The first thesis concerning phonological representations enunciated by Anderson and Jones (henceforth A&J)(1974: 8) is ‘that phonological representations are more highly structured than the standard theory would claim’, where the level of structure with which they are particularly concerned is that of bracketing into syllables. The principles in terms of which this bracketing is assigned are given as (I) (= their (19)):

(I) (a) Medial clusters are composed of a syllable-final preceding a syllable- initial sequence. (b) ‘Precede’ includes overlap where possible.

A couple of points of elucidation are necessary here. First, it should be noted that a previous formulation of (Ia) in the same paper (4) states: ‘We claim that medial clusters are combination of clusters that can be final in monosyllables and clusters that can be initial.’ This reference to word-final and initial clusters must be borne in mind if (Ia) is not to be construed as either circular or trivial.

The primary aim of this paper is to show by the analysis of an extended example that a phonological description which recognizes the functional variety of phonological description which recognizes the functional variety of phonological rules is more illuminating than one in which the data are handled merely as the output of a set of completely undifferentiated processes. In particular I hope to emphasize the value of distinguishing MOTIVATED and UNMOTIVATED processes in phonology.

Schools of thought concerning the study of language in anthropology and in linguistics proper have developed historically along lines that are sometimes convergent, but too often divergent because of a certain gap in communication between the two disciplines. It is the purpose of this paper to suggest the existence of an area of common interest which is at present unrecognized in the literature. I submit that recent work in what anthropologists refer to as ‘formal’ semantic analysis, when considered in the light of transformational linguistics, provides a potentially fruitful point of interdisciplinary interaction which should result in the formulation of a more adequate theory of meaning in the study of language than exists at the moment.

Existing approaches to the representation of argument structure in grammar tend to focus either on semantics or on syntax. Our goal in this paper is to strike the right balance between the two levels by proposing an analysis that maintains the independence of the syntactic and semantic aspects of argument structure, and, at the same time, captures the interplay between the two levels. Our proposal is set in the context of the development of a large-scale grammar of Modern Hebrew within the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). Consequently, an additional challenge it faces is to reconcile two conflicting desiderata: to be both linguistically coherent and realistic in terms of the grammar engineering effort. We present a novel representation of argument structure that is fully implemented in HPSG, and demonstrate its many benefits to the coherence of our Hebrew grammar. We also highlight the additional dimensions of linguistic generalization that our proposal provides, which we believe are also applicable to grammars of other languages.

Recent work in Relevance Theory (henceforth RT) illustrates the coming of age of modern pragmatic scholarship in creating an environment in which a particular theory of pragmatics can be taken for granted, without explanation or justification, and an analysis of a phenomenon previously unaccounted for within that theory can be advanced. One is reminded of much of the recent syntactic work within GB/Principles & Parameters/Minimalist Theory: the dominance of the Chomskyan approach – particularly in certain geographic regions – allows researchers, for better or worse, to simply assume the correctness of the theory in their work and proceed to illustrate how that theory might (or must) be extended or modified to accommodate a new class of data. In this volume, Žegarac & Clark (1999) provide the latest illustration of a similar strategy in pragmatics: the correctness of RT is assumed and an analysis of ‘phatic communication’ proposed within that framework. On the one hand, this constitutes an advance for pragmatic theory, since until recently there was no comprehensive all-inclusive framework within which certain pragmatic generalizations could be stated. If nothing else, RT has served to raise a number of important issues surrounding the semantics-pragmatics interface, helping to crystallize the debate and make explicit many assumptions that had been either implicit or non-existent in other frameworks. In particular, RT work on scalar implicature/explicature and on echoic mention and metalinguistic negation (e.g. Carston 1988, 1995; Récanati 1989) has represented major advances in our understanding of these phenomena and their theoretical implications. Thus, whatever one may think of RT, it is a theory that must be taken seriously by anyone working in this area. On the other hand, we find that RT suffers from one of the principal afflictions of the aforementioned work in the GB/P&P/Minimalism mainstream: a remarkable failure to address, come to terms with, and incorporate the extensive previous literature on the topic under current consideration.

Linguists are constantly invoking a relation of subordination of one clause to another and there seems to be agreement among linguists, about their native tongues at least. Yet the reason for the existence of the relation and the consistency of judgments concerning it is not well understood. The study of subordination and of argumentation for assigning the relation can profitably be made from at least two viewpoints. One viewpoint is paradigmatic or transformational. Evidence for subordination derives from an asymmetry in certain transformational relationships. Non-subordinating constructions on a pair of clauses show identical properties in each clause when the whole construction undergoes transformation, while the same transformations display non-identical properties in the clauses of subordinating constructions. The other viewpoint is syntagmatic or textual. One might even call this viewpoint semantic. Subordinating constructions are restricted in their co-occurrence within coreference patterns of a text in a way that corresponds to an intuitive feeling that a subordinate clause is not the topic of the text at the point where it occurs. Thus one might state the pattern by saying that the common element of meaning of all subordination markers is to indicate that the clause they operate on is subordinate in topic to the non-marked clause. However, the precise account will be in cerms of coreference patterns.

This paper reports the results of two acceptability judgment experiments that examine the effect of PP remnants with mismatching correlates in the antecedent clause (either a PP, with a distinct preposition, or an NP) on the acceptability of pseudogapping as well as non-elliptical controls. Across both experiments, three novel findings emerge: First, utterances with mismatching PPs across the ellipsis clause and its antecedent were consistently degraded relative to their preposition-matched counterparts. Second, this mismatch penalty arose for elliptical and non-elliptical variants alike with only minor differences between the two. Finally, a significant portion of the mismatch penalties was explained away by the degree of semantic similarity between the thematic relations established by the mismatching prepositions with respect to the antecedent verb which was measured in a separate norming experiment. We examine the consequences of these new empirical results for current theories of pseudogapping, namely (i) the remnant-raising analysis, according to which the remnant XP is raised leftward out of the VP prior to VP ellipsis, licensed under identity with its antecedent; and (ii) the direct generation analysis, under which auxiliaries are verbal proforms that recover their referent anaphorically without the need for remnant movement or syntactic identity between the verb and its antecedent. We conclude that the data are more naturally accounted for under the direct generation approach.

This paper offers a comprehensive discussion of the cardinal numeral system of Italian Sign Language. At the lexical level, we present the different formational strategies used to generate cardinal numerals and we provide evidence that in the younger generations of signers, the sign one has lost the function of indefinite determiner and is now used as a cardinal only. At the syntactic level, we show that the attested variation in the ordering between the cardinal and the noun is in part due to definiteness and contrastive focus. We account for this variation within the cartographic approach to syntax. Finally, we offer a principled explanation for the reason why cardinals inside Measure Phrases are not subject to word order variation, but always precede the measure noun.