At a time when linguistic theory is becoming increasingly fragmented and decreasingly dominated by a single orthodoxy, it has been an encouraging exercise to compile a list of statements about language which are likely to be accepted by virtually all linguists, irrespective of what they think about all the many issues on which linguists disagree. The following list contains no fewer than 83 claims which have been accepted by a wide range of British linguists, and there is no reason to believe that the sample of linguists who have helped me in compiling the list is particularly biased. It seems reasonable to claim that other linguists are LIKELY to accept these statements, although I certainly cannot claim that every linguist accepts every one of them. So far as I know, no attempt has ever been made before to find out what linguists at large actually believe, although any writer of an introductory text-book hopes that he is expounding a widely held set of views. Considered as a piece of research, this investigation seems to me to have produced at least one interesting result: linguistics really is making some progress, in a cumulative way, and we are notjust lurching from one 'paradigm' to another, as some of us sometimes suspect in our gloomier moments. Moreover, it raises the interesting question what other statements could be added to the list given here, which certainly is not meant to be exhaustive. I hope that other linguists with more imagination than me can bring the list into the hundreds, as should surely be possible.

Pre-aspirated stops, known to be quite rare in the world's languages, are shown herein to be significantly rarer still. Their aspiration component is typically reinforced by an oral gesture that is influenced by the following stop and/or the preceding vowel. Alternatively, the aspiration component weakens to zero and is replaced by vowel length. In this typological study I document the phonetic details of so-called pre-aspirates and offer phonetic explanations for their rarity and their diachronic instability.

Educated spoken Arabic (ESA), like any of the world's innumerable other koineized forms of speech, greatly depends for its maintenance and dissemination on the binding power of writing, on its quasi-permanence and transferability in space and time. It is understandable, too, that koines – and the koineizing tradition is an ancient one in the eastern Mediterranean – should regularly call upon earlier, whence written ancestral forms and, as far as the Arab and Islamic worlds are concerned, the fundamental importance of the immutable Koran cannot be over-estimated. Although a koine needs a spoken base, Classical Arabic, itself probably never the dialect of any single group or region (cf. Ferguson, 1959), substantially contributed through its more or less fixed written norms to an older koine and nowadays, via the so-called Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) of contemporary literature, journalism and ‘spoken prose’, to a more recently emergent pan-Arabic or, conceivably, pan-Arabics. In a not dissimilar way, in the Romance-speaking area, Latin existed for centuries as the language, for example, of clerics, side by side with developing regional koines and subsequent new literary languages which borrowed greatly from it, just as the Classical Latin koine was itself modelled by writers, like Cicero, whose cultural values were determined and carried by Greek. A crucial difference, however, between Latin vis-à-vis the Romance languages and Classical Arabic or the substantially similar MSA vis-à-vis ESA is that the latter qua spoken language may not be any more freely written than the regional vernaculars of Arabic. It is not, for instance, orthographic or orthoepic difficulties that inhibit the ‘transcribing“ of spoken Arabic of whatever kind but rather the almost mystical regard in which Arabs hold their written language to the detriment of spoken counterparts.

I propose a modification of the notion ‘phrase-marker’, to permit nodes to branch upwards as well as downwards. The change for which I argue both simplifies linguistic theory and renders it more empirically adequate.

This article proposes a new analysis of yers in Polish and addresses the issue of how yers should be represented. Reviving the debate started by Kiparsky (1973), the article argues that diacritic use of phonological features is superior to phonological use of diacritic features. Since diacritic representation of yers misses generalizations, yers are better represented as floating melodic segments (Rubach 1986, Kenstowicz & Rubach 1987). The patterns of Yer Vocalization and Yer Deletion are derived without recourse to syllable structure constraints such as *COMPLEX-Coda. Yer Deletion applies at an earlier level than Yer Vocalization and is enforced by a distribution-based constraint. Yer Vocalization, on the other hand, is a context-free process that is driven by the need to parse segments in output representations.

