Since Paul Grice published ‘Logic and conversation’ in 1975, there have been a number of attempts to develop his programmatic remarks on conversational and conventional implicatures further (see Gazdar, 1979; Atlas & Levinson, 1981; Horn, 1985; Sperber & Wilson, 1986; and especially Levinson, 1983, and the references cited therein). The result has been a growing understanding of the relationship between semantics and pragmatics, and more generally of human reasoning in everyday language use. Many aspects of natural language understanding that were previously thought to be part of the conventional meaning of a given expression can now be shown to be the result of conversational inference. And with cancellability as the diagnostic test, a number of traditional problems in the study of meaning are yielding to more satisfactory analyses. Even more ambitiously, implicatures are penetrating into core areas of the syntax, as pragmatic theories of increasing subtlety are proposed for ‘grammatical’ phenomena such as Chomsky's (1981, 1982) binding principles (see Reinhart, 1983, and Levinson, 1987a, b, 1991).

I have argued elsewhere (Hengeveld, 1987b) that for a proper treatment of modality the clause model used in Functional Grammar (Dik, 1978, 1980) should be adapted in such a way that a number of different layers can be distinguished. My main argument there was that predications, used in Functional Grammar to represent linguistic expressions, have two different functions: a DESCRIPTIVE function and a CONTENT function. A predication not only gives a description of the external situation the speaker refers to within his speech act, it also represents the prepositional content or message unit processed within that speech act. Subjective and evidential modalities, which express a propositional attitude, should take a predication in its contentrepresenting function in their scope, whereas objective modalities, i.e. those modalities that are concerned with the actuality status of a State of Affairs (SoA), should take a predication in its SoA-designating function in their scope. A clause model should therefore be able to distinguish between these two functions of predications.

Remarkably little is known in detail about the phonetics and phonology of naturally occurring conversational talk. Virtually nothing of interest is known of the interactional implications of particular kinds of phonetic events in everyday talk: in particular about the ways in which participants in talk deploy general phonetic resources to accomplish specific interactional tasks. This is in part a consequence of the tendency of recent research on the phonological aspect of discourse to limit itself to ‘intonation’ as an area of primary interest. This work has moved away from the type of phonological analysis, such as that of Halliday (1967), that states intonational systems in terms of grammatically defined units or sentence types. Workers such as Brazil (1975, 1978, 1981), Brown, Currie and Kenworthy (1981), and Coulthard and Brazil (1981) have pursued Bolinger's suggestion that the relationship between intonation and grammar is ‘casual not causal’ and have sought to relate ‘intonation’ to discourse categories rather than to grammatical ones. These, and similar attempts to deal with aspects of discourse phonology, have suggested some organizational features which traditional linguistic accounts have not dealt with. On the whole, however, these recent attempts have been less than satisfactory for one or more of the following reasons.

This paper sketches a grammar of English relative clause constructions (including infinitival and reduced relatives) based on the notions of construction type and type constraints. Generalizations about dependency relations and clausal functions are factored into distinct dimensions contributing constraints to specific construction types in a multiple inheritance type hierarchy. The grammar presented here provides an account of extraction, pied piping and relative clause ‘stacking’ without appeal to transformational operations, transderivational competition, or invisible (‘empty’) categories of any kind.

Hopper & Thompson (1980) is an important contribution on the issue of transitivity, in which they propose that transitivity consists of the following ten semantic parameters:

In the first issue of this journal, Fred W. Householder discussed two papers of ours which he found defective in various respects. We feel that the issues involved are important and deserve the fullest clarification. We will therefore discuss Householder's objections and the underlying issues in some detail, reiterating points that have been made in the aforementioned papers and elsewhere and making no attempt to avoid redundancy if this can contribute to clarity.

