For both children and adults, communicating with each other effectively depends on having enough knowledge about particular entities, actions, or relations to understand and produce the words being used. Speakers draw on conventional meanings shared with their interlocutors, but do they share every detail of word meaning? They need not have identical, or fully specified, representations for the meanings of all the terms they make use of. Rather, they need only have represented enough about the meanings of the words used by another speaker to understand what is intended in context on a particular occasion. Reliance on partial meanings is common in both children and adults. More detailed, shared, representations of word meanings for a domain depend on acquiring additional knowledge about that domain and its contents.

Romance clitics are currently accounted for as DP arguments moved to functional head positions or as functional heads (AccVoice, etc.) licensing pro-DPs in argument position. I take the view that clitics are first merged as heads, projecting independently motivated categories on the functional spine of the sentence (φP, ApplP). I argue that they can satisfy theta relations without need for a pro associate. From an empirical point of view, a pure head syntax for clitics is favoured in explaining the asymmetries between clitics and phrases, found in several syntactically relevant domains (order, agreement, case). I show how the hypothesis that clitics are functional heads derives the internal order of the clitic string, which does not necessarily match (or mirror) that of phrasal constituents. I also consider agreement asymmetries (perfect participle agreement) and case asymmetries (in relation to Differential Object Marking).

In this paper, I examine the properties of a construction in Korean speech that has not received much attention in the literature. I refer to the construction in question as the ‘stranded embedded clause’ (SEC). SECs are a special type of echoed utterance, where an utterance in the form of an embedded clause is repeated for various reasons. The characteristic properties of the SEC involve the fact that there can be a mismatch between the type of the clause indicated by the clause type marker that they contain and the actual illocutionary force of the utterance that is indicated by its prosody. The complementizer is also obligatory, despite the fact that no matrix clause element shows up—hence, the name stranded embedded clause. I propose a deletion-based analysis of SECs, where they start out as a full-fledged embedded clause in a complex sentence and undergo movement, followed by deletion of the rest of the clause. It should be noted that this is essentially how fragment answers (and some other ellipsis constructions) have been analysed in the literature. Indeed, I show that there is a parallelism between SECs and fragment answers, which I argue provides support for the deletion-based approach to the former.

In this article I review two analyses of English existential constructions – the Case-transmission analysis and the expletive-replacement analysis – from the perspective of Chomsky's (1993, 1995) minimalist framework. I show that neither approach is free from empirical problems and that adopting minimalist program can reconcile these difficulties and account for more extensive data as well. I propose that LF feature-raising theory that I adopt here should be more economical than it is now, for example, in Chomsky (1995) so that only the relevant ‘checkable’ features raise at LF. My discussion concerns English existential constructions and Object Shift in Icelandic. In particular, I discuss (a) specificity, (b) scope and (c) negative polarity item licensing and show that the category-raising analysis of the associate of an expletive raises problems concerning these three aspects. The analysis presented in the article will be further supported by facts about predicate raising constructions.

We examine the constellation of factors – lexical, aspectual, temporal and conversational – that give rise to evidential implications from assertions. We target intensional and inferential meanings associated with a certain class of present-tense state sentences: those containing a temporal adverb headed by by, e.g. The American traveling public is pretty mature by now. We ask why present-tense sentences containing by temporal adverbs (BTAs) are improved by, and sometimes appear to require, an epistemic modal, e.g. They ??(must) live in a mansion by now. Key to our analysis is the idea that BTA sentences require the onset of a resultant state described by the complement of by now to overlap some unspecified time that precedes the time described by the adverb. The indefiniteness of the unspecified time described by BTAs leads interpreters to pragmatically construe present-tense BTA reports as conjectures, guesses or suppositions. We show how our analysis can be extended to incorporate the contribution of epistemic modals. Adopting insights from von Fintel & Gillies (2010) and Mandelkern (2016), we hypothesize the manner in which the BTA change schema is instantiated in intensional contexts and discuss the relationship between intensional and evidential contexts. We see the merging of aspectual and epistemic features in BTA sentences, and in particular present-tense sentences, as the result of a semantic reconciliation procedure: the use of an epistemic modal in a BTA predication evokes an observation or act of reasoning, prior to speech time, which permits the speaker to make her assertion, and this inference trigger is identified with the ‘onset event’ in the BTA schema.

The present paper1 will be concerned with some descriptive and theoretical issues connected with Glide Formation (GF) and Stress Placement (StrP) as well as with the interplay of these rules in the ‘phonological component’ of Modern Greek (MG). These problems have recently been discussed by Irene Warburton whose article (1976) will serve as a point of reference.

Warburton's paper consists of two major parts of rather unequal strength. The first section (‘The relationship between stress and vowel length’, 260–268) makes a good case against attempts to condition the MG stress rule(s) phonologically by setting up never-surfacing distinctions of vowel length. It is also meritorious plea for the view that morphological conditioning ‘does not necessarily introduce irregularity in the language’ (Warburton, 259), as far as the rule makes reference to ‘a natural class of items… that can be subsumed wihin a single morphological feature (e.g. Past, Plural, etc.) that is independently available’ (l.c.).