I consider a number of constructions with ne-cliticisation, which at first sight would seem to be problematic vis-à-vis the hypothesis that the Italian partitive clitic ne is a diagnostic of unaccusativity. Structures with ne-cliticisation can receive an existential interpretation in sentence focus. I argue that, in the putatively non-canonical domains, ne realises the argument of a stage-level existential predicate (see Carlson 1977; Diesing 1992; Pustejovsky 1995), which is not spelled out in syntax, but only figures in the semantic representation of the sentence. My findings highlight the role of focus structure in unaccusativity phenomena (see Van Valin 1993a; Levin & Rappaport Hovav 1995; Lambrecht 2000, among others), and support the analysis of split intransitivity in terms of non-deterministic correspondence between discourse, semantics and syntax.

Hebrew (past and future tenses) and Standard Finnish exhibit limitations on third person pro-drop, although their first and second person pro-drop follows the well-known Spanish/Italian pattern. This paper aims to show that only a detailed theory of discourse anaphora, such as the one proposed by Ariel (1990, 2001), can account for the distribution of third person pro-drop in Hebrew and Finnish; accounts proposing a syntactic analysis of the phenomenon cannot explain the whole range of data. A comparison between Hebrew and Finnish reveals a difference in the distribution of third person null subjects: Finnish appears to be significantly more restrictive than Hebrew. These two languages are also compared to Rumanian, a typical pro-drop language, which shows almost free third person pro-drop across the board.

In English and other languages, pre-modifiers must generally be head-final, whereas specifiers need not be, which suggests that modifiers are NOT specifiers. The theory of modification defended here rests on a unified version of Merge triggered by satisfaction of selection features under a Priority constraint and claims that the label is dynamically determined by the object containing unsatisfied features AFTER Merge or Move. ‘Adjuncts’ do NOT exist in it, for modification reduces to complementation. Modifiers are just additional predicates, modifieds are their complements or specifiers, depending on the previous structure of the modifier, and correct scope and surface order, including head-final effects and absence thereof, follow from Kayne's Linear Correspondence Axiom without stipulations like the Head-Final Filter. Empirically and conceptually, this theory compares favourably with major alternatives like Kayne's, Chomsky's, Cinque's or Ernst's, and perhaps deserves consideration within a minimalist programme.

This paper focuses on two types of definites in Greek – MONADICS and POLYDEFINITES – and provides a constraint-based account of their form, meaning and use. Specifically, I discuss three core issues that have not been addressed in previous work. First, the special pragmatic import of polydefinites. These are associated with contextual constraints that go beyond the uniqueness entailments of standard (monadic) definites. Their idiosyncratic morphosyntax achieves effects similar to those induced in other languages solely by prosodic means and illustrated by phenomena subsumed within the term DEACCENTING. Second, the morphosyntax of definites. I argue that the Greek definite article can be best analysed as a PHRASALAFFIX, and provide a composition approach in the spirit of previous work couched in HPSG. Monadics and polydefinites are treated uniformly, without positing unmotivated complexity in the grammar for deriving the form of the latter. The definite concord and linear order facts that pose problems for previous analyses are directly derived and the morphosyntactic affinity between the Greek definite article and ‘weak form’ possessive is straightforwardly captured. Third, the semantics of definites. A quantificational semantics is provided that ensures that the semantic content of the definite article in polydefinites is integrated into the meaning of the sentence just once. Polydefinites are, therefore, semantically identical to monadics; the special import of the former originates from a contextual constraint on the anchoring of the index that interacts with the common morphosyntactic and semantic basis.

This paper explains several unique aspects of scrambling. Using the scrambling feature (Σ-feature) proposed by Grewendorf & Sabel (1999), I discuss (a) what derives the difference between A-scrambling and DP-movement, (b) why scrambling shows radical reconstruction properties, while an operator–variable relation is established in wh-questions, and (c) why we find several types of scrambling. I propose a Feature Interpretation Principle, which states that a feature checking relationship established in derivation is preserved at LF. I show that the Feature Interpretation Principle, together with the multiple feature-checking parameter of Ura (1996) and the nature of heads, explains most of the unique properties of scrambling.

One of the most puzzling issues in biblical Hebrew has been its verbal system. In this article, I deal with one of the forms, namely wayyiqtol, suggesting that its meaning is compositional, calculated from three components: a verbal base and two morphemes. The verbal base is shown to be modal, involving quantification over possible worlds. The two morphemes prefixed to the verbal base restrict its modal nature. One morpheme functions like the definite article in a noun phrase; it picks out one of the possible worlds, the familiar actual world (Wo), and anchors the event into it. The other morpheme builds a reference-time, locating the event in time.

In this paper we will extend Smith's (1997) two-component aspect theory to develop a two-level model of situation aspect in which situation aspect is modelled as verb classes at the lexical level and as situation types at the sentential level. Situation types are the composite result of the rule-based interaction between verb classes and complements, arguments, peripheral adjuncts and viewpoint aspect at the nucleus, core and clause levels. With a framework consisting of a lexicon, a layered clause structure and a set of rules mapping verb classes onto situation types, the model is developed and tested using an English corpus and a Chinese corpus.

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).