Attractive as might seem the challenge to build a process or performance model that can account for every behavioural decision, there are a number of sound reasons to tackle first the still difficult (but hopefully manageable) task of developing a competence model; of trying to find the underlying system that informs and constrains (if it doesn't always actually govern) choice. (Spolsky 1988: 105)

This article aims at showing the predictability of phonological adaptation, segment preservation and deletion in borrowings. It is shown that ill-formed segments are preserved and adapted in the vast majority of cases; segment deletion occurs only when an ill-formed segment is embedded within a higher level ill-formed structure, such as the syllable. This conclusion is based on the study of 15,686 segmental and syllabic malformations found in 11,348 loanword forms from five different corpora of loanwords. The analysis, which is set within the Theory of Constraints and Repair Strategies, is illustrated with the data from a corpus of 545 French loanwords in Fula.

In this paper we introduce a declarative approach to inflectional morphology, which we call Network Morphology, using the lexical representation language DATR. We show that we can account for a range of (Russian) data, for which previously various rule types were required, and can provide a more satisfying analysis than was previously available. First we outline the essential data (section 2), highlighting the problems they present. Section 3 introduces the basic tenets of Network Morphology. This draws heavily on DATR, which we present in outline in section 4. Next we reconsider the Russian declensional classes from this new perspective (section 5). We show how the approach described overcomes long-standing problems in an elegant fashion; the complexity of the data suggests that the approach adopted has implications well beyond Russian. We then tackle the complex problem of animacy in Russian, which exemplifies interesting regularities extending across declensional classes (section 6).

I. Some recent work in phonology/phonetics has tended to reaffirm the relevance of larger-than-segment (non-syntactico-morphological) structural units like the syllable: that is, that phonological representations are per se more highly structured than has generally been supposed in the immediate past. On the one hand, it has been argued that various ‘prosodic’ phenomena have as their domain non-arbitrary groupings of segments, including in particular groupings of ‘syllable size’ (e.g. Cheng, 1966; Lehiste, 1970), and that ‘morpheme structure conditions’ and redundancy conditions in general are most naturally interpreted as in large part constraints on syllable structure (cf., e.g., O'Connor & Trim, 1953; Fudge, 1969; Sampson, 1970; and the works they refer to). There have, on the other hand, been a number of studies particularly of co-articulation and of malfunctioning in production (stuttering, spoonerisms, etc.) whose import seems to be that ‘the unit of articulatory programming is larger in size than the segment, and makes it difficult to believe that articulation consists merely in the concatenation of phonemes’ (Kim, 1971: 60) - cf. the work surveyed by Kim and by Fromkin (1968).

The term ‘agentive’ is a familiar one in current discussions of the syntax of English (and other languages). Although most who use it seem, at first glance, to be referring to more or less the same semantic feature, the term is employed in a variety of ways. For instance, Fillmore (1968: 24) talks of an ‘agentive case’; Gruber (1967: 943) has ‘agentive verbs’; Lyons and others speak of ‘agentive nouns’; while Halliday (1967: 196), although he does not use the term ‘agentive’, distinguishes a feature of clauses which is clearly related to the notion of agentivity. Apart from this disagreement as to what, precisely, the term ‘agentive’ is to be predicated of, there is a further divergence of opinion over which nouns (or verbs, etc.) are to be considered agentive. For instance, Lyons marks the surface subject of see as agentive (1968: 387). Fillmore, on the other hand, assigns this to the dative case, and Gruber classifies see as a non-agentive verb. Again, Lyons and Halliday take up what are in effect incompatible positions with regard to the status of the prisoners in John marched the prisoners. In view of this indeterminacy, it seems worthwhile to attempt a critical examination of the notion of agentivity, in the hope that a clearer characterization of it might emerge.

