This essay is concerned with a section of the suprasegmental phonology of English that has traditionally been called ‘sentence stress’: a domain that goes beyond the simple word and its accent, covering prominence relations within lexical compounds and syntactic phrases. Some almost commonplace assumptions are usually made about sentence stress in the phonological literature of English: first, that the distinction between compound stress and phrasal stress leads to a phonological contrast, so that in a compound noun like black board the left-hand constituent is the stronger one whereas in a phrase, black board for example, the right-hand one is. Second, that this prominence differentiation consists of a further contouring of the main stresses of the simple words involved so that word stress serves as input for sentence stress differentiation, as in Gérman tèacher vs.Gèrman téacher. Also frequently observed is a class of exceptions to this second assumption: the thìrteen mén cases, where the primary stress of a word in isolation, thirtéen, gets shifted in certain contexts for rhythmic reasons.

This paper is a quantitative study of the factors that determine the selection of passive constructions over active ones by English speakers. By examining a large body of passives used in spontaneous speech, together with the sentences that show an opposing choice, we are able to throw light on the crucial question of which syntactic and which semantic features of the environment act to constrain the choice and whether syntactic or semantic factors predominate in this case. In the course of the analysis, we will also have something to say about the social factors that have been reported to determine the use of the passive.

A thorough examination of the nature of the phonological portion of the lexicon must address at least two crucial issues. One has traditionally been termed the abstractness controversy, which concerns itself with the issue of the level of representation, or whether lexical entries are at a surface phonetic, phonemic, systematic phonemic, or some other level. The second issue deals with the unit of representation, or whether lexical entries are in the form of morphemes, words, or some of each.

In generative–transformational theories of language, semantics has always played handmaiden to syntax. For example, the extended standard theory (EST) has as its core a component of base phrase structure rules and a lexicon which supplies lexical items for the deep syntactic trees generated by the base rules; ‘semantic representations’ are created from these lexicalized P-markers at various stages of their syntactic derivation from deep to surface structure (Jackendoif, 1972: 4 ff.). Similarly, the semantic representations of a rival theory, generative semantics (GS), are taken from deep pre-lexical syntactic P-markers generated by base PS rules (McCawley, 1971). Both of these models reflect the historical roots of generative–transformational grammar, for at its inception, this theory provided only a model of syntax with no description of semantic structure (Chomsky, 1957). So it is natural, though not necessary, that linguists working in this tradition would construct their semantic models as outgrowths of the original syntactic core.

The inflexional paradigm, as a linguistic entity or concept, has not been a major preoccupation of theoretical linguists (at least in the English-speaking world) for several decades. For example, it is scarcely mentioned by Zellig Harris in his classic Methods in structural linguistics (1951). Nor have generative grammarians devoted much attention to it. Being interested originally in syntax, semantics and phonology to the almost total exclusion of morphology, they had no immediate incentive to reconsider such a squarely morphological concept. Quite apart from this, a positive reason for continuing to neglect, or reject, the paradigm seemed to flow from their approach to phonology. If phonological organization and phonological change were properly understood (they thought), then it could be seen that there was no need to invoke explicitly non-phonological factors such as ‘paradigm pressure’ or ‘analogical levelling’ in order to account for ‘exceptions’ to ‘sound laws’.

This paper is concerned with the analysis of sentences such as (1) in terms of the Wh- Movement transformation as proposed in Chomsky (1977: 102–110) and, in a revised form, in Chomsky (1981: 308–314):

(1) John is easy to please.

A highly unusual set of voice alternations obtains in the Lac Simon dialect of Northern Algonquin (Kaye, 1979, 1981). Here the distribution of voiced and voiceless obstruents reveals phonemic contrast in morpheme-internal positions (e.g. a:sɨbi: ‘net’, a:nɨpi:č ‘when’), but the initial obstruents only of morphemes which may begin the word are invariably voiceless when they do begin the word, voiced when they do not. The peculiar complementation, Kaye (1979: 276–277) reports, is due to the following historical developments affecting the Proto-Algonquian obstruent inventory.

This paper attempts to account for the existence of two phonological rules (consonant gemination and a type of metathesis) and for the suspension of a third (truncation), all of which occur in very limited grammatical environments. A close examination of these three cases suggests that we must recognize the possibility of phonetically unmotivated morphophonological rules, which can perhaps be explained in functionalist terms: the rules examined here appear to be designed essentially to preserve the canonical forms of sets of morphemes which would otherwise be in danger of clashing with other sets of morphemes in the language. These findings lead us to elaborate on Hooper's (1976) notion of MP-rules (rules which require grammatical information to be given in their structural description), and to question her hypothesis concerning the origins of such rules.

Taylor and Wolf (1981) seek to show that Edmondson (1979) makes the position of the descriptivist ‘if anything, worse’, and that the dilemma for the descriptivist posed by Harris (1978) is ‘inescapable’. The authors seek to facilitate discussion by analysing my theory ‘rather more clearly’ than I managed to myself, and in doing so establish that its claims are ‘either contradictory or absurd’ (329).