Determiner-noun agreement in English and many other languages appears to be straightforwardly describable; singular determiners go with singular nouns, and plural determiners go with plural nouns. The situation is more complicated with coordinated nouns, however, since unexpected agreement patterns often result. Our theory makes the correct predictions for English and other languages by combining two crucial insights: the dual nature of agreement features inside the noun phrase (Kathol 1999; Sadler 1999, 2003; Wechsler & Zlatić 2000, 2003) and the distinction between distributive and nondistributive features in coordination (Dalrymple & Kaplan 2000).

As is well known, English has two genitive or possessive constructions, the ‘proposed’ and the ‘postposed’, exemplified in (1).

In each case we have an NP, with a head N (book, office, dog, house, plants) modified by a possessive expression (John's, a man's, mine, etc.). This expression is itself an NP in the genitive Case, and I shall refer to it as the ‘genitive phrase’. By contrast with other familiar languages more highly inflected than English, genitive Case is hot marked by an inflection on the head of a genitive phrase, but by the clitic ’s, which is attached right at the end of the phrase. The exception is where the genitive phrase is not a full NP but a personal pronoun, in which case we get an inflected form (irregular in pattern) as in these other languages: I - my/mine, he - his, etc. These possessive forms of pronouns have almost identical distribution to that of full NPs in the genitive (there are some differences which I shall point to below), and so it seems clear that they are genitives, despite the morphological difference; personal pronouns are highly irregular morphologically anyway, and not only in English. This is assumed in all recent work I know of, and I shall take it to be uncontroversial.

Notions of ‘head’ and ‘modifier’ have a long and respectable history in syntax, although they have changed considerably in recent years. But the application of similar notions to morphology is relatively new. The extension of these notions to morphology has been prompted by two developments:

(i) Intimations from dependency grammarians that their approach to language ought to be generalizable to morphology (Andersen, 1980); and, far more importantly

(ii) The development of lexicalist theories of word-formation using an X-bar notation.

One of the most fundamental constructs of phonological theory past and present is ‘neutralization’, i.e. the merger of a contrast in certain contexts. It is as basic as such other constructs as ‘contrast’, ‘distinctive feature’, and ‘segment’. While there exists a substantial body of literature on the phonetics of various phonological constructs (e.g. acoustic correlates for features, acoustic invariance, descriptive phonetics of particular languages, instrumental measurement techniques and segmentation criteria), the phonetics of neutralization has largely been assumed on the basis of casual impressionistic phonetics. The assumption is that forms which are distinguishable phonetically and phonologically in certain contexts and/or levels of representation (e.g. intervocalic voiced and voiceless obstruents in German) are under certain other well-defined circumstances totally indistinguishable at the level of phonetics (e.g. only voiceless obstruents occur word-finally in German).

The debate over determinism and free choice in linguistics is not likely to be settled in this or the next century. All we can do is try to shed some light on the issue from time to time, and perhaps define areas that are best described deterministically, and others where freedom reigns, in majesty if not supreme. Nowhere has the debate been more lively than in descriptions of English stress and accent. The latest – to which this essay is a response (and which can be consulted for chronological developments – there is no need to repeat them here) is Gussenhoven (1983), ‘Focus, mode and the nucleus’. It is a forthright endorsement of a deterministic view, with the high merit of a rich assortment of examples – many attested and all perfectly idiomatic. The case that Gussenhoven builds is a solid one, and as it is directed in part against a view that I have espoused for a long time and still believe to be correct, it requires an answer.

Culicover (1976:152) states that ‘the imperative is an idiosyncratic construction in most languages’. One of the aims of this article is to show that as far as this construction in the English language is concerned, this is an overstatement if we give careful consideration to the structural properties of this construction in a restrictive framework such as Government-Binding theory. Given the proposals in current generative grammar concerning the relations between COMP, INFL, V and their corresponding projections, it is worth investigating what the syntactic representation of the imperative may look like.

INTRODUCTION In a recent paper, Botha (1976) suggests that the analysis of linguistic argumentation is a ‘non-normal’ thing for linguists to do. ‘Normally’, he maintains, ‘linguists are oriented towards uncovering the nature of human language, and not the nature of linguistic science.’ Botha (1976: 3) even goes so far as to claim that the analysis of a form of argumentation is not a sort of linguistic analysis; it is instead a form of philosophical analysis. Some philosophers would probably disagree here with Botha and say that philosophical analysis is a sort of linguistic analysis. I am thinking here of Wittgenstein, for example, and the so-called philosophers of language who accept the view that the business of philosophy is to deal with the question of how words mean what they mean, etc., rather than to offer a comprehensive theory of the universe. It is difficult to draw a line of demarcation between a discipline proper and the study of the methodological underpinnings of that discipline, which I am not sure is essential anyway. My point is that a certain amount of self-criticism and awareness of the status of theoretical concepts and arguments can do linguists no harm.

The law of least effort is of course constantly at play in language use. Redundant linguistic items are consistently reduced in size, replaced with a proform or simply left out. These phenomena are dealt with within the framework of a transformational-generative grammar through transformations involving reduction and deletion. In other grammars they may be handled differently; for example the ‘reduced’ sentences may be regarded as full sentences that may optionally be ‘completed’. But I am not concerned here to give a precise specification of the rules involved, but only to raise the more fundamental questions: what is the nature of the processes involved? And, under what conditions do they operate? In this discussion I shall use the term DELETION throughout although a more neutral term like OMISSION, or even NON-INCLUSION, might be preferred.

