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

L’Objet de cette étude est une analyse comparative et critique de deux ouvrages portant sur la syntaxe structurale du français, celui de Knud Togeby Structure immanente de la langue française (SI) et celui de Lucien Tesnière Eléments de syntaxe structurale (ESS).

Nous avons essayé de dégager les principes d’analyse syntaxiques utilisés par ces deux auteurs, de marquer dans quelle mesure leur méthode et les résultats qu’ils ont obtenus sont originaux à l’égard de la grammaire traditionnelle et s’ils apportent des solutions suffisantes à tous les problèmes de la syntaxe.

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.

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.

In this study, we examined to what extent cross-linguistic influence is observed in the production of unstressed vowels in Mexican learners of L2 English and L3 Russian. Phonological spectral vowel reduction is a widespread process present in both English and Russian, but not in Spanish. In total, 18 Mexican learners, six American speakers, five Russian speakers and six Mexican speakers performed a delayed word repetition task and a sentence completion task. Euclidean distances and temporal values were measured to assess vowel reduction in 1,192 tokens. Mexican learners showed hybrid values of vowel reduction in both foreign languages: while they tended to use quality cues in the case of the L2, they relied on duration cues in the case of the L3. Our results do not show any direct evidence of cross-linguistic influence of temporal values or vowel quality from the L1 or the L2 on the L3. We examine these findings in light of similar studies and current L3 acquisition models.

One well-known difference between British and American English concerns the verb prevent. In both varieties, the verb is commonly found in constructions with NP from -ing, as in […] the extreme temperature of the cold tenderises the flesh and prevents it from becoming tough (NOW Corpus 2010), and in British English it is also commonly found in corresponding constructions lacking the preposition from, as in Morgan […] fastened a belt around his wrists to prevent him saving himself (NOW Corpus 2011). There are major unresolved issues relating to the two types of constructions illustrated. One question is whether the constructions involve object control or a Raising rule. One novel idea proposed is that an ACC -ing analysis should be available for the pattern without from. The British and American segments of the NOW corpus offer good sources of data, which have not been used in earlier work on prevent.

This report contains the results of a preliminary study dealing with the ways in which children between five and six years of age discriminate and learn phonetic elements of spoken language. In particular, it describes differences on a verbal discrimination learning task of stops vs fricatives in CVC syllables.

This paper focuses on genitive interrogatives in Iraqi Arabic. I argue that these constructions are inherently D-linked (Discourse-Linked). Similarly to D-linked interrogatives, when genitive interrogatives appear in content questions in which both the resumptive strategy and the gap strategy are possible, the genitive interrogatives have a D-N structure when the gap strategy is employed and a D-φ-N structure when the resumptive strategy is employed. I then propose the following hypothesis: what defines D-linking is the presence of a domain restriction in the form of an overt noun.

Person features play a role in narrow-syntax processes. However, a person feature is often characterized as [±participant], a characterization that suggests pragmatic or semantic features. Relatedly, person has been the subject of an ongoing debate in the literature: one family of approaches argues that 3rd person is an elsewhere case, while another argues that it is a valued interpretable feature. This article provides a programatic argument that this disagreement has a principled basis. I argue that the representation of the features we identify as person changes between narrow syntax and the syntax-semantics interface. The tests and empirical descriptions are incongruent because they target different modules of the grammar and in turn different grammatical objects. The article thus contributes to our understanding of the division of labour among the modules, with a special focus on the autonomous status of narrow syntax.

Predication is widely considered to be a fundamental feature of human language and conceptual structure. This article offers a reassessment of the central role that predication plays within current theories of grammar, by calling into question the universality of predication and its nature as a primitive, irreducible notion. It proposes a new definition of predicate, as a complex emergent entity derived from the alignment of two independent elements of conceptual structure: thematic role assignment and headedness.

We report a study that tests children’s knowledge of an effect of Principle C of the binding theory: In the adult grammar of English and French, coreference between a main clause object pronoun and a non-pronominal subject of a sentence-final temporal clause is permitted, whereas coreference between a subject pronoun and the subject of a temporal clause is blocked. In an act-out task, both French-speaking adults and children aged 3–7 were found to be sensitive to the position of a main clause pronoun (subject vs object) in selecting a referent for the subject of a temporal clause, permitting coreference more frequently when the pronoun was in object position. This result replicates earlier work done on English. A sentence judgement task produced clear results only for adults. Results from the act-out suggest that children are relatively inept at integrating non-mentioned participants into their interpretation of sentences. We suggest that children’s knowledge of the principle C effect we tested constitutes a “poverty of the stimulus” argument for innateness.

This study presents a partial analysis of nouns ending in orthographic -sion, -tion (or -ion) and morphophonemic variations between these nouns and related stems. It deals with an area traditionally called derivation.

The frame of reference is that of Trager and Smith, Outline of English Structure, supplemented by subsequent revisions and additions to the general theory developed by the authors in their teaching. For the purposes of this study the morphemic analysis will be limited to “postmorphemes,” i.e., morphemes occurring at the end of the word. Everything which precedes the postmorpheme(s) will be called the “stem” and will not be further segmented. The “stem” may occur elsewhere as an independent word (mutation: mutate) or in composition with different postmorpheme(s) (ambition: ambitious). The following special symbols will be used: √ … “morphemes”; √ … “allomorphs”; √ …/ “morphophonemes”; ∽ “varies with.” In three cases (Y, T, S) a small capital letter is used as a morphophonemic symbol; these are denned below.