This paper argues that the word order possibilities of a language are partly determined by the parts-of-speech system of that language. In languages in which lexical items are specialized for certain functionally defined syntactic slots (e.g. the modifier slot within a noun phrase), the identifiability of these slots is ensured by the nature of the lexical items (e.g. adjectives) themselves. As a result, word order possibilities are relatively unrestricted in these languages. In languages in which lexical items are not specialized for certain syntactic slots, in that these items combine the functions of two or more of the traditional word classes, other strategies have to be invoked to enhance identifiability. In these languages word order constraints are used to make syntactic slots identifiable on the basis of their position within the clause or phrase. Hence the word order possibilities are rather restricted in these languages. Counterexamples to the latter claim all involve cases in which identifiability is ensured by morphological rather than syntactic means. This shows that there is a balanced trade-off between the syntactic, morphological, and lexical structure of a language.

One of the fundamental questions on which we linguists disagree is whether or not our subject is useful for education. On one side is a long tradition, stretching back to the classical world, in which the practical benefits were clear and agreed – for example, the early Stoic grammarians aimed to improve literary style (Robins 1967: 16), and the Latin grammarians wrote pedagogical texts for use in school (ibid.: 54). In modern times this tradition is represented by leading linguists such as Tesnière (1959) and Halliday (1964), whose work has been motivated at least in part by the desire to improve language teaching at school. On the other hand is an equally long philosophical tradition of ‘pure’ scholarship for its own sake, in which the only motivation was a desire to understand language better. Recently this tradition is most clearly represented by two linguists who otherwise have little in common, Sampson (1980) and Chomsky (Olson, Faigley & Chomsky 1991), both of whom have denied that linguistics has, can have or indeed should have any relevance to language teaching.

The aim of this paper is to defend the traditional idea that linguistics has an important contribution to make in language teaching, though I shall not of course suggest that every piece of academic research should have a clear pay-off in terms of practical benefits. ‘Blue-skies’ research is just as important in linguistics as in other disciplines. All I shall argue is that our discipline, seen as a whole, has an important interface with education, and that research whose results cross this interface is just as important as that which feeds into, say, neuroscience or child development. Indeed, I shall go further by arguing that academic linguistics is weakened if we ignore the impact of education on language, so information must cross this interface in both directions. If the interface is important even for ‘pure’ research, it follows that we cannot simply name it ‘applied linguistics’ and leave it to those who call themselves applied linguists. My point is that the debate is relevant to all linguists, however ‘pure’, because if education has a profound impact on language, we should know rather better than we do at present exactly what that impact is.

The first large-scale modern grammars of English were Quirk et al.'s A grammar of contemporary English (1972) and A comprehensive grammar of the English language (1985). It has taken 18 years for a major competitor to be published. Many linguists, especially those whose main focus is English, will have looked forward to the publication of the present book. The Cambridge grammar of the English language (henceforth CaGEL) is first and foremost the brainchild of Rodney Huddleston, whose 1984 Introduction to the grammar of English had already established itself as an important text. He was joined by Geoffrey Pullum and the other authors listed above at various points in time.

Ray Jackendoff,Foundations of language. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xix+477.

Ray Jackendoff is well qualified to talk about the trend towards increasing specialization and fragmentation of the science of language. For over 30 years he has been a prolific contributor to a number of different topics in syntax and semantics, and has also made notable contributions to other areas of cognitive science, including music, consciousness, spatial cognition, and psycholinguistics. It's hard to find many in the field who can match Jackendoff's breadth. Therefore, all linguists should be interested in Jackendoff's most recent book, Foundations of language, in which he lays out a series of objectives for the science of language, and describes some of the steps that he believes are needed in order to reintegrate theoretical linguistics with psycholinguistics and even computational neuroscience.

For better or worse, linguistics is rife with frameworks, each with its own ethos. Two important aspects of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar's are: (1) the search for an explicit and exhaustive account of the intricate syntactic and semantic facts that constitute one's grammar and (2) the hypothesis that general/universal and specific aspects of one's grammar are not qualitatively distinct. This book stands as a superb example of this ethos. It illustrates the fecundity of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (henceforth, HPSG) as a framework and advances our knowledge of the syntax and semantics of interrogatives. It is the most explicit description of the semantics and syntax of any area of English syntax of which this reviewer is aware. It thus sets up a healthy empirical benchmark for other theories of interrogatives. The sixty pages of appendices that detail the grammar discussed in the book and its almost complete implementation in the current version of the English Resource Grammar attest to this empirical bent. Any future theory will have to match it in accuracy before any metatheoretical issues (e.g. simplicity or explanatory adequacy) can be meaningfully discussed. Its precision and comprehensiveness will also, hopefully, lead to descriptions of unbounded dependencies and clause-types in other languages that are orders of magnitude more detailed than those currently available. Ginzburg & Sag's (G&S's) book also illustrates how possibly universal principles (such as the requirement that head-daughters and mothers of a local tree share information) and construction-specific requirements (such as the fact that the scope of

William Croft,Radical Construction Grammar: syntactic theory in typological perspective. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. xxviii+416.

My reason for writing this review article is that I want to highlight a particular basic opposition in linguistic theory and methodology. On the one hand, we have what is usually called COGNITIVISM, represented in the book under review by the new theory of Radical Construction Grammar, henceforth RCG. On the other hand, there is a variety of schools, together forming a large majority in the field, whose theoretical overlap may be characterized by the term MODULARITY. I argue against cognitivism and in favour of the modularity view, and I am using the book under review as an opportunity to define the issue and put forward the arguments.

In his review of Radical Construction Grammar: syntactic theory in typological perspective (Croft 2001), Pieter Seuren argues that the theory of syntactic representation argued for in that book is fundamentally misguided. S also raises a number of general methodological and philosophical issues, as well as some empirical data, which he claims are problematic for RCG. I begin by dealing with the general critique, then turn to S's discussion of the specific major theses of RCG and his empirical data.