The approach adopted here identifies finiteness with the capacity to license an independent predication. The prototypical independent predication is positive and declarative; other ‘moods’, or main-clause types, while finite, may fail to display the morphosyntactic properties associated with this prototype. These properties vary from language to language, but the recurrent core properties are verbal, since the verb is the prototypical predicator. Some constructions that occur in both main and subordinate clauses, such as the infinitival in English, differ in interpretation in these two different circumstances; this may be the only difference between finite (main-clause) and non-finite (subordinate-clause) use. This general approach is contrasted with one in which finiteness is identified with the presence of a particular set of morphosyntactic properties: such a view as the latter can be maintained, if at all, only on the basis of massive recourse to covert categories.

The term morphological reversal describes the situation where the members of a morphological opposition switch their functions in some context (as with Hebrew gender marking, where -Ø~-a marks masculine~feminine with adjectives but feminine~masculine with numerals). There is a long tradition of polemic against the notion that morphology can encode systematic reversals, and an equally long tradition of reintroducing them under different names (e.g. polarity, exchange rules or morphosyntactic toggles). An examination of some unjustly neglected examples (number in Nehan, aspect in Tübatulabal, tense in Trique and argument marking in Neo-Aramaic) confirms the existence of morphological reversal, particularly as a mechanism of language change. This is strong evidence for the separateness of morphological paradigms from the features that they encode.

In generative metrics, a meter is taken to be an abstract periodic template with a set of constraints mapping linguistic material onto it. Such templates, constrained by periodicity and line length, are usually limited in number. The repertoire of Classical Sanskrit verse meters is characterized by three features which contradict each of the above properties – (a) templates constituted by arbitrary syllable sequences without any overtly discernible periodic repetition: APERIODICITY, (b) absolute faithfulness of linguistic material to a given metrical template: INVARIANCE, and (c) a vast number of templates, ranging between 600–700: RICH REPERTOIRE. In this paper, I claim that in spite of apparent incompatibility, Sanskrit meters are based on the same principles of temporal organization as other versification traditions, and can be accounted for without significant alterations to existing assumptions about metrical structure. I demonstrate that a majority of aperiodic meters are, in fact, surface instantiations of a small set of underlying quantity-based periodic templates and that aperiodicity emerges from the complex mappings of linguistic material to these templates. Further, I argue that the appearance of a rich repertoire is an effect of nomenclatural choices and poetic convention and not variation at the level of underlying structure.

The point of departure of this paper is the consideration of how words with the meanings of property concept states (states that are lexicalized as adjectives in languages that have that lexical category, cf. Dixon 1982), e.g. ‘red’, are related to words denoting their corresponding change of state, e.g. ‘redden’. It is shown that while many languages relate words with these meanings to one another via some morpholexical process, this is not so in the Polynesian language Tongan. A detailed case study shows that in this language there are no non-causative change of state lexemes based on property concepts. Rather, these meanings are derived pragmatically from verbs denoting the corresponding state via aspectual coercion (Moens & Steedman 1988, Jackendoff 1997, de Swart 1998, Zucchi 1998, Michaelis 2004). This finding is shown to have consequences for the understanding of the typology of change of state predicates (Koontz-Garboden 2005, 2006, Koontz-Garboden & Levin 2005) and for theories of event structure: (a) the typological space is broader than previously thought and (b) theories of event structure need to be reconsidered in order to account for the postlexical derivation of meaning.

This paper argues for a constructional approach to English progressives. On this view, progressivity is a construction-level property, rather than a lexical property of the ing forms that progressive verb phrases contain or of the auxiliary. The incompatibility of ing forms with state verbs in progressive constructions provides crucial evidence in support of the construction-based perspective, given that stative ing forms are fully acceptable in gerundive and other ing constructions. Of course, underlying this approach is the proposal that gerund is neutralizable with present participle (Huddleston 1984, 2002b, c; Pullum 1991; Blevins 1994). A lexicalist and construction-based analysis of gerundive nominals, as in Pullum (1991) and Blevins (1994), offers a means of claiming that progressivity is a property of the combination of an auxiliary and ing participle, just as the perfect aspect is expressed by the combination of have and a past participle, as proposed in Ackerman & Webelhuth (1998) and Spencer (2001b), and implicitly in Curme (1935) and other traditional grammars.

The paper discusses phonologically motivated gaps in inflectional paradigms. A model is offered in which the appearance of gaps is based on a tension between markedness constraints, faithfulness constraints, and constraints which require the expression of morphological categories. After presenting the model, additional implications are analyzed. Situations in which the same problem has different solutions in different morphological contexts are predicted insofar as constraints requiring the expression of different categories can vary in their ranking relative to some faithfulness constraint. Hence, the same phonotactic problem can yield a gap in one situation and a repair in another. This prediction is illustrated and further details of the prediction are explored, including the identification of a situation requiring a more restrictive version of the model. This is achieved by drawing on Smith's (2001) proposal that faithfulness constraints can be indexed to lexical categories to model this situation.