This paper examines Superiority effects with VP internal constituents in English, Spanish and Bulgarian. It is argued in the paper that certain data concerning Superiority effects provide evidence for the existence of AgrO. In particular, they provide evidence that Accusative wh-phrases undergoing syntactic wh-movement must move to SpecAgrOP on their way to SpecCP. The data examined in the paper are also shown to provide support for the Economy account of the Superiority Condition.

This paper examines the relationship between the use of names and other words in address and in reference: how does the way that speaker A addresses B differ from the way that A refers to B, and what are the factors affecting this difference? The study, based on observation and interviews, attempts both to solve a problem in pragmatics and to help historical linguists and others who need to know the extent to which it may be justified to extrapolate from referential to address usage and vice versa.

This paper offers a variationist critique of aspects of phonological theory and method, focusing on advances in descriptive methods and highlighting the problems that need to be addressed in explaining phonological variation. On the one hand, socially situated language samples which have been systematically collected and analysed constitute a legitimate – indeed often vital – source of evidence to be utilised by linguists for assessing and refining theoretical models. On the other hand, variationists cannot operate in isolation from theoretical concerns, and can benefit from an evaluation of the competing theoretical frameworks available to them.

The paper begins with a brief review of the philosophical foundations underlying the tension between ‘external’ and ‘internal’ methodology. We then focus on a particular phonological example – glottalisation in English. We demonstrate that phonological models of this can be complemented by systematic and accountable data collection and analysis of the kind associated with sociolinguistics. It is suggested that the patterns of variation produced by speakers are significantly more complex than has been indicated in the phonological literature. Consequently, these approaches can be usefully expanded and extended as theoretical models. We discuss some desiderata for extending the range of phonological models, focusing chiefly on the need to account for variability and change in language.

In this article I review two analyses of English existential constructions – the Case-transmission analysis and the expletive-replacement analysis – from the perspective of Chomsky's (1993, 1995) minimalist framework. I show that neither approach is free from empirical problems and that adopting minimalist program can reconcile these difficulties and account for more extensive data as well. I propose that LF feature-raising theory that I adopt here should be more economical than it is now, for example, in Chomsky (1995) so that only the relevant ‘checkable’ features raise at LF. My discussion concerns English existential constructions and Object Shift in Icelandic. In particular, I discuss (a) specificity, (b) scope and (c) negative polarity item licensing and show that the category-raising analysis of the associate of an expletive raises problems concerning these three aspects. The analysis presented in the article will be further supported by facts about predicate raising constructions.

This study focuses on the development of complex word formation in L2 acquisition. We examine experimentally elicited data on English deverbal synthetic compounding (such as toe-painter) by native Spanish speakers and conclude that: (a) development proceeds in stages which clearly reflect UG-constrained L1 influence; (b) nontargetlike productions (e.g. painter-toes) show attempts to spell out the grammatical features associated with functional categories in deverbal compounding; though nontargetlike, they are nonetheless consistent with the compound's required feature-marking; (c) such attempts implicate the early existence in the Interlanguage of those functional heads and their projections in the (lexical) syntax; i.e., the absence of the correct phonological form cannot be taken to imply lack of knowledge of morphosyntactic features and their corresponding phrase structure.

This paper provides a relevance theoretic account of the semantics of the be going to construction in English, based on Klinge's (1993) model for the semantics of the modal auxiliaries, and in particular of will. The semantics of both forms will be accounted for in terms of the relation between linguistic representations of situations and cognitive domains. Finally the pragmatics of utterances of sentences containing will and be going to will be discussed.

Attractive as might seem the challenge to build a process or performance model that can account for every behavioural decision, there are a number of sound reasons to tackle first the still difficult (but hopefully manageable) task of developing a competence model; of trying to find the underlying system that informs and constrains (if it doesn't always actually govern) choice. (Spolsky 1988: 105)

This article aims at showing the predictability of phonological adaptation, segment preservation and deletion in borrowings. It is shown that ill-formed segments are preserved and adapted in the vast majority of cases; segment deletion occurs only when an ill-formed segment is embedded within a higher level ill-formed structure, such as the syllable. This conclusion is based on the study of 15,686 segmental and syllabic malformations found in 11,348 loanword forms from five different corpora of loanwords. The analysis, which is set within the Theory of Constraints and Repair Strategies, is illustrated with the data from a corpus of 545 French loanwords in Fula.

This paper sketches a grammar of English relative clause constructions (including infinitival and reduced relatives) based on the notions of construction type and type constraints. Generalizations about dependency relations and clausal functions are factored into distinct dimensions contributing constraints to specific construction types in a multiple inheritance type hierarchy. The grammar presented here provides an account of extraction, pied piping and relative clause ‘stacking’ without appeal to transformational operations, transderivational competition, or invisible (‘empty’) categories of any kind.

Late Middle English is a VO language in which surface OV order can nevertheless be found. This has been taken to show that the language has both OV and VO as possible underlying orders. However, there are various types of data that this hypothesis cannot account for. It is therefore argued in this article that late Middle English only had VO order underlyingly, and that all surface OV orders are derived by means of leftward movement of the object across the verb, in a manner fully compatible with the Minimalist Program. In surface OV, the object moves overtly to the functional projection AgrOP for feature-checking; LF movement is also possible (yielding surface VO), since the two derivations are equally economical. Pronominal objects can move to a higher clitic position. This analysis is shown to account for a wide range of data.

This paper shows, after Watkins (1967) and Tremblay (1989, 1991), that the possessive phrase of This is John's does not necessarily include an elliptical Possessee. This ambiguity is argued to arise from the dual nature of the possessive marker, which may either be inflectional or derivational in Modern English. In the first case, it may be analysed as a functional head, as proposed by Abney (1987) and Kayne (1993, 1994); in the second case, it operates in the lexicon, deriving possessive adjectives which exhibit complementary morphological and semantic properties in adnominal and predicate positions.

Guglielmo Cinque, Jan Koster, Jean-Yves Pollock, Luigi Rizzi & Raffaella Zanuttini (eds.), Paths towards Universal Grammar: studies in honor of Richard S. Kayne. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1994. Pp. xvi+491.