This paper is concerned with the phenomenon labelled ‘metalinguistic negation’ (MN) by Horn (1985). The interaction of MN with negative polarity items, lexically incorporated negation, and accentuation, is considered in order to establish its exact scope and range of applicability. The relationships between MN and various types of implicature are advanced in support of the use of MN as a diagnostic for aspects of an utterance which are properties of the linguistic expression used. The implications of this for the status of accent are assessed. Finally, the particularly stylistic effects of MN are considered, in relation to the topics discussed.

The syntax literature has overwhelmingly adopted the view that Condition C reconstruction takes place in wh-chains for R-expressions contained within arguments, but not within adjuncts of fronted wh-phrases. At the same time, this empirical picture has been questioned by various authors. We undertake a series of grammaticality surveys using Amazon Mechanical Turk in an attempt to clarify the empirical picture regarding reconstruction for Binding Condition C. We find absolutely no evidence of an argument–adjunct distinction in reconstruction for Binding Condition C. Neither arguments nor adjuncts reconstruct for Condition C. We suggest that those speakers who report such a contrast (linguists, primarily) are following a pragmatic bias, and not Condition C. While we do not find reconstruction of dependents of fronted NPs for Binding Condition C, we do find reconstruction of fronted PPs. That is, the NP complement of a fronted P must reconstruct for Binding Condition C. The literature also finds reconstruction of NP complements of verbs and adjectives. This means that fronted Ns are special in not requiring reconstruction of their arguments and adjuncts. We suggest that, syntactically, arguments of Ns are treated as adjuncts: semantic arguments simply adjoin in the same manner as true adjuncts. Syntactic adjuncts can be left out of lower copies in chains, something that we suggest follows from a left-to-right syntactic derivation plus an economy condition on copying.

Two classic and previously unrelated problems are reconsidered for their implications for optimality theory and acquisition. The puzzle-puddle-pickle problem centers on the debate over children’s underlying representations and the characterization of interacting error patterns which, when lost, result in overgeneralizations. In response to the challenges that this problem poses, an optimality theoretic solution is offered that appeals to the second problem, the Duke-of-York gambit, which involves co-occurring generalizations with reverse effects. The solution avoids language-specific restrictions on input representations and characterizes the loss and introduction of errors by one mechanism. New insight is offered for when overgeneralization is (not) expected to occur.

Neutralization in Korean involves a large number of oppositions, and affects a significant portion of the lexicon. Nonetheless, it induces remarkably little homophony. These highly divergent facts are argued herein to be related. The present findings suggest a reconsideration of the role that ‘functional load’ (Martinet 1952, Hockett 1967) plays in patterns of sound change.

Most of the literature devoted to the study of deverbal nominalizations concentrates on the complex event reading (e.g. La concentración de partículas tiene lugar a temperatura ambiente ‘The concentration of particles takes place at room temperature’) and the object reading (e.g. El paciente tenía concentraciones de calcio en el hombro ‘The patient had calcium concentrations in the shoulder’), while nominalizations denoting states (e.g. La concentración de Sherlock Holmes duró cinco horas ‘Sherlock Holmes’ concentration lasted five hours') have remained, in general, understudied. In this paper we present their empirical properties and argue that, despite the empirical differences, state nominalizations and event nominalizations can receive a unified account. We show that in Spanish, Catalan, French, English and German the question of whether a deverbal nominalization denotes a state or an event, or is ambiguous between both readings depends on independent properties of the verbal base, allowing us to propose a unified account of both classes of nominalizations: the productive nominalizers in these languages can only denote the aspectual notions contained in the base's Aktionsart. We further argue that other languages, like Slovenian, have productive nominalizers that can operate over the external aspect of the predicate; in these cases, the nominalization can denote aspectual notions not contained in the base's Aktionsart.

Language change is neutral if the probability of a language learner adopting any given linguistic variant only depends on the frequency of that variant in the learner’s environment. Ruling out non-neutral motivations of change, be they sociolinguistic, computational, articulatory or functional, a theory of neutral change insists that at least some instances of language change are essentially due to random drift, demographic noise and the social dynamics of finite populations; consequently, it has remained little investigated in the historical and sociolinguistics literature, which has generally been on the lookout for more substantial causes of change. Indeed, recent computational studies have argued that a neutral mechanism cannot give rise to ‘well-behaved’ time series of change which would align with historical data, for instance to generate S-curves. In this paper, I point out a methodological shortcoming of those studies and introduce a mathematical model of neutral change which represents the language community as a dynamic, evolving network of speakers. With computer simulations and a quantitative operationalization of what it means for change to be well-behaved, I show that this model exhibits well-behaved neutral change provided that the language community is suitably clusterized. Thus, neutral change is not only possible but is in fact a characteristic emergent property of a class of social networks. From a theoretical point of view, this finding implies that neutral theories of change deserve more (serious) consideration than they have traditionally received in diachronic and variationist linguistics. Methodologically, it urges that if change is to be successfully modelled, some of the traditional idealizing assumptions employed in much mathematical modelling must be done away with.

