Reduplication patterns in Itelmen (Chukotko-Kamchatkan) present a prima facie challenge to the view that association in partial reduplication is always Edge-In (Yip 1988, McCarthy & Prince 1996). Closer investigation suggests that Itelmen reduplication may in fact be total copying, masked by an apocope rule. This solution is not obvious, however, as the apocope rule must be limited to ‘core’ or ‘native’ vocabulary. While Russian loans are reasonably transparent, the analysis requires making a distinction between cognates and loans from related Koryak, a distinction speakers are not consciously aware of. Positing that this distinction is part of the synchronic phonology provides a solution to other apparently unrelated phonological puzzles in the language. In addition to removing an apparent counter-example to universal Edge-In association, the proposals made here may also provide a small argument for the lexical stratification model of loanword phonology over a purely representational alternative.

This paper first provides an overview of the various senses in which the terms ‘marked’ and ‘unmarked’ have been used in 20th-century linguistics. Twelve different senses, related only by family resemblances, are distinguished, grouped into four larger classes: markedness as complexity, as difficulty, as abnormality, and as a multidimensional correlation. In the second part of the paper, it is argued that the term ‘markedness’ is superfluous, because some of the concepts that it denotes are not helpful, and others are better expressed by more straightforward, less ambiguous terms. In a great many cases, frequency asymmetries can be shown to lead to a direct explanation of observed structural asymmetries, and in other cases additional concrete, substantive factors such as phonetic difficulty and pragmatic inferences can replace reference to an abstract notion of ‘markedness’.

It is widely accepted that the semantic content of a lexical entry determines to a large extent its syntactic subcategorization or other contexts of occurrence. However, clarifying the precise extent to which this hypothesis holds has proven difficult and on occasion controversial. To maintain this hypothesis, scholars have in many difficult cases introduced syntactic diacritics in their lexical semantic representations, thereby running the risk of rendering it vacuous. Our answer to this challenge is two-fold. First, on the substantive side, we argue that the problem lies in the assumption that the semantic content of lexical entries consists of a recursive predicate-argument structure. In contrast, we claim that the semantic content of lexical entries can consist of a set of such structures, thus eschewing semantically unmotivated predicates that merely ensure the correct semantic geometry. Second, on the structural side, we suggest that the semantic content of words can idiosyncratically select one of those predicate-argument structures for the purposes of direct grammatical function assignment. We show that this hypothesis, which builds on independently motivated proposals regarding the form of underspecified natural language semantic representations, provides a clean account of linking phenomena related to several classes of predicators: verbs whose denotata require the presence of an instrument, the semantic role of French ‘adjunct’ clitics, commercial event verbs, the spray/load alternations, and lexical subordination constructions.

This study investigates how the parser employs thematic and contextual information in resolving temporary ambiguities during sentence processing. We report results from a sentence-completion task and from a self-paced reading experiment with native speakers of Greek examining two constructions under different referential context conditions: relative clauses (RCs) preceded by complex noun phrases with genitives, [NP1+NP2Gen], and RCs preceded by complex noun phrases containing prepositional phrases, [NP1+PP[P NP2]]. We found different attachment preferences for these two constructions, a high (NP1) preference for RCs with genitive antecedents and a low (NP2) preference for RCs with PP antecedents. Moreover, referential context information was found to modulate RC attachment differently in the two experimental tasks. We interpret these findings from the perspective of modular theories of sentence processing and argue that on-line ambiguity resolution relies primarily on grammatical and lexical-thematic information, and makes use of referential context information only as a secondary resource.

For the analysis of the noun phrase, the treatment which currently prevails in generative grammar is the one in which the head of the noun phrase is identified with the determiner, rather than with the noun. This D(et)P treatment has the advantage of providing a uniform account of all syntactic categories, both the substantive and the functional ones, and it provides a natural way to capture the co-occurrence restrictions between nouns and determiners, but it also faces a number of empirical problems. To solve them I propose an analysis in which the head of the noun phrase is identified with the noun, but in which the advantages of the DP treatment are incorporated as much as possible. This is done in two steps. First, I argue that the requirement (or the desirability) of a uniform treatment of all syntactic categories does not by itself favour the DP treatment, since there is no empirical evidence for the postulation of a separate syntactic category for the determiners. The argumentation is mainly based on an analysis of NP-internal agreement data and leads to the conclusion that the class of determiners is syntactically heterogeneous: there are the adjectival determiners, which are subject to morpho-syntactic agreement, and (pro)nominal ones, which are exempt from this agreement. Second, I dissociate the roles of head and selector. All prenominals, both the specifying and the modifying ones, are treated as functors which select a nominal head, rather than as heads which select a nominal complement. This functor treatment accounts in a natural and straightforward way for both morpho-syntactic agreement and semantic types of agreement. The language which is used for exemplification is Dutch, but at various points comparisons are made with German and English.