The purpose of this paper is to provide a plausibility argument for a new way of thinking about intra-personal morphosyntactic variation. The idea is embedded within the framework of the Minimalist Program, and makes use of notions of feature interpretability and feature checking. Specifically, I argue that underspecification of uninterpretable features in a matching relation with interpretable features allows us to model categoricality and variability within a single system. Unlike many current approaches to intra-personal variation (which involve multiple grammars or building stochastic weightings into the grammar itself), the system attempts to predict (rather than capture) frequencies of variants. It does this by combining an evaluation metric for the acquisition of uninterpretable features with the standard properties of features and syntactic operations in the Minimalist framework. The argument is made through a case study of was/were variation in a Scottish dialect.

This paper examines two contrasting perspectives on morphological analysis, and considers inflectional patterns that bear on the choice between these alternatives. On what is termed an ABSTRACTIVE perspective, surface word forms are regarded as basic morphotactic units of a grammatical system, with roots, stems and exponents treated as abstractions over a lexicon of word forms. This traditional standpoint is contrasted with the more CONSTRUCTIVE perspective of post-Bloomfieldian models, in which surface word forms are ‘built’ from sub-word units. Part of the interest of this contrast is that it cuts across conventional divisions of morphological models. Thus, realization-based models are morphosyntactically ‘word-based’ in the sense that they regard words as the minimal meaningful units of a grammatical system. Yet morphotactically, these models tend to adopt a constructive ‘root-based’ or ‘stem-based’ perspective. An examination of some form-class patterns in Saami, Estonian and Georgian highlights advantages of an abstractive model, and suggests that these advantages derive from the fact that sets of words often predict other word forms and determine a morphotactic analysis of their parts, whereas sets of sub-word units are of limited predictive value and typically do not provide enough information to recover word forms.

This paper is a critique of two foundational assumptions of generative work culminating in the Minimalist Program: the assumption that, as a matter of conceptual necessity, language has a ‘double-interface property’ and the related assumption that phonology has a realizational function with respect to syntax-semantics. The issues are broached through a critique of Holmberg's (2000) analysis of Stylistic Fronting in Icelandic. We show that, although empirically motivated, and although based on the double-interface assumption, this analysis is incompatible with that assumption and with the notion of (phonological) realization. Independently of Stylistic Fronting, we argue that the double-interface assumption is a problematic legacy of Saussure's conception of the linguistic sign and that, conceptually, it is neither explanatory nor necessary. The Representational Hypothesis (e.g. Burton-Roberts 2000) develops a Peircian conception of the relation between sound and meaning that breaks with the Saussurian tradition, though in a way consistent with minimalist goals. Other superficially similar approaches (Lexeme–Morpheme Base Morphology, Distributed Morphology, Jackendoff's Parallel Architecture) are discussed; it is argued that they, too, perpetuate aspects of Saussurian thought.

This study investigates whether children learning Irish as a first language show a preference for one or other of the two mechanisms for relative clause formation used in the adult language (movement and binding), and what details of the grammar of Irish relative clauses children are sensitive to. Our results suggest that Irish-speaking children have acquired both a movement and a binding mechanism for relativization by age five, and that they additionally have a non-movement mechanism for forming subject relatives, one that is not licensed in adult Irish. The data is discussed in the context of other studies of relativization in child language, cross-linguistic evidence and the computation of binding structures in language production and processing.

I'd like to start this brief response to Asudeh & Toivonen's 2006 review article ‘Symptomatic imperfections’ (henceforth SI) with a word of thanks for the careful job they've done and generally collegial manner in which they've done it. They make many good points about Adger (2000; Core syntax – henceforth CS) which will help a great deal in improving the book for any future edition. Because of this, I don't want to dwell on any minor quibbles I have about their comments. Instead, I'd like to focus on some broader conclusions they draw about the theoretical devices used in CS and the perspective taken there. My remarks will address mainly SI's concerns about the feature theory I outlined in CS, and the question of movement.

David Adger raises some interesting issues and makes several valuable points in his ‘Remarks on Minimalist feature theory and Move’ (henceforth MFTM), a response to our review article ‘Symptomatic imperfections’ (henceforth SI) in this journal (Asudeh & Toivonen 2006), which was in part a review of his Core syntax (Adger 2003). In this response, we address some of the points in MFTM. We would also like to set the record straight about some points in SI which we feel have been misrepresented. In several instances, MFTM argues against claims that were not made in SI. Whatever the independent merit of these arguments, we do not wish to defend viewpoints we did not propose in the first place.