An analysis of phonological speech errors in Arabic, English and German is carried out with a view to probing into the organization of segments within syllables and words. Arabic slips are shown to be less structure-sensitive than English and German ones. Being absent from underlying representation, suprasegmental structures are assumed to unfold gradually in real time. The erection of hierarchical representations is claimed to be slower in Arabic than in English and German because the nonconcatenative morphology of Arabic prevents an early assignment of consonants to structural slots. In contrast, English and German words allow the early build-up of hierarchical structures because sufficient phonological information is available from the beginning of the derivation.

In French and Spanish, both parts of the causative–anticausative alternation can be formally encoded in two ways: Depending on the form of the verb, marked and unmarked causatives and marked and unmarked anticausatives can be distinguished. The goal of this paper is to verify whether causalness is a factor in the encoding and whether the two languages differ in this respect (verbs used more often as causatives than as anticausatives have a high degree of causalness, while verbs used more often as anticausatives than as causatives have a low degree of causalness). On the basis of a corpus study of 20 French and 20 Spanish verbs, it will be shown that in both languages a strong correlation between causalness and encoding exists. A high degree of causalness increases the likelihood that a verb’s anticausative is marked and the causative is unmarked, and a low degree of causalness increases the likelihood that a verb’s anticausative is unmarked and the causative is marked.

Signed languages are similar to spoken languages in the overall organisation of their grammars, displaying a prosodic level of organisation that is not isomorphic to the syntactic organisation. Their rich inventory of manual and non-manual features allows for a prolific range of functions if used prosodically. New data from Sign Language of the Netherlands (NGT, Nederlandse Gebarentaal) are discussed to demonstrate that focused constituents are not marked by a single prosodic feature, but rather by multiple properties that can also have other functions in the prosodic phonology of the language. These findings are integrated in an overall model of sign language prosody that emphasises the distinction between phonetic appearance and phonological representation and that allows for the interaction of linguistic and paralinguistic cues in visual communication.

In a recent paper in this journal, Hawkins (1980), it was observed that there was considerable, but quite principled, variation both in the types and in the quantities of word order co-occurrences found in Greenberg's (1966) data (cf. his Appendix I (AI) and Appendix II (AII), reproduced here as Tables 1 and 2 respectively). We formulated two types of universal statements to account for this data: implicational universals, which define permitted versus non-permitted co-occurrences of word orders (matching the attested versus non-attested co-occurrences respectively), and which are of the form ‘if a language has some property (or properties) P, then it will also have some property (or properties) Q’; and a ‘universal of language distribution’, entitled the principle of ‘Cross-Category Harmony’ (CCH), which predicts the different quantities of languages having the permitted co-occurences.2 The present paper is intended as a sequel to the last. We now relate our universals to the cross-category, X-bar, generalizations of generative grammar and to issues of markedness, suggesting that our universals and X-bar theory can be of mutual benefit to one another.

This paper examines Superiority effects with VP internal constituents in English, Spanish and Bulgarian. It is argued in the paper that certain data concerning Superiority effects provide evidence for the existence of AgrO. In particular, they provide evidence that Accusative wh-phrases undergoing syntactic wh-movement must move to SpecAgrOP on their way to SpecCP. The data examined in the paper are also shown to provide support for the Economy account of the Superiority Condition.

The phenomenon of stress in Old English (OE) has been the subject of thorough and extensive study for well over a century. Indeed the foundation for any modern study remains the work of Eduard Sievers (1885, 1893a, b), well summarized in Campbell (1959). The present paper is not concerned with a revision of the ‘facts’ of Sievers' account, although we shall note below instances where we disagree with those facts, but rather with a linguistic explanation of those facts. Sievers' account is essentially a statistical presentation of varying stress patterns, and he made little attempt to provide explanations of either frequent patterns, or non-existent ones. The framework in which we shall operate is that of lexicalist metrical phonology. Within that framework we shall attempt to demonstrate that Old English stress was organized in a way very different from that in Modern English. Most particularly we shall suggest that there is a central rule (the Old English Stress Rule = OESR) which, in contrast to the central rule for present-day English (PDE), operated from left-to-right. This, we shall suggest, has direct implications for the operation of other features of stress derivations, such as Destressing. Further, we shall argue that it is probable that level-ordering has no role to play in the stress phonology of Old English.

