This article explores the interface between the syntactic and semantic representation of natural language with respect to the interpretation of time. The main claim of the paper is that the semantic relationship of temporal dependency requires syntactic locality at LF. Based on this claim, I explore the syntax and semantics of gerundive relative clauses. I argue that since gerundive relatives are temporally dependent on the tense of the main clause, they need to be local with a temporal element of the main clause at LF. I show that gerundive relatives receive different temporal interpretations depending on their syntactic position at LF. This analysis sheds light on the behavior of gerundive relatives in constructions involving coordination, existential there, scope of quantificational and cardinality adverbials, extraposition, presuppositionality effects and binding-theoretic reconstruction effects.

In this paper it is argued that there existed, in a certain period of the history of Latin, a floating C-Place node in some lexical items in word- and stem-initial position. Notably, this was involved in the phonological representation of the words written – in an archaising fashion – with initial 〈gn〉. Based on a thorough analysis of the Brepols Corpus (CLCLT-5) it is demonstrated that the diachronic distribution of the prefixed forms of 〈gn〉-initial stems shows restrictions that can only be explained if one assumes a geometric representation involving a floating C-Place node that remained in the place of the original velar stop inherited from Proto-Indo-European. By classical times this floating node was also lost, and thus the possibilities for combining prefixes with original 〈gn〉-initial stems expanded.

This paper attempts to account for the existence of two phonological rules (consonant gemination and a type of metathesis) and for the suspension of a third (truncation), all of which occur in very limited grammatical environments. A close examination of these three cases suggests that we must recognize the possibility of phonetically unmotivated morphophonological rules, which can perhaps be explained in functionalist terms: the rules examined here appear to be designed essentially to preserve the canonical forms of sets of morphemes which would otherwise be in danger of clashing with other sets of morphemes in the language. These findings lead us to elaborate on Hooper's (1976) notion of MP-rules (rules which require grammatical information to be given in their structural description), and to question her hypothesis concerning the origins of such rules.

The emphasis on syntagmatic criteria in analysis, especially as interpreted by J. R. Firth (from his 1948 paper onwards) in the phonological aspect of language, has led many scholars, in Great Britain at least, to a disbelief in the adequacy of phonemes alone – or of phonemes aided by such suprasegmental features as intensity, duration and tone – for the tasks of accurate description and powerful theoretical explanation of the operation of a spoken language. Among the fruits of the new emphasis, the studies which are characterized as ‘prosodic’ and ‘polysystemic’, is that treatment of Sanskrit discontinuous retroflexion within words which handles this feature as a prosody operating over a considerable stretch (chain of phonematic units) and being phonetically realized wherever possible, which may be more often than is graphically hinted (Allen, 1951). In this view, apparent historical ‘assimilation’ is trenchantly dismissed: we are not to imagine a shift being induced in one phoneme by another which stands at a distance from it, nor is the first to be spoken of as changing from ‘something it never was’. This, of course, begs the whole historical question; and even if the nature of Indo-European reconstructions is so skeletophonemic that we cannot say with certainty that Skt. ṇ is not the unshifted allophonic reflex of IE /n/ in the relevant positions in the relevant words, nevertheless a phonetic continuation is scarcely likely (e.g. in *plH-nó-). In many cases a different earlier form can be pointed to, attested and unmistakable (e.g. Latin octo before Ital. otto). One cannot lightly oppose a prima facie possibility that ṇ was first one thing and then became another.

This study uses data from loanwords in Indonesian to argue for a phonological analysis using Harmonic Grammar (e.g. Smolensky & Legendre 2006, Pater, Bhatt & Potts 2007, Pater 2009). In original data consisting of Arabic and Dutch loanwords containing initial and final consonant clusters produced by 24 native speakers of Indonesian, we find both deletion and epenthesis to resolve word-final clusters, while word-initial clusters sometimes have epenthesis and sometimes are tolerated intact. The adaptations of Arabic and Dutch loanwords reveal the influence of three markedness constraints generally observed in Indonesian (*ComplexCoda, *ComplexOnset, and MinWord), and support a role for phonology in the analysis of borrowing, rather than a purely perceptual approach. When native monosyllables and borrowed monosyllables without clusters are considered, we find evidence that a standard Optimality Theory strict ranking is inadequate to account for the data; these constraints must be allowed to ‘gang up’, as in Harmonic Grammar, to account for the deletions, epenthesis, and non-adaptations found in the data.