The purpose of this paper is to examine psycholinguistic work on attraction with a view to enriching our knowledge of the grammar of agreement. Following Franck et al. (2006),I assume that the different theories of agreement should relate to the way speakers err when they implement agreement operations. As an aberrant computation of the mind, attraction is interesting due to its frequency: in English experiments 13% of complex NPs (i.e. NPs which consist of two or more constituent NPs) establish incorrect agreement with the verb (as in *the key to the cabinets are in the kitchen; Eberhard, Cooper Cutting & Bock 2005). This is what makes it a magnet for both linguistic and psycholinguistic research. Here I examine the main findings and models in the psycholinguistic literature, and how they relate to existing theories of agreement in grammar. It will be argued that agreement cannot be properly understood unless models incorporate an adequate measurement of the size of the morphological component of every language studied, as agreement operations are continuously sensitive to this. The general idea, which I extend from Berg (1998) and Acuña-Fariña (2009) is that a strong morphosyntactic component blocks (rather than facilitates) semantic interference, and that languages opportunistically use more or less semantics in establishing agreement ties depending not only on morphological richness but also on the direction of encoding.

This paper argues that intonational phrasing in English is subject to two constraints formulated purely in terms of surface syntax. The first applies to all headed structures, and the second to all structures of coordination. It is claimed that these constraints account for the facts more adequately than Selkirk's Sense Unit Condition. Several problematic types of constructions are discussed in this context, including structures with parentheticals. In addition to the syntax, accent placement is also shown to be relevant to intonational phrasing. Finally, proposals are made for the incorporation of the syntactic constraints in an HPSG grammar of English.

1. Dialectologists in England have concentrated on the speech of small and relatively isolated rural communities (see, for example, Orton and Dieth, 1962: Introduction, 14). Other linguists and phoneticians concerned with the English of England have almost without exception described Standard English and the form of pronunciation they call, using an established but less than happy term, ‘Received Pronunciation’ (Jones, 1967:xvii). Yet the English of most English (and English-speaking Welsh) people is neither RP Standard English nor a rural dialect. The vast mass of urban working-class and lower-middle-class speakers use a pronunciation nearer to RP, and lexical and grammatical forms much nearer to Standard English, than the archaic rural dialects recorded by the dialectologists. Yet their speech diverges in many ways from what is described as standard. The purpose of this article, which must be regarded as preliminary and tentative, is to sketch the principal phonetic variables among such local, mainly urban, forms of English.1 It is the task of anyone concerned with the description of these ‘accents’ of English to investigate whatever phonetic variables can be identified and to establish their correlation with the non-linguistic variables of age, social standing and education, and geographical provenance. (For discussion of some of the problems of urban dialectology, see particularly Wright, 1966.)

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.

Welsh differs from English in a number of ways. The most obvious point is that it is a VSO language, but it also has distinctive agreement phenomena and clitics. For this reason, it is natural to ask of any theory of syntax that has been developed primarily on the basis of English: how can it handle Welsh? Welsh has had fairly extensive attention within the Government-Binding theory (see, for example, Harlow, 1981; Sproat, 1985; Sadler, 1988, and Hendrick, 1988). It has also had some attention within Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG) (see Harlow, 1983; Borsley, 1983; 1988a). In this paper, I will consider how some of the central features of Welsh can be accommodated within Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). This is a framework developed over the last few years by Carl Pollard, Ivan Sag and others, which seeks to combine the insights of GPSG, categorial grammar and certain other theories (see Pollard, 1985, 1988; Sag & Pollard, 1987, and Pollard & Sag, 1988). In fact, I will be mainly concerned with the version of HPSG developed in Borsley (1986, 1987, 1988 b), but I will also have something to say about standard HPSG.

The present study arose out of an investigation of whether already and yet as in He has left already, *He has left yet, IHe hasn't left already, He hasn't left yet formed a suppletion set that matches some →any, sometimes → ever, etc. as in They want some love, *They want any love, ?They don't want some love, They don't want any love (for discussion of some, sometimes, too, etc. cf. Klima, 1964; Fillmore, 1967; UCLA, 1967: Negation). Various observations about the restriction of already and yet to certain tenses and aspects, and about their failure to match with many adverbs of time, led to an investigation of whether already and yet were really adverbs of time, as is usually assumed. The conclusions we reached are that already and yet indeed form a suppletion set (with certain limitations not shared by other suppletives), but that they cannot usefully be treated as time adverbs. Rather, they seem to have close connexions with perfect aspect. The arguments presented here in support of this hypothesis are by no means exhaustive but will hopefully provide a suggestive contribution toward the study of both adverbs and aspects.

