The distinction between complements and peripheral elements, which is made in valency theory, applies not only to verbs and adjectives but also to nouns (cf. Matthews, 1981: 231–233), as is shown by examples such as the following: (1a) You will not find many signposts to Exeter on Dartmoor, (1b) You will not find many signs for Exeter on Dartmoor. (2a) He presented his arguments against the proposal at the meeting. (2b) He presented his objections to the proposal at the meeting.

The most serious recent work on the theory of coordination has probably been done in terms of three theories of grammatical structure: Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG–see especially Gazdar, 1981; Gazdar et al., 1982; 1985; Sag et al., 1985; Schachter & Mordechay, 1983), Categorial Grammar (CG–see especially Steedman, 1985; Dowty, 1985) and Transformational Grammar (TG–notably Williams, 1978, 1981; Neijt, 1979; van Oirsouw, 1985, 1987). Each of these approaches is different in important respects: for instance, according to whether or not they allow deletion rules, and according to the kinds of information which they allow to be encoded in syntactic features. However, behind these differences lies an important similarity: in each case the theory concerned makes two assumptions about grammatical structure in general (i.e. about all structures, including coordinate ones):

I The basic syntagmatic relations in sentence-structure are part-whole relations (consituent structure) and temporal order; note that this is true whether or not syntactic structure is seen as a ‘projection’ of lexical properties, since these lexical properies are themselves defined in terms of constituent structure and temporal order.

The aim of this paper is to examine two constructions, It-Cleft Sentences (e.g. It is me who/that wrote the book) and Wh-Cleft Sentences (e.g. The one who wrote the book is me), which constitute a problematic area of contemporary research in grammar.

It-Cleft Sentences and Wh-Cleft Sentences (henceforth ICS and WCS, respectively) appear in a number of languages which are typologically different from each other, and have some, but not all, of their characteristics in common. In Malayalam, for example, in the configuration of the ICS, S¯ is not recognizable: cf. Mohanan, 1978. Both ICS and WCS are present in many European languages (although ICS seem to have a more limited geographic distribution) and in Chinese. In the Semitic languages (Arabic, Hebrew) only the WCS type occurs. The present paper will deal mainly with English constructions and will also present, at the syntactic level, a comparative analysis between the constructions in English and the corresponding constructions in the Romance languages (French, Italian and Spanish). This comparison is useful in that it allows us to study the existence of a field of variability in the syntactic properties characterizing the way these types of sentences are realized in European languages.

Most phonological textbooks and treatises do not define lenition or weakening, as it is also called. Instead they provide a list of examples of processes which they wish to term ‘lenitions’ or ‘weakenings’. It is then hoped that the reader will deduce a correct definition. This is what is done in, for example, Lass & Anderson (1975: 150) and Sommerstein (1977: 228). One of the few available definitions of lenition is to be derived from Vennemann's definition of relative weakness (cited in Hyman, 1975: 165): ‘A segment X is said to be weaker than a segment Y if Y goes through an X stage on its way to zero.’ According to this definition, lenition is primarily a diachronic process affecting the sound structure of languages. It may also have synchronie reflexes (such as initial consonant mutations in the Celtic languages), but these are called ‘lenitions’ by an extension of the term from diachrony.

Over the course of the last twenty-five years, linguistic theory has established itself as providing one of the major routes towards an understanding of the human mind. With increasing precision we have been able to address the problem of articulating in detail the structured capacities the human mind brings to the problem of language acquisition. Along the way there have been doubters, much of the doubt having arisen because of the apparently unbridgeable gap the theory demands between the language user's capacity and the interaction of this capacity with more general cognitive skills. Such doubters as there were received little reassurance from looking at work on performance or language use, for there has been little more than speculative philosophy on the one hand (most notably by Paul Grice, 1975) and articulation of detailed processing mechanisms on the other (e.g. Fodor, 1978; Frazier, 1979; Frazier & Fodor, 1978), without any overall theory. J. A. Fodor (1982, 1983) has led the field in cognitive psychology with his representational theory of mind. But we have till now had no theory of the central cognitive mechanism. Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1986) provides us with a contender. It makes specific claims about the central cognitive mechanism and about the relation of natural language to that central mechanism. Against this framework, we are at last able to formulate precise proposals about the grammar-cognition interface, and in so doing provide answers to the psychological reality questions which have gone unanswered for so long: What is the relation of grammars to utterance–interpretation? What is the nature of the link between grammars and the central cognitive mechanism? What is the relation between a speaker's knowledge of his language and his general knowledge?

The aim of this paper is to defend the autosegmental account of nonconcatenative morphology originally proposed by McCarthy (1979, 1981), which has been seriously challenged by Hudson (1986). It is argued that an autosegmental analysis of nonconcatenative morphology such as that of Arabic still remains a better alternative than what Hudson proposes. We first present a brief overview of McCarthy's theory of non-concatenative morphology. We then review Hudson's criticisms of such an autosegmental approach to Arabic morphology and we end up by showing why his reanalysis does not constitute a better alternative than the criticized autosegmental account.

Among the most striking morphosyntactic characteristics shared by the Celtic languages are their elaborate consonant mutation systems. It is clear from the most cursory inspection that in such systems, the range of possible syntactic relations between mutation triggers and their targets is subject to principled limits. In a recent paper, Zwicky (1984) has hypothesized that trigger-target relations are universally restricted by the constraint in (1): (1) The trigger determining a rule feature for a morphophonemic rule must be adjacent to the affected word and c-command it (Zwicky, 1984:389).