Susan Ervin-Tripp has remarked that she ‘would like to see more done on the comprehension side of development,’ and that ‘this is something that we are still in very serions ignorance about’ (1971). Despite this ignorance it seems to be a widely held view that comprehension develops in advance of production, but the authors feel that this whole question is in need of close analysis.

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.

This study examines the referential properties of a class of complex pronouns labelled M-PRONOUNS, exemplified by Old English HIMSELF, French LUI-MéME and English HISOWN. It is shown that M-pronouns exhibit some properties commonly taken as characterizing reflexive anaphors, and that they also occur as ‘intensive’ pronouns. It is shown, however, that they are not anaphors, and that labelling them ‘intensives’ does not suffice to account for their distribution. It is argued that the semantic properties of M-pronouns may be derived from their morphological structure. Their pronoun component (Old English HIM, French LUI, English HIS) is not a pronominal, in the sense of the Binding Theory, but a bindable expression unspecified for disjoint reference and locality. In the complex form created by M-adjunction, the pronoun is crucially de-stressed and, correlatively, interpreted as endophoric.

This paper tests whether lemma frequency impacts the duration of homographic noun–verb homophones in spontaneous speech, e.g. cut (n)/cut (v). In earlier research on effects of lemma frequency (e.g. Gahl 2008), these pairs of words were not investigated due to a focus on heterographic homophones. Theories of the mental lexicon in both linguistics and psycholinguistics differ as to whether these word pairs are assumed to have shared or separate lexical representations. An empirical analysis based on spontaneous speech from the Buckeye corpus (Pitt et al. 2007) yields the result that differences in lemma frequency affect the duration of the N/V pairs under investigation. First, this finding provides evidence for N/V pairs having separate representations and thus supports models of the mental lexicon in which lexical entries are specified for word class. Second, the result is at odds with an account of ‘full inheritance’ of frequency across homophones and consequently with speech production models implementing inheritance effects via a shared form representation for homophonous words. The findings are best accounted for in a model that assumes completely separate lexical representations for homophonous words.

A general typology of number systems has to confront the problem of variation both in the number values in different languages and in the inventories of nominals involved. We start from the Smith-Stark Hierarchy and extend this approach to additional numbers (such as dual and paucal). Associative plurals appear to undermine this typology, if we treat them as a third number. Either the associative plural or the ordinary plural proves to be exceptional.

‘Abduction’, a concept from the philosophy of Charles Peirce, has become extremely popular in linguistics in the last three decades. This article argues that the interpretation of abduction in (historical) linguistics is based on a critical misunderstanding: it relies on an aborted model, which was rejected by Peirce himself, and it conflates two incompatible frameworks (Peirce's early and late ideas), to create a picture that is entirely incoherent. In consequence, it puts linguists directly at odds with mainstream practice in philosophy and science. Moreover, as currently interpreted, the term ‘abductive change’ is neither adequate nor necessary for classifying linguistic innovations.

Over the last decade or so, hierarchies such as the animacy hierarchy, the personal hierarchy, the case hierarchy, the definiticity and referentiality hierarchies and so forth have been identified as determinants of constituent order. It is my intention in this paper to review the set of hierarchies and rank them as determinants of NP sequencing in English. I shall from time to time compare and contrast the effect of a hierarchy in other languages with what we find in English; but it remains to be seen whether the ranking which obtains for English has a wider application: I make no a priori claim that it does. The hierarchies and families of hierarchies are ranked as follows, from the most powerful determinant to the least:

(1) the familiarity hierarchy;

(2) the topic < comment, given < new hierarchies;

(3) the universal sequencing conventions;

(4) the definiticity and referentiality hierarchies;

(5) the personal, social status, and role hierarchies;

(6) the dominant descriptor hierarchies;

(7) the formal hierarchies.

This study focuses on the development of complex word formation in L2 acquisition. We examine experimentally elicited data on English deverbal synthetic compounding (such as toe-painter) by native Spanish speakers and conclude that: (a) development proceeds in stages which clearly reflect UG-constrained L1 influence; (b) nontargetlike productions (e.g. painter-toes) show attempts to spell out the grammatical features associated with functional categories in deverbal compounding; though nontargetlike, they are nonetheless consistent with the compound's required feature-marking; (c) such attempts implicate the early existence in the Interlanguage of those functional heads and their projections in the (lexical) syntax; i.e., the absence of the correct phonological form cannot be taken to imply lack of knowledge of morphosyntactic features and their corresponding phrase structure.