The derivational system of Sechelt (Coast Salish) includes stative formations serving a variety of functions, one of which is the indication of possession in certain constructions. A sampling of stative forms is offered here, along with observations on their derivation. The purpose of this study is to propose, on the basis of such a survey, a generalized conceptual definition of the stative aspect in Sechelt and to suggest reasons for certain restrictions in the use of statives in possessive structures.

L’évolution du modal should s’est caractérisée par l’émergence progressive d’une interprétation non-déontique en construction hypotaxique. En effet, certaines constructions comportant should, du type It is surprising that he should say that, révèle un conflit sur une valeur construite ; celle-ci n’est alors plus repérée comme «effective» mais comme «fictive», et est considérée comme inattendue. Cette contribution se propose d’analyser le lien entre représentation attendue/inattendue et interaction de marqueurs hypotaxiques. L’examen d’exemples authentiques d’anglais contemporain révèle, en effet, la coexistence de plusieurs formes après la séquence It is + adjectif de valuation : constructions en for … to, propositions introduites par that (ou ∅) comportant should ou une forme assertée ou une base verbale. Il s’agit de montrer les différences de repérages entre ces formes et de rendre compte de l’apparition de l’une plutt que de l’autre en contexte.

Naturalistic data are a useful source for language acquisition research. Recently, the emphasis has been placed on using denser corpora, in order to capture a more accurate picture of child language development. However, working with large amounts of data raises resource issues, since it is time-consuming to record and to transcribe. In this article, I focus on what would be the ideal duration of a naturalistic recording for it to be considered a representative enough sample of children's linguistic behaviours to observe the acquisition of words and sounds. Some of the results suggest that 30 minutes of recording may be enough to capture these specific developments, but these results are discussed in the perspective of what an ideal session could be.

Cet article propose une analyse comparée des styles conversationnels des néerlandophones et des francophones de Belgique tels qu'ils se présentent dans déux debats télévisés comparables diffusés sur les deux chaînes de télévision publiques beiges (l'une néerlandophone, l'autre francophone). L'étude des marqueurs discursifs fonctionnant comme «ouvreurs» ainsi que I'étude de la gestion des tours de parole, et notamment des chevauchements, font apparaître un style plus pondéré pour les néerlandophones et aussi plus hésitant et plus consensuel que le style francophone, les données pour le français confirmant ainsi ce qui a déjà été observé pour le style conversationnel des locuteurs franàais (de France).

Nissenbaum (2000) and Heck and Himmelreich (2017) (henceforth HH) are two prominent works that are noteworthy for focusing on the interaction of multiple movement dependencies (MMDs) and parasitic gaps (PGs). However, these two works consider disjoint and contrasting types of data paradigms. In this squib, I take both types of paradigms into consideration. In doing so, there are three inter-related questions that arise for our understanding of PGs (and in particular for PGs that involve certain MMDs). The first question asks what the correct descriptive generalizations about PG paradigms are. Going beyond such a generalization, we can also ask how to properly account for the data (and whether a unified analysis is possible). Finally, and more specifically, we can ask how to account for the compositional semantics of PGs, especially those involving MMDs.

This article aims to better understand how Negative Polarity Items (NPIs) come into existence and how they change over time. It argues that an expression can become an NPI if its semantics makes it pragmatically useful in negative or downward entailing contexts, often because the meaning leads to pragmatic strength, but sometimes because its semantics leads to pragmatic attenuation. Special attention is given to two patterns involving pragmatic strength that can emerge historically: Negative Concord (NC) and what I call NPI Dualization. Both patterns, I argue, involve a pairing between an NPI that has an existential-like or low scalar semantics with a homophonous but semantically different expression with a freer distribution; the homophone is semantically negative in Negative Concord but semantically universal in NPI Dualization. The article argues that pragmatic strength plays an important role in the history of NPIs, both in their origin and in NPI Dualization, but is not directly relevant for their licensing synchronically. Instead, it argues for a return to the view that NPIs are lexically marked by a semantically meaningless distributional feature that needs to be valued syntactically. On a conceptual level, the article argues that historical shifts may be matters of likelihood.

This article investigates the loss of aboutness topics in preverbal position in the history of French, using a corpus-based research on preverbal accusative objects. A comparison of Old and Middle French with Modern French reveals that new-information focalization had disappeared by the 14th century, whereas aboutness topicalization had in turn vanished by the end of the 16th century, along with other marked constructions. Combined with the generative premise that independent pragmatic factors should not trigger syntactic change, the results of this study suggest the reanalysis of the grammar as V-to-I in Renaissance French is responsible for blocking the derivation of aboutness topicalization. An alternative proposal based on phase extension and on Relativized Minimality, in a version affecting some types of A′-movement, relates those two diachronic shifts. The article concludes with the idea that the study of marked constructions may be recast as offering diagnostics on broader syntactic changes.

One of the conundrums of the historical phonology of Spanish is the seemingly intrusive -s- in the word hasta ‘until.’ Its putative etymon, the Arabic ḥattā ‘up to, until, as far as, even, in order to’ does not have this -s- and, as far as is known, has never had it. The most recent serious discussion of and accounting for this -s- that I am aware of is that presented by Malkiel (1979) in which, dismissing previous lexical and phonological attempts as inadequate, he suggests that hasta (earlier fasta) resulted from a contamination of its predecessor fata, coming unambiguously from ḥattā, with a Romance form fascas ‘nearly, almost,’ derived in part from Latin usque ‘until.’ Both fata and fascas then went out of use, and fasta (> hasta) alone remains. In spite of the wealth of documentation adduced by Malkiel, his evidence adds up to this: before roughly 1300, there was a -word fata ‘until’ and a word fascas ‘almost’; after 1300 both fell out of use, and there was a new word fasta ‘until.’ The rest is speculation.

