The absence of I amn't for the first person singular present tense negative form is taken to indicate that there is a gap in the paradigm. Recent accounts take a morphosyntactic approach and phonology is largely ignored. Such accounts typically focus on contemporary forms of Standard English. This paper, in contrast, compares nineteenth-century and contemporary West Yorkshire (WY) aux+n't forms and pursues a largely phonological solution. The paper sets out to demonstrate that WY has never had a *amn't gap and that changes over the past century shed light on the *amn't gap problem. Contemporary WY is known to exhibit a phenomenon called secondary contraction, whereby shouldn't [ʃʊdʔ], for example, may be pronounced [ʃunʔ]. I argue that secondary contraction is responsible for the creation of homophones for amn't and aren't: [aːnt]/[aːt]. I will consider the possibility that certain aux+n't forms have become lexicalised and that this has triggered secondary contraction as a phonological repair strategy. With the analysis of WY data as a backdrop, the paper then pursues the possibility that lexicalisation may have occurred, at a much earlier date, in precursors of Standard British English (SBE). Indeed, it seems plausible that homophony for amn't and aren't may have led to prescription against new realisations of amn't. The paper will show that grammatically amn't has evolved in exactly the same way as other auxn't forms, and it is only commentators who have treated it differently. If this is so, the *amn't gap in SBE is man-made rather than grammatical in nature.

This paper investigates the question of whether and how ‘Second Occurrence Focus’ (SOF) is realized phonetically in German. The apparent lack of phonetic marking on SOF has raised much discussion on the semantic theory of focus (Partee 1999, Rooth 1992). Some researchers have reported the existence of phonetic marking of SOF in the postnuclear area (Rooth 1996, Beaver et al. 2007). In our experimental study with German sentences, we examined sentences both with prenuclear SOF and with postnuclear SOF, comparing them with their first occurrence focus (FOF) and non-focus counterparts. The results show that the phonetic prominence of focus (higher pitch/longer duration) is realized differently according to the type of focus as well as according to the position of the target expression. We account for these differences by considering several phonetic effects, those that are information-structure-related and those that are phonologically motivated.

The study of adjectival diathesis alternations lags behind the study of verbal diathesis and nominalization. This paper aims to diminish the gap by applying to the adjectival domain theoretical tools with proven success elsewhere. We focus on evaluative adjectives, which display a systematic alternation between a basic variant (John was rude) and a derived one (That was rude of John). The alternation brings about a cluster of syntactic and semantic changes – in the semantic type of the predicate, its valency and the mode of argument projection. We argue that the adjectival variants are related by the joint application of two operators: a lexical saturation operator (also seen in verbal passive) and a syntactic reification operator (also seen in nominalization). The analysis straightforwardly extends to similar alternations with Subject- and Object-Experiencer adjectives (proud, irritating). Among its important implications are (i) lexical saturation is not restricted to external arguments (internal ones may also be saturated), and (ii) ‘referential’ (R) roles are not restricted to nominal predicates (adjectives may assign them as well).

This paper develops a semantic analysis of three constructions: (i) the subject-oriented adverb construction (Wisely, John left early), (ii) the ‘Adj+to Inf’ construction (John was wise to leave early), and (iii) the ‘Adj+of NP’ construction (It was wise of John to leave early), which all involve three semantic components: (i) an individual a (John), (ii) a property P1 that describes a mental/behavioral propensity (wise), and (iii) another property P2 which typically describes an action (leave early). I argue that the three constructions share a meaning along the lines of ‘P2(a), and from this it is possible to infer that P1(a)’, where P1 is forced to receive the transitory interpretation, but they differ as to which component they assert/presuppose. I further demonstrate that this analysis allows us to solve two well-known semantic puzzles concerning these constructions (the ‘entailment puzzle’ and the ‘embeddability puzzle’). The three constructions are highly amenable to the Construction Grammar approach, because their meaning cannot be derived from the intuitive meanings of their constituents and regular semantic rules only. I provide formal analyses of the three constructions in the framework of Sign-Based Construction Grammar (SBCG).

Wh-dependencies are known to be formed rapidly in real-time comprehension. The parser posits the location of gap sites in advance of the bottom-up evidence for missing constituents, and must therefore have a means of deciding when and where to project dependencies. Previous studies have observed that the parser avoids building ungrammatical wh-dependencies, for example, by restricting the search for gap sites from island domains. This paper tests the stronger claim that constraints are not merely respected, but that grammatical knowledge actively prompts the construction of some representations in advance of the input. Three self-paced reading experiments examined patterns of wh-dependency formation in multiple-dependency constructions: obligatory across-the-board (ATB) extraction from coordinated verb phrases, and from optional parasitic gaps in post-verbal adjunct clauses. The key finding is that comprehenders immediately enforce the requirement for extraction from coordinates, and hence actively search for multiple gap sites within a coordinate VP; but they do not search for post-verbal parasitic gaps. This difference cannot be attributed to relative differences in acceptability, as comprehenders rated both of these multiple-gap constructions equally highly, nor can it be explained by general parsing incentives to develop maximal incremental interpretations of partial strings. More plausibly, the difference reflects the deployment of detailed grammatical knowledge in a parser that is motivated to satisfy structural licensing requirements in real time.