme minimaliste. Le mandarin montre qu'une relative contenant soit un pronom résomptif soit une lacune et une dislocation à lacune sont dérivées par l'opération Accorder et sont soumises aux contraintes de localité et qu'une dislocation résomptive est dérivée par Match sans conditions d’îlot. «Transferts multiples» et « épellations multiples » sont légitimés dans les dépendances établies par Accorder mais pas dans celles dérivées par Match. Le choix du mécanisme dérivationnel dépend de l'interprétabilité des traits formels attachés à la sonde ainsi qu’à la cible dans une dépendance Aʹ.

This paper examines a previously identified but so far imprecisely defined split in the historical phonology of Resígaro (Arawakan). I argue that this development was a simple case of allophonic redistribution or primary split, in which word-final allophones of *a merged with ɯ. However, comparative data offers no evidence for the existence of ɯ before the operation of the split in question. This apparent paradox can be resolved by the plausible hypothesis that ɯ entered the language via the massive influx of morphemes from Bora, an unrelated language of the Bora-Muinane family. Only after that were some contextual allophones of *a merged with ɯ. This is the first solidly justified case of loan phonology in Resígaro and it provides further support to the hypothesis that Bora influence on Resígaro is not a result of the language's obsolescent status.

Montreal became famous in socio-psychological and sociohnguistic circles half a century ago, when a group of researchers—Lambert, Hodgson, Gardner, and Fil-lenbaum — invented a new methodology to measure speech evaluations indirectly. They came up with an innovative technique, called matched guise, which allows researchers to access subjects’ reactions without asking for their opinions directly or doing extensive field work. In 2004, another matched guise study of the evaluational reactions of Montrealers added new aspects to the original methodological design in order to test some of its limits. The fundamental methodological difference was to include members of different language groups in a representative sample of the population of Montreal so that multivariate analysis could determine the extent to which belonging to a specific linguistic group could actually account for reactions to spoken language. This analysis reveals that some earlier interpretations should be realigned.

This contribution explores a methodological problem in language acquisition studies. Much research in language acquisition has shown that children use statistical learning as a strategy in the acquisition of their native language (Saffran et al. 1996 and many others). Frequency of occurrence is also believed to determine the order of acquisition of phonological structures in the construction of the grammar (Boersma and Levelt 2000, Levelt et al. 2000, van de Weijer and Sloos 2013). How do we obtain the relevant frequency information for acquisition studies?

Ideally, we should take into account children's speech or child-directed speech (CDS), depending on the purposes of the investigation. Investigations into the construction of the lexicon and acquisition of the grammar depend on the input, the perception, and the lexical storage of the child, and therefore, frequency data on CDS seem most desirable.

Substance-free phonology (SFP) is based on the hypothesis that phonological computation makes no reference to phonetic substance, and that phonological features are treated as arbitrary symbols for the purposes of computation. However, phonologists within the SFP tradition disagree about whether the content of phonological features is innate or learned (“emergent”), and if learned, whether the acquisition process is based on phonological patterning alone or refers to phonetic substance. In the present article we identify predictive differences between these accounts. We conclude that there is an innate basis to phonological features, but that featural content is not innate. We suggest that a hybrid phonetic-phonological approach to feature content acquisition may ultimately be the most successful.

The articles in this issue were developed from presentations in the Intersections workshop held concurrently with NWAV44. The goals of that workshop were to widen and deepen the study of linguistic variation by creating intersections with other approaches to linguistic analysis.

This paper presents a case study of verb phrase ellipses with adverbially modified antecedents. It is shown experimentally that there is a preference for resolving ellipses in certain embedded clauses with unmodified VPs. The effect is hypothesized to reflect a general requirement to minimize the complexity of accommodated content. Four experiments support this hypothesis over plausible candidate hypotheses, including syntactic approaches to the effect (Matsuo 2001; Sailor 2014).

The motivations of sound change are almost exclusively treated as articulatory phenomena, even when the source and the target sounds are generated by very different articulatory mechanisms and no transitional stages can be found. What will be argued here is that seemingly regular place shifts in the articulation of consonants, such as the ones known under the term of “Rhenish Velarization” or “Rhenish Gutturalization” are actually manifestations of acoustically induced variants, very similar to those known as “slips of the ear”, which differ from one another only by the presence or absence of a single acoustic feature. The data assembled from a larger Rhenish corpus show that the operative process entails variations between labial, dental and velar place of articulation and involves stops, fricatives and nasals; its directionality is basically undetermined. Data from other sources and languages suggest that such place variations may be much more general than previously thought.

This paper attempts to extend a theory of description for songs belonging to non-literate societies; this theory was first described by R. H. Robins, of the Department of Linguistics of the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London and a former colleague of the late J. R. Firth. The author has tried to develop the theory a little further and has applied it to the analysis of two Haida love songs.

The purpose of this note is to introduce a restricted class of transformational grammars, the deletion grammars, and to use them to discuss the names of natural numbers in Chinese. Hereafter these names are referred to as Chinese number names.

Transformations and transformational grammars were introduced into linguistics by N. Chomsky. By now a vast literature on transformations has grown up. However, many of the transformational grammars appearing in this literature lack precision and rigor. In particular, it is not always clear what corpus they generate because of the multiplicity, complexity, and inadequate definition of the transformations contained in these grammars.

Traditional approaches to natural language processing (NLP) can be considered construction-based. That is to say, they employ surface oriented, language specific rules, whether in the form of an Augmented Transition Network (ATN), logic grammar or some other grammar/parsing formalism. The problems of such approaches have always been apparent; they involve large sets of rules, often ad hoc, and their adequacy with respect to the grammar of the language is difficult to ensure.

This article reports on a synchronic analysis in the surface variation between the conditional and the imperfect or pluperfect indicative in hypothetical clauses headed by the subordinator si. The empirical basis of the study is a corpus of French spoken in the national capital region of Canada, which comprises 120 informants. The study also has a diachronic component concerning the evolution of the variable based on a collection of published works since Early Modern French. The most interesting aspect of the results is the system wherein the morphological exponent of the verb is determined by the modal reading of the utterance. It is revealed that this grammatical trait was attested at earlier steps in the development of the language and that it helps to resolve a form-function asymmetry resulting from use of the indicative imperfect in a conditional context.

Like all pidgins, the lexicon of Chinook Jargon has a number of sources; although the core vocabulary is chiefly of Chinookan and Nootkan origin, English and French have also made large contributions, the percentage of each varying from time to time and from place to place. As Sankoff (1980: 145) points out, “Chinook Jargon remained highly variable throughout its history. Its vocabulary changed radically over time depending on the locus and proportions of its various groups of speakers, and because of the increasing dominance of English over time.” While most of the lexical items in the Jargon have been more or less satisfactorily accounted for, especially those of French and English origin, there remain a score or so of words for which an etymology either is not recorded or is of dubious accuracy. For some time, I have been attempting to track down the origins of as many of these ‘mystery words’ as possible, or to offer more probable sources than those usually cited. In this paper, I deal only with those items whose origin is apparently in or through French.

I argue here for the necessity of negative constraints, specifically the claim in (1). This position contrasts with that taken by Declarative Phonology (Scobbie 1992; this volume) and with the view that positive and negative constraints are equivalent (Itô 1988:32).