The purpose of this paper is to show that the term “palatal” has been used with various meanings and to redefine or establish a consistency of terminology concerning this term with respect to palatalized and central consonants. Confusion arising from the various divisions of the tongue into articulators and from the misuse of the above articulatory terms has led to incorrect phonological solutions.

The status of Russian palatalized and palatal consonants has been under discussion recently. Dunatov claims in a recent article that Russian palatal consonants cannot be palatalized and suggests three different orders of palatals to distinguish “the three articulatory sets of palatals encountered in the Slavic languages”: pre-palatal, medio-palatal, and post-palatal. However, he fails to state the distribution of them in Russian or the other Slavic languages.

The ways in which the vowel system of Vulgar Latin (VL) differs from that of Classical Latin (CL) have been well documented. These differences arise from historical innovations including:

• (1) the monophthongization of the diphthongs [oj] œ and [aj] œ to [ē] and respectively,

• (2) the lowering of the short vowels to respectively, and the consequent introduction of a new phonemic degree of vowel height for the front unrounded and back rounded vowels,

• (3) the neutralization of the phonemic CL length differences, all stressed vowels now being long whatever the length of their CL source, and all unstressed vowels being short, and

• (4) the introduction of phonemic stress, since the position of stress is no longer synchronically predictable because of the neutralization of vowel length mentioned in (3).

The experiment reported on here investigating the syllabic attachment of post-vocalic nasals and l grew out of an earlier experiment which compared the post-vocalic liquids r and l (Laubstein 1989). Using the error elicitation technique described in Motley et al (1983), induced errors involving Vr and Vl sequences were compared. The two sequences behaved quite differently, suggesting different syllabic attachments for the two liquids. Vowel-r sequences consistently interacted with single vowels or vowel glide sequences and such sequences never split up, supporting the hypothesis (based on naturally occurring errors) that vowel-r sequences belong to a uni-positional peak constituent and supporting Kahn’s argument that English r, like w and y, is a glide (Kahn 1976). Vowel-l sequences, on the other hand, did split apart; errors involved the l alone or the vowel alone, significantly more often than they involved the r or V alone from Vr sequences (Wilcoxon p <.0001). This supported the hypothesis that the r and l belonged to different constituents. The relative frequency of errors is commonly assumed to reflect constituency. See, for instance, Stemberger and Treiman’s (1986) arguments regarding different positions in the onset. Nevertheless, such sequences also acted as single units, and in this respect behaved like vowel-r sequences. In addition, when such sequences were involved as a unit they interacted with single vowels or vowel glide sequences, suggesting that at some level of analysis they belonged to the same constituents as vowels. Speech errors which involve interactions between two items, or the substitution of one item for another, are in general structure-preserving. They involve units of the same constituent type at some level of analysis; for instance, noun phrase with noun phrase, preposition with preposition, verb with verb, and at the sub-lexical level, syllabic constituent type a with syllabic constituent type a (Laubstein 1987).

The impact of anatomical transformations on the acquisition of sounds by infants remains poorly understood. Using the Variable Linear Articulator? Model, we simulate vowel production in the course of non-uniform vocal tract growth. Production abilities related to vocal tract growth are described by simulating French vowels, generated by assuming that sensori-motor control abilities are identical in newborns and adults. Despite small vocal tract size, an infant is able to produce all the vowels of its first language. The recurrence of certain units in the babbling inventory is attributable to motor control immaturity and cognitive abilities. Simulation of articulatory fibers provides a more accurate view of the relation between articulatory strategies and acoustic targets. The results highlight differences relative to labial and lingual articulators.

Drawn from ethnographic data collected in a small coastal village on Cape Breton Island, where tourism-related industries are emerging in response to the deep sea fishing crisis that hit the area in the early 1980s, this analysis focusses on the effects of tourism on linguistic practices and representations. It is argued that these effects are not without consequence on the way French-speakers in the region (re)construct their identity.

Increased contact with outsiders leads to two seemingly contradictory tendencies: differentiation and standardization. These two strategies exert a marked influence on the social structure of the Acadian community. In this particular case, speakers must constantly negotiate an equilibrium between the desire to assert their specificity through discriminating traits that showcase their linguistic as well as cultural differences, on the one hand, and their need to communicate with a broader audience, on the other, the latter entailing a certain degree of linguistic standardization. This analysis focusses on how these speakers manage to perform this balancing act between differentiation and standardization.

In a recent reply to my review of The Language Lottery, David Lightfoot (1985) attempts to rebut the claims which I made about the viability of language learning without task-specific innate principles. The basic thrust of Lightfoot’s book is that there are innate linguistic principles which constrain the form of grammars and play a crucial role in language acquisition. I referred to this view as “special nativism” and contrasted it with “general nativism”, the thesis that genetic structuring of the mind is of a more general sort and does not include principles or notions specific to language. I suggested that special nativism is linked to a particular syntactic theory (transformational grammar) and that a theory of language learning more compatible with general nativism could well emerge from a different type of syntactic analysis. As an illustration of this, I briefly outlined two counterproposals, one pertaining to the interpretation of the indefinite pronoun one and the other to binding theory. In his reply to my review, Lightfoot misinterprets my suggestions, pointing to supposed inadequacies which would undermine the more general point I advanced.

Visser (1973:1968) gives a long list of verbs “more or less incompatible” with the progressive that have this in common: in their general sense