This paper examines quasi-monoclausal left-peripheral analyses of English it-clefts. Though attractive because such analyses bring out commonalities between it-clefts on the one hand and focus fronting and wh-questions on the other, the range of word order variations available in English it-clefts reveals that such monoclausal analyses of it-clefts lead to considerable complications of implementation, ultimately undoing the gain in terms of economy that initially would seem to justify them. In particular, we will show that, on closer inspection, the presumed focus fronting in it-clefts cannot be targeting the position deployed for ‘regular’ left-peripheral focus fronting. Moreover, both implementations of the monoclausal analysis discussed make the wrong predictions with respect to the distribution of it-clefts. In particular, as already argued by Hooper & Thompson (1973) and Emonds (1976), English it-clefting, unlike ‘regular’ focus fronting, is not a main clause phenomenon. Given these objections, we conclude that the left-peripheral analyses of it-clefts are ill-founded.

Most discussion surrounding external possessors has centered around dative NPs or clitics in Indo-European or Semitic languages and focused on whether or not such structures are derived via movement. This paper examines external possessors in Chimwiini, a Bantu language that lacks datives. It will be shown that while these constructions share certain structural and semantic restrictions with their counterparts in other languages, these properties do not straightforwardly correlate with arguments for a movement or base-generation analysis. This suggests the derivational mechanics of the constructions involved are independent of the semantic restrictions placed on them.

Orthography has been given marginal status in theoretical linguistics, but it can offer ‘visible’ insights into the invisible mechanisms of grammar. Japanese kanji graphs, Chinese characters used to write Japanese, provide an excellent illustration of this perspective. Our core claim is that the kanji orthography reflects the working of lexeme-based morphology in Japanese grammar. Specifically, we show how the lexeme-based morphological framework developed by Mark Aronoff and Martin Maiden can explain apparently cumbersome and inefficient properties of the kanji usage, its dual pronunciation in particular. Among the findings of this study are the following: (i) the underlying mechanism of the kanji's dual pronunciation is suppletion, native and Sino-Japanese synonyms working as morphomic stems of the same paradigm; (ii) this suppletion emerged and developed as a paradigmatic strategy of synonymy avoidance; and (iii) the large-scale suppletive morphology has long been retained in Japanese because it has served advantageous functions in the maintenance of lexemic isomorphism and in lexical stock expansion. Our findings shed an entirely new light on the bafflingly complex nature of Japanese orthography; it is the complexity of morphology, a grammatical module that is deemed to be the locus of language-specificity.

This paper provides new data from Colloquial Singapore English (CSE) showing a hitherto unnoticed subject–object asymmetry: empty objects, but not empty subjects, exhibit sloppy/quantificational readings. According to a recent theory of argument ellipsis in Japanese/Korean (Oku 1998; S. Kim 1999; Takahashi 2007, 2008a, b, 2010), these readings obtain as a result of the LF-Copy of an overt argument from a full-fledged clause onto the corresponding empty argument position in an elliptical clause. Şener & Takahashi (2010) and Takahashi (2010) hypothesize that this operation is blocked by ϕ-agreement. This hypothesis provides a principled explanation for the subject–object asymmetry in CSE, coupled with the new observation that primary substrates of CSE – Mandarin, Cantonese, Hokkien and Malay – exhibit the same asymmetry as CSE. My analysis has significant implications for the comparative syntax of argument ellipsis and for theories of contact genesis. Among others, the analysis supports the claim (Miyagawa 2010) that Chinese possesses ϕ-agreement despite the lack of morphological manifestations. The results in this paper also provide strong evidence for the general substratist explanation on the emerging grammar of CSE (Bao 2005).

This paper presents new experimental data on Quito Spanish /s/-voicing, which has attracted considerable interest from theoretical phonologists owing to the overapplication of voicing to word-final pre-vocalic /s/. Bermúdez-Otero (2011) singles out Quito /s/-voicing as an important test case for discriminating between two competing theories of phonology–morphosyntax interactions: Output–output correspondence and cyclicity. Overapplication in /s/-voicing cannot be captured using correspondence relationship to a base form, which challenges Output–output correspondence as a theory of opacity. However, the argument only holds insofar as word-final pre-vocalic /s/-voicing is considered phonological, as Output–output correspondence can account for /s/-voicing assuming that it only applies in the phonetics (Colina 2009). We discuss the diverging empirical predictions concerning categoricity and gradience in the surface realisation of voicing processes. We further test these predictions based on acoustic data from seven speakers of Quito Spanish. Evidence from speech rate manipulations shows that some speakers produce more voicing during frication at normal speech rate, compared to fast, maintaining a stable voicing ratio across different speech rates. We argue that for these speakers, /s/-voicing is optional but categorical, and so it ought to be analysed as phonological. This result presents a challenge to the Output–output correspondence approach, but can be accommodated within cyclicity.

Researchers have long sought to determine the strength of the relation between prosody and the interpretation of scopally ambiguous sentences in English involving quantification and negation (e.g. All the men didn't go). While Jackendoff (1972) proposed a one-to-one mapping between sentence-final contour and the scope of negation (falling contour: narrow scope, fall-rise contour: wide scope), in subsequent work, researchers (e.g. Ladd 1980; Ward & Hirschberg 1985; Kadmon & Roberts 1986) disentangled the link between prosody and scope. Even though these pragmatic accounts predict variability in production, they still allow for some correlation between scope and prosody. To date, we lack systematic evidence to bear on this discussion. Here, we present findings from two perception experiments aimed at investigating whether prosodic information – including, but not limited to, sentence-final contour – can successfully disambiguate such sentences. We show that when speakers provide consistent auditory cues to sentential interpretation, hearers can successfully recruit these cues to arrive at the correct interpretation as intended by the speaker. In light of these results, we argue that psycholinguistic studies (including language acquisition studies) investigating participants’ ability to access multiple interpretations of scopally ambiguous sentences – quantificational and otherwise – should carefully control for prosody.