The Dutch dialect of Venlo has a lexical tone opposition comparable to the distinction between Accent I and Accent II in Scandinavian. The two word tone patterns are realised in a variety of different ways, depending on the intonation contour, on whether the word has a focus tone, and on whether it occurs finally or nonfinally in the intonational phrase (IP). Twelve such contexts are identified, and an autosegmental-metrical analysis is presented of the contours for the word tones in each of these. The analysis is instructive because of its clear illustration of the distinction between the phonological underlying representation and the phonological surface representation, as well as of the distinction between the latter representation and the phonetic realisation. In addition, because of the complexity of its tonal phonology, the dialect is of considerable typological interest for the study of word prosody and intonation.

Like so many others before it, this exposition is of the meaning of the English modal auxiliaries, which are found in utterances conveying modal meanings such as ability, possibility and permission. However, unlike the majority of its predecessors, the present rendering admits to being about more than semantics. With the five central modal auxiliaries, can, may, must, will and shall, the modals for short, as a point of departure, a framework will be formulated to shed light on some central aspects of the immense cotext and context sensitivity involved in the meaning of utterances of sentences containing a modal auxiliary.

In 1962, on the occasion of the Ninth International Congress of Linguists, an article by Morris Halle (1962) appeared in the special issue of Word, and Noam Chomsky (1964) appeared before a plenary session of the Congress to defend some remarks which had previously been distributed in the Preprints.1 These two papers were perhaps intended as a sort of one-two punch to knock old-fashioned linguistics out of the ring; at any rate, on matters of phonology, their claims and assertions, if all wholly true, would tend to make all phonological work impossible on any known lines (curiously, they fail to reveal their own methods).

The adverbials, as far as I am aware, have never been systematically considered in relation to English verbal description and definition, most traditional text-books resolving the relationship in terms of a vaguely-defined notional ‘modification’. Scholars have of course noted the existence of regular formal co-occurrences between temporal adverbials and tense-forms, but this has been only for the most obvious cases, and there has been no general, empirical study of all the mutual restrictions and formally definable correlations in English. For example, Jespersen (1933) introduces adverbials into some sections of his description of English tenses (e.g. 23.43) but omits them from others (e.g. 23.41 or 23.54) where one could suggest a comparable relevance, and in many sections (e.g. 23.63–23.67) gives only a partial picture of the total number of possible relationships. Again, Ward (1954:44) notes the frequency of adverbials with ‘past ordinary’ tenses, but gives only a few examples, and then lists ‘exceptions’ with no apparent order. Adverbials with other tense-forms are given little mention, and are in any case given a different orientation, which makes it difficult to compare the sets of information. This approach seems typical of that found in most teaching handbooks on the subject: one could instance Zandvoort (1957: 58–63), who gives adverbials only incidental mention in his description of present, past and perfect tenses, despite the fact that the majority of his examples involve their obligatory use. However, Ota (1963) has studied in more detail correlations between verb forms and certain adverbs of particular semantic classes in English; and Osman (1964: 28–106) has recently given adverb-tense relationship a great deal of prominence in his exposition of English tenses; but the scope of his handbook does not allow a sufficiently detailed treatment to show the full range and complexity of the situation. (Cf. also Hornby, 1954: Part 2.)

In this article I argue that both bare infinitival and participial complements of perception verbs in English are clausal constituents headed by the functional category Aspect, and differ only with respect to their aspectual value. Further, I argue that perception verbs license aspectual complements by virtue of being able to function as event control predicates, that is, they allow a control relation to be established between their own and the event argument provided by the predicate of the complement clause. It is shown that the entire cluster of syntactic and semantic properties that characterize direct perception constructions follows from the proposed analysis, in conjunction with independently motivated principles of grammar.

The term word-and-paradigm grammar (Hockett, 1954; Robins, 1959) may be used of any grammar which preserves the traditional distinction between morphology and syntax. This distinction is usually drawn as follows. Following the classical formulation (Dionysius Thrax in Uhlig, 1883:22, line 4; Priscian in Keil, 1855: 53, line 8), any sentence is said to have as its minimal elements a set of [grammatical] words. Such words are of two main types. Some are invariable: examples are the Latin conjunctions et and atque or the prepositions per and in. Others, for example the verb amo or the noun dominus, are variable: they appear in a variety of forms (amo, amabas, amatus, ….; dominus, domino, dominorum, ….) with different syntactic properties. The ‘function’ and distribution of these variants, in relation to each other and to the invariables, is handled by the syntactic sections of the grammar; their phonological or graphological ‘shape’, on the other hand, is stated by the morphology. It is, for instance, a syntactic rule which states that the preposition per must govern a noun in the ACC [usative]2 case, but it is a subject of morphology that dominum, terram, etc. are ACC forms of their respective nouns. The field of grammar, as opposed to phonology, semantics, etc., is thus divided into two separate but interconnected sub-fields: one dealing with what may be called the ‘external’, the other with the ‘internal’ characteristics of grammatical words.

Structural semantics seeks to discover certain relationships among the words in the vocabulary of a language.1 This area of linguistic analysis has received relatively little systematic study by most linguists until recently (Gleason, 1962: 86), and the vocabulary has been considered a rather unorganized set of items.

When the sizes of language families of the world, measured by the number of languages contained in each family, are plotted in descending order on a diagram where the x-axis represents the place of each family in the rank-order (the largest family having rank 1, the next-largest, rank 2, and so on) and the y-axis represents the number of languages in the family determining the rank-ordering, it is seen that the distribution closely approximates a curve defined by the formula y=ax−b. Such ‘power-law’ distributions are known to characterize a wide range of social, biological, and physical phenomena and are essentially of a stochastic nature. It is suggested that the apparent power-law distribution of language family sizes is of relevance when evaluating overall classifications of the world's languages, for the analysis of taxonomic structures, for developing hypotheses concerning the prehistory of the world's languages, and for modelling the future extinction of language families.