Previous functional analyses of American English inversion constructions (for example, Hartvigson & Jakobsen, 1974; Gary, 1976; Green, 1980, 1982) have recognized – either implicitly or explicitly – that inverted sentences and their canonical-word-order counterparts are semantically equivalent. None the less, in Ward & Birner (to appear), we describe a non-truth-conditional asymmetry between the interpretation of certain VP inversions and that of their canonical-word-order counterparts.2 Consider (1a) and (2b) in the following context:(1) Free elections were held yesterday in Czechoslovakia for the first time since the war.(a) The main opposition party was losing the election.(b) Losing the election was the main opposition party.(c) The main opposition party lost the election.

The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that underspecification of lexical-entry forms enables us to restrict phonological theory to declarative statements about the structure of lexical items, and to avoid having recourse to feature-changing and deletion rules. The realizations of lexical items are mapped onto their underlying forms by means of filling-in, redundancy rules of two basic types, predictive and default. Predictive rules derive (at least) one feature from (at least) one other feature, given in the lexical entry form, and default rules provide a feature, if no other rule has applied. Rules are both universal and language-specific. Since all filling-in is accounted for by these redundancy rules, there is no need for a post-lexical component of the phonology.

English exhibits PP, AP and NP resultative secondary predicates (SPs). Italian freely exhibits PP resultatives and, less commonly, AP resultatives. This difference follows from two facts. First, resultatives, being arguments of the V except in constructions involving ‘fake’ objects (see section 4), may appear only in positions that non-predicative arguments of the V of their same category can appear in (a correlation stated in (155) below). Since English allows PP, AP and NP non-predicative arguments in the position immediately following the direct object, all three categories can also appear as resultatives in the same position. But since Italian allows only the first two types of non-predicative arguments in this position, only PP and AP resultatives can appear there. Second, Italian sentences with AP resultatives are subject to a rule of semantic interpretation by which the primary predicate must be interpreted as focusing on the endpoint of the activity it denotes (as stated in (110) below). English sentences with AP resultatives are only slightly sensitive to this interpretation rule. As a result, AP resultatives are appropriate in fewer situations in Italian. That AP resultatives are sensitive to this rule of interpretation is consistent with the fact that AP arguments of verb that appear in post-object position are marked in a number of ways.

The analysis of vowel length in Standard Scottish English (SSE) and Scots dialects has proved problematical for some time now. With most analyses the Scottish Vowel-Length Rule (SVLR) is taken to lengthen underlyingly short vowels, and the principal problem with this approach has been in giving a phonological characterization of the set of vowels which act as input to the rule. A complicating factor here is the fact that the set of input vowels seems to vary across dialects. A recent analysis by Anderson (to appear), couched in dependency-phonology (DP) representations which allow for non-specification, argues rather persuasively that SVLR is a shortening operation on underlyingly long vowels, thus resolving the problem of the phonological definition of the input set (for some dialects at least). It also goes some way towards dealing with variation across dialects by giving an explanation for the variable behaviour of the lower mid vowel [ↄ,], which participates in SVLR in some dialects but not in others.

This article analyses middle constructions in English, accounting for their key syntactic and semantic properties. The analysis rests on the observation that there are certain similarities between middle, tough and recipe-context null-object constructions, such as in (1a–c).(1) (a) This bread cuts—easily.(b) This bread is easy to cut—.(c) Take bread. Cut—carefully (and arrange—nicely).