There has been a consistent pattern of criticism of the reliability of acceptability judgment data in syntax for at least 50 years (e.g., Hill 1961), culminating in several high-profile criticisms within the past ten years (Edelman & Christiansen 2003, Ferreira 2005, Wasow & Arnold 2005, Gibson & Fedorenko 2010, in press). The fundamental claim of these critics is that traditional acceptability judgment collection methods, which tend to be relatively informal compared to methods from experimental psychology, lead to an intolerably high number of false positive results. In this paper we empirically assess this claim by formally testing all 469 (unique, US-English) data points from a popular syntax textbook (Adger 2003) using 440 naïve participants, two judgment tasks (magnitude estimation and yes–no), and three different types of statistical analyses (standard frequentist tests, linear mixed effects models, and Bayes factor analyses). The results suggest that the maximum discrepancy between traditional methods and formal experimental methods is 2%. This suggests that even under the (likely unwarranted) assumption that the discrepant results are all false positives that have found their way into the syntactic literature due to the shortcomings of traditional methods, the minimum replication rate of these 469 data points is 98%. We discuss the implications of these results for questions about the reliability of syntactic data, as well as the practical consequences of these results for the methodological options available to syntacticians.

In an earlier article (Levinson, 1987b), I raised the possibility that a Gricean theory of implicature might provide a systematic partial reduction of the Binding Conditions; the briefest of outlines is given in Section 2.1 below but the argumentation will be found in the earlier article. In this article I want, first, to show how that account might be further justified and extended, but then to introduce a radical alternative. This alternative uses the same pragmatic framework, but gives an account better adjusted to some languages. Finally, I shall attempt to show that both accounts can be combined by taking a diachronic perspective. The attraction of the combined account is that, suddenly, many facts about long-range reflexives and their associated logophoricity fall into place.

In this paper we present an alternative approach to discourse structure according to which topicality is the general organizing principle in discourse. This approach accounts for the fact that the segmentation structure of discourse is in correspondence with the hierarchy of topics defined for the discourse units. Fundamental to the proposed analysis is the relation it assumes between the notion of topic and that of explicit and implicit questioning in discourse. This relation implies that (1) the topic associated with a discourse unit is provided by the explicit or implicit question it answers and (2) the relation between discourse units is determined by the relation between these topic-providing questions.

Jespersen (1894) was the first to attempt to provide an account of the changes that the Old English (OE) impersonal construction was subject to over a period of time, finally ending in its disappearance from the language. The analysis that he proposed, and that he worked out in greater detail in Jespersen (1927), has essentially been taken over by other linguists writing on the subject since then, the only difference lying in the type of explanation they had to offer for the loss of the construction. It seems to have been generally taken for granted that Jespersen's choice of data on which to base the explanation for the disappearance of the construction is correct. As Tripp (1978: 177) puts it, ‘The discussion of the loss of impersonal constructions has reached a point where additional data seem unlikely to alter competing explanations of their disappearance.’ We have a radically different view of the matter in that we claim that all previous explanations of the loss of the impersonal construction (that we know of) are based on the same incorrect starting-point, i.e. a data base that is unduly limited and consequently an incorrect view of the changes involved in the loss of the construction, therefore inevitably leading to the wrong explanation. Rather than assuming, with Jespersen and others, that ‘impersonal’ verbs had one meaning in OE and another, the converse, meaning in New English (NE), we uphold that in OE both meanings existed side by side, systematically associable with different syntactic constructions.

Recently, linguists have discovered (or, more accurately, rediscovered) the role that historical linguistics can legitimately play in providing explanations for the facts of synchronic language types. Greater awareness of synchronic variability and its source in historical changes in progress has focused attention on the concept of a language as a system not of static structures, but of interacting processes which the individual speaker becomes involved in as he/she acquires the language and enters the language community (Weinreich, Labov & Herzog, 1968). These processes are hypothesized to be universal, in that they may occur in any language family at any time period (though the initial actuation of a change is still a riddle, ibid. 102).

