In the light of current morphological theory, this paper examines the analogical levelling of long/short vowel oppositions in certain inflectional and derivational alternations in a number of modern Swiss German dialects. The regular occurrence of levelling is shown to depend on the extent to which the alternation in question is ‘perceptually salient’ (Chapman 1994). That is, if the semantic relation between base and derivative is transparent and the derivative is uniformly marked, analogical levelling occurs regularly. On the basis of this evidence it is argued that all morphological alternations, both inflectional and derivational, are listed in the lexicon and that each one is assigned a different status according to its degree of perceptual salience.

Relational Grammarians have proposed Union analyses for adversatives many languages. An odd asymmetry in base predicates contrasts Japanese (Dubinsky 1985), in which adversatives may not be formed on unaccusatives, and Indonesian (Kana 1986), in which adversatives may only be formed on unaccusatives. A close examination of adversatives in Javanese (a language closely related to Indonesian) resolves this asymmetry, revealing that Javanese adversatives (and by implication Indonesian adversatives) are best analyzed not as Unions but as passives. However, the passive analysis violates Perlmutter & Postal's (1984) I-Advancement Exclusiveness Law, which figures crucially in Dubinsky's elegant account of the distribution of Japanese adversatives. Gerdts' (1993a) Mapping Theory, rooted in an RG tradition, provides a solution, in which it is possible to capture the similarities of adversatives and other Javanese passives and at the same time preserve the insights of Dubinsky's analysis of Japanese.

In this paper I argue that the polysemy view is not capable of giving a unified account of the meanings of CAN, MAY, MUST and SHOULD, whereas the unitary meaning view does not encounter the problems facing the polysemy view. I propose unitary meanings which are rich enough to account for the range of interpretations these modals can have, but which are specific enough to account for why they get these interpretations and not others. Proposing unitary meanings implies that we have to look for a theory of pragmatics which can explain how we achieve the different interpretations of these modals in use. I will argue that adopting the Relevance theory view of what drives interpretation gives us the basis for such an explanation.

This paper deals with the clause structure of Old English. In the main body of the paper we adopt the ‘traditional’ analysis of the West Germanic languages in which it is proposed that VP is head-final. We will argue (contra Van Kemenade 1987, pace Cardinaletti & Roberts 1991, Pintzuk 1991, Tomaselli 1991) that the clause structure of Old English contains a head-initial functional projection whose head can be the landing site of verb movement in subordinate clauses. This claim is based on evidence related to the distribution and interpretation of negative elements in Old English and West Flemish. We will show that differences between these two languages with respect to Negative Concord phenomena can be accounted for straightforwardly in terms of an Old English clause structure which is different from the one traditionally proposed for the modern Germanic SOV/V2 languages.

In the appendix to the paper we briefly turn to the recent alternative approaches to the phrase structure of SOV languages in terms of a universal base hypothesis where all projections are head-initial (see Kayne (1993), Zwart (1993), Roberts (1995) for a discussion of Old English).

In this paper we present an alternative approach to discourse structure according to which topicality is the general organizing principle in discourse. This approach accounts for the fact that the segmentation structure of discourse is in correspondence with the hierarchy of topics defined for the discourse units. Fundamental to the proposed analysis is the relation it assumes between the notion of topic and that of explicit and implicit questioning in discourse. This relation implies that (1) the topic associated with a discourse unit is provided by the explicit or implicit question it answers and (2) the relation between discourse units is determined by the relation between these topic-providing questions.

Our purpose is simple: to apply a rudimentary kind of logical analysis to the problem, which sometimes arises in linguistic typology and in comparative linguistics, of whether there are any languages with fewer than two vowels. The principal reason why this question has occupied the attention of linguists is probably the fact that Proto-Indo-European is sometimes said to have had only one vowel phoneme (see especially Hjelmslev (1936–7), Borgstrøm (1949, 1954) and Lehmann (1952), following Saussure (1879). Yet this was precisely one of the features of PIE reconstruction that Jakobson selected for attack on typological grounds, reasoning that ‘a conflict between the reconstructed state of a language and the general laws which typology discovers makes the reconstruction questionable’ (1958: 23).