In this paper we focus on the ability of ArgumentSupporting Nominalizations (ASNs) to realizemorphological plural. We think that this aspect of their behavior isinstrumental in our understanding of their properties and their syntax withinone language and across languages. Our factual investigation deals withRomanian, English, German and Spanish, as well as Polish and Bulgarian ASNs. Weshow that the interplay between the aspectual properties – eitherinner or outer aspect – and the nominal/verbalcharacteristics, as justifying the internal structure of ASNs, allows us tocharacterize the ability of ASNs to accept plural marking across languages. Wefurther argue for a flexible syntactic theory that enables us to capture themixed properties of ASNs. We provide evidence for two parameters of variation.The first parameter is whether ASNs involve a nominalizer or not. If anominalizer is not included, ASNs lack nominal internal properties. If anominalizer is included, the second parameter comes into play and allows forlanguage variation with respect to the height of attachment of the nominalizer.Specifically, a nominalizer can attach to (and thusnominalize) distinct layers of syntactic structure (VP vs.AspectP).

This paper examines the use of audience-directed or inherently communicative expressions (discourse markers and interjections) in free indirect thought representations in fiction. It argues that the insights of Banfield's (1982) no-narrator approach to free indirect style can be accommodated in a relevance theoretic framework. The result is an account in which the author's act of revealing a character's thoughts communicates a guarantee of optimal relevance – a guarantee which justifies the effort which the reader invests in deriving meta-representations of those thoughts from the evidence which the author provides. However, the reward for this effort is a meta-representation of a character's thoughts which is unmediated by the thoughts of the author who is responsible for producing the text. Using examples from fiction, I show that within this framework, the use of procedurally encoded discourse markers and interjections contribute to this sense of immediacy by imposing constraints on interpretation which leave the reader with the responsibility for deriving his own interpretations of a character's thoughts and thought processes.

Persian complex predicates pose an interesting challenge for theoretical linguistics since they have both word-like and phrase-like properties. For example, they can feed derivational processes, but they are also separable by the future auxiliary or the negation prefix.

Various proposals have been made in the literature to capture the nature of Persian complex predicates, among them analyses that treat them as purely phrasal or purely lexical combinations. Mixed analyses that analyze them as words by default and as phrases in the non-default case have also been suggested.

In this paper, I show that theories that rely exclusively on the classification of patterns in inheritance hierarchies cannot account for the facts in an insightful way unless they are augmented by transformations or some similar device. I then show that a lexical account together with appropriate grammar rules and an argument composition analysis of the future auxiliary has none of the shortcomings that classification-based analyses have and that it can account for both the phrasal and the word-like properties of Persian complex predicates.

In Prosodic Phonology, domains for the application of phonological patterns are commonly modeled as a Prosodic Hierarchy. The theory predicts, among other things, that (i) prosodic domains cluster on a single universal set of domains (‘Clustering’), and (ii) no level of prosodic structure is skipped in the building of prosodic structure unless this is required by independently motivated higher ranking principles or constraints (‘Strict Succession’). In this paper, we demonstrate that if, as is standardly done, evidence is limited to lexically general phonological processes, some languages systematically violate the Strict Succession Prediction, evidencing no prosodic word domain, and some languages systematically violate the Clustering Prediction, evidencing more than one domain between the phonological phrase and the foot. We substantiate these claims by in-depth studies of phonological rule domains in Vietnamese (Austroasiatic) and Limbu (Sino-Tibetan). As an alternative to the Prosodic Hierarchy framework, we advocate a heuristic for cross-linguistic comparison in which prosodic domains are conceived of as language-particular, intrinsic and highly specific properties of individual phonological rules or constraints. This allows us to explore empirically the actual degree of variation to be encountered across prosodic systems. It turns out that the ‘word’ has no privileged or universal status in phonology, but only emerges through frequent reference of sound patterns to a given construction type in a given language.

This paper examines the German action nouns derived with the suffix -ung which have acquired an additional sense denoting either the result of the action (e.g. Veröffentlichung ‘publishing (action)’+‘publication (object)’, or a concrete referent connected with the action in some other way, e.g. Bewachung ‘guarding (action)’+‘group of people who guard’. The phenomenon is analysed as a (non-prototypical) type of polysemy; a monosemic approach fails to explain the cases in which the referent of the additional senses of the nouns is established and/or idiosyncratic. The action nouns acquire extra senses as a way of ensuring economy in the morphological system as this avoids the need for large numbers of derivational affixes, each with an individual function. An unexpected implication of the findings is that the nouns studied – abstract nouns which acquire a second, often concrete sense – move against the accepted direction of semantic change, in which items with a specific sense acquire a more general sense.