The notion of subject in human language has a privileged status relative to other arguments. This special status is manifested in the behavior of subjects at the morphological, syntactic, semantic and discourse levels. Here we present evidence that subjects have a privileged status at the lexical level as well, by analyzing lexicalization patterns of verbs in three different sign languages. Our analysis shows that the sub-lexical structure of iconic signs denoting states of affairs in these languages manifests an inherent pattern of form–meaning correspondence: the signer's body consistently represents one argument of the verb, the subject. The hands, moving in relation to the body, represent all other components of the event – including all other arguments. This analysis shows that sign languages provide novel evidence in support of the centrality of the notion of subject in human language. It also solves a typological puzzle about the apparent primacy of object in sign language verb agreement, a primacy not usually found in spoken languages, in which subject agreement generally ranks higher. Our analysis suggests that the subject argument is represented by the body and is part of the lexical structure of the verb. Because it is always inherently represented in the structure of the sign, the subject is more basic than the object, and tolerates the omission of agreement morphology.

Levinson (1985, 1987a & b, 1991) and Ariel (1985a & b, 1987, 1988a & b, 1990a, 1991) have each proposed to anchor discourse and sentential anaphora within a more general theory of communication. Levinson chose a general, extra-linguistic pragmatic theory. He uses Grice's Quantity maxim to account for the distribution of zeros, reflexives, pronouns and lexical NPs, claiming that coreferent readings are preferred, unless a disjoint reading is implicated (by the revised Gricean maxims he offers). I have proposed a specifically linguistic, cognitive theory, whereby speakers guide addressees' retrievals of mental representations corresponding to all definite NPs (coreferent as well as disjoint) by signalling to them the degree of Accessibility associated with the intended mental entity in their memory. An examination of actual data reveals that Levinson's predictions regarding definite NP interpretations are often not borne out. In addition, his proposals cannot account for many anaphoric patterns actually found in natural discourse. Accessibility theory, it is argued, can account for both types of problematic data.

Imperative Vs with distinctive morphology either have a distinctive syntax (Modern Greek, Spanish), or distribute like others Vs (Serbo-Croatian, Ancient Greek). The contrast follows from properties of the root C. The first type has a strong Imperative V-feature in C, and under Chomsky's Greed Principle, Imperative Vs raise overtly to check this feature. The second type is the Wackernagel language, whose C hosts no features, but V-features are in I. If no phrase fronts, Vs move to C to support second position items. V-to-C affects all Vs, is last resort, follows Lasnik's Enlightened Self-Interest, and escapes Greed.

This paper presents three experiments that investigate the relationship between gradient and binary judgments of grammaticality. In the first two experiments, two different groups of participants judged sentences by the method of magnitude estimation and by the method of speeded grammaticality judgments in a single session. The two experiments involved identical sentence materials but they differed in the order in which the two procedures were applied. The results show a high correlation between the magnitude estimation data and the speeded grammaticality judgments data, both within a session and across the two sessions. The third experiment was a questionnaire study in which participants judged the same sentences as either grammatical or ungrammatical without time pressure. This experiment yielded results quite similar to those of the other two experiments. Thus gradient and binary judgments both provide valuable and reliable sources for linguistic theory when assessed in an experimentally controlled way. We present a model based on Signal Detection Theory which specifies how gradient grammaticality scores are mapped to binary grammaticality judgments. Finally, we compare our experimental results to existing corpus data in order to inquire into the relationship between grammaticality and frequency of usage.

The paper offers a theoretical characterization of the middle Voice as distinct from the passive Voice, and addresses the cross-linguistic morphological variation in realizing these two non-active Voices in different classes of languages, represented by Hebrew, Greek and English. The two non-active Voices are the morphological realization of two distinct syntactic Voice heads generating middle and passive clauses respectively. The former are cross-linguistically interpreted as (i) anticausative, (ii) reflexive (and reciprocal), (iii) dispositional middle, and (iv) medio-passive, which is distinct from passive. This variation in the interpretation of the middle Voice reflects different properties of the root rather than the application of four different lexical rules postulated by lexicalist theories.