In some languages, nominal case is distributed over several adnominal elements, such as demonstrative pronouns, adjectives, participles, numerals and the nominal head itself. In this article, two hypotheses concerning case distribution are compared. According to the two-part model, case assignment to DPs as a whole (determiner phrases or maximal nominal projections) in syntax is based on a different grammatical mechanism than case distribution within those DPs. According to the one-part model, case distribution within DPs and syntactic case assignment to DPs are based on the same case assignment mechanism. Relying upon case distribution data from Finnish, Estonian, Polish, Russian and Serbo-Croatian, this article argues in favor of the one-part model. Furthermore, it is suggested that the one-part case distribution mechanism interacts with two independent morphological principles, one which regulates the overt morphological realization of elements which function as case assigners and another which states that the grammar is subject to a particular type of case hierarchy.

We demonstrate the logical necessity of assuming innate knowledge for language acquisition using toy grammars. The implications are applied to reconceptualizing the Subset Principle in terms of features, rather than, say, segments. Both syntactic and phonological issues are discussed, but the focus is on the acquisition of phonological inventories. We point out that our logical arguments converge with recent empirical results.

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.

The most serious recent work on the theory of coordination has probably been done in terms of three theories of grammatical structure: Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG–see especially Gazdar, 1981; Gazdar et al., 1982; 1985; Sag et al., 1985; Schachter & Mordechay, 1983), Categorial Grammar (CG–see especially Steedman, 1985; Dowty, 1985) and Transformational Grammar (TG–notably Williams, 1978, 1981; Neijt, 1979; van Oirsouw, 1985, 1987). Each of these approaches is different in important respects: for instance, according to whether or not they allow deletion rules, and according to the kinds of information which they allow to be encoded in syntactic features. However, behind these differences lies an important similarity: in each case the theory concerned makes two assumptions about grammatical structure in general (i.e. about all structures, including coordinate ones):

I The basic syntagmatic relations in sentence-structure are part-whole relations (consituent structure) and temporal order; note that this is true whether or not syntactic structure is seen as a ‘projection’ of lexical properties, since these lexical properies are themselves defined in terms of constituent structure and temporal order.

This paper shows, after Watkins (1967) and Tremblay (1989, 1991), that the possessive phrase of This is John's does not necessarily include an elliptical Possessee. This ambiguity is argued to arise from the dual nature of the possessive marker, which may either be inflectional or derivational in Modern English. In the first case, it may be analysed as a functional head, as proposed by Abney (1987) and Kayne (1993, 1994); in the second case, it operates in the lexicon, deriving possessive adjectives which exhibit complementary morphological and semantic properties in adnominal and predicate positions.

It is widely accepted that the semantic content of a lexical entry determines to a large extent its syntactic subcategorization or other contexts of occurrence. However, clarifying the precise extent to which this hypothesis holds has proven difficult and on occasion controversial. To maintain this hypothesis, scholars have in many difficult cases introduced syntactic diacritics in their lexical semantic representations, thereby running the risk of rendering it vacuous. Our answer to this challenge is two-fold. First, on the substantive side, we argue that the problem lies in the assumption that the semantic content of lexical entries consists of a recursive predicate-argument structure. In contrast, we claim that the semantic content of lexical entries can consist of a set of such structures, thus eschewing semantically unmotivated predicates that merely ensure the correct semantic geometry. Second, on the structural side, we suggest that the semantic content of words can idiosyncratically select one of those predicate-argument structures for the purposes of direct grammatical function assignment. We show that this hypothesis, which builds on independently motivated proposals regarding the form of underspecified natural language semantic representations, provides a clean account of linking phenomena related to several classes of predicators: verbs whose denotata require the presence of an instrument, the semantic role of French ‘adjunct’ clitics, commercial event verbs, the spray/load alternations, and lexical subordination constructions.

Syllables without consonantal onsets may be invisible for stress-assignment, reduplication, or tone. Many authors attribute this behavior to some sort of prosodic deficiency, while having little to say about cases in which onsetless syllables act as well-formed constituents. In the Onset Prominence (OP) representational environment, the ambiguous behavior of onsetless syllables is explained by means of a single representational parameter. Prosodically active initial vowels are assumed to be specified for the Vocalic Onset (VO) layer of structure, a specification lacking in prosodically inert onsetless syllables. Diverse phonological implications of VO specification for KiKerewe, Eastern Arrernte, Tashlhiyt Berber and Polish are examined. In the case of Polish, phonetic data on the glottalization of initial vowels provide additional support for the representational proposal. Finally, the place of the OP environment within the context of modern phonological theory is discussed.