Gussmann (1980) has presented an analysis of Polish morphophonemics within the framework of SPE (Chomsky & Halle, 1968). His treatment appeals extensively to underlying representations containing segments which never appear in surface representations. He justifies this use of absolute neutralization with the claim that other rules of Polish phonology appeal to such underlying forms. Rubach (1984) has reanalysed much of Gussmann's description within the framework of Kiparsky's (1982) Lexical Phonology, retaining the analysis of the neutralized segments and even adding to the inventory of abstract elements. The arguments presented by both scholars are a paradigm of elegance and ingenuity, representing generative phonological analysis at its best. However, the considerable reliance they put on abstract underlying representations, morphologically conditioned rules, extrinsic rule ordering and other devices which give rise to a high degree of opacity arouses suspicion. For this reason I have sought to re-examine some of their material within a more ‘concrete’ interpretation of Lexical Phonology, making use of recent ideas from theories of non-linear phonology and theories of allomorphy.

The aim of this paper is to argue that the process of code-mixing is constrained by the government relation that holds between the constituents of a sentence. The government constraint replaces a number of specific constraints that have been proposed in the literature to account for apparently ‘impossible’, ‘ungrammatical’ or ‘non-occurring’ types of intra-sentential switches. Code-mixing is a form of linguistic behaviour which produces utterances consisting of elements taken from the lexicons of different languages. Some examples are given in (1).

Although linguists like to claim that all human languages are equal in a general sense, differing from systems of animal communication in possessing ‘design features’ like arbitrariness and productivity (Hockett, 1958), they sometimes join non-linguists in expressing the view that some languages are inadequate with respect to the cognitive or expressive resources which they offer their speakers. In the Middle Ages, this charge was commonly levelled against the European vernaculars, and it was sometime before Spanish and Italian were recognized as having autonomous grammatical and lexical resources comparable in regularity and power to classical Greek and Latin (Scaglione, 1984). By the middle of the twentieth century, following on the descriptive work of Boas, Sapir and others, the notion that the languages of ‘primitive’ peoples were fundamentally inadequate had also been eroded, at least in linguistics, anthropology, and other academic circles (Kay & Kempton, 1984:65). Yet, as Hall (1966:106) notes, there is still one group of languages which constitutes the ‘last refuge’ of the concept of inadequate grammatical or lexical resources: pidgins and creoles.

The terms definite and indefinite, when used in relation to NPs, can be handled in two different ways. One can treat definiteness as a formal (syntactico-morphological) category and make use of the syntactic features [±definite], as in Chomsky (1965). One can also go into the question of how definite and indefinite NPs are used, i.e. the question of when and why a (formally) definite NP is preferred to an indefinite one, or vice versa. If we take the latter approach, we are investigating definiteness as a semantico-pragmatic category.

The phenomenon that I describe in this paper is a specific class of indirectly conveyed meanings. The meanings involved are definitional, or partially definitional. Though conveyed by the utterance of sentences, they are not part of the meaning of those sentences. To begin with, I shall use the term ‘non-descriptive definition’ to refer to the act of conveying such a meaning by the utterance of a sentence that does not have that meaning. In due course, though, I shall refine the reference of that term.

This paper is a sequel to ‘Thematic predicates and the pragmatics of non-descriptive definition’ (Burton-Roberts, 1986, henceforth PNDD) and is best read in conjunction with it. I discuss a variety of issues arising out of the explanation there given of a phenomenon I called ‘non-descriptive definition’. In explaining non-descriptive definition, we need to explain how a definition-requesting question (e.g. What is a dandy?, (2) below) can be appropriately responded to by the utterance of a sentence that does not constitute a definition and, canonically at least, would actually presuppose knowledge of the meaning of the word to be defined (e.g. Max is a dandy?, (3) below). The explanation given depends on analysing such responses as having the predicate rather than the subject as theme. On the assumption that subject is unmarked theme, such responses thus have marked thematic structure. On the further assumption of a relation of pragmatic equivalence between an utterance with marked thematic structure and some unmarked counterpart, such responses may be straightforwardly related to strict literal ANSWERS to their definition-requesting questions; that is, they can be related to DEFINITIONS – non-descriptive in the first instance (see (4) below), and (explicit) descriptive definitions in the second (see (5) below).

As part of an investigation into rapid speech and its rule-based processes, I want to present an analysis of colloquial spoken Thai and show how different tempi can be related to one another. I also want to see whether the processes displayed by colloquial Thai fit into the general picture of phonological processes which has emerged over the past 15 years or so (roughly Stampe, 1969, onwards) within different theoretical frameworks. In particular I shall try to relate my findings to the increasingly accepted notions of richer phonological structure now being envisaged (e.g. Clements & Keyser, 1983 – tridimensional; Goldsmith, 1976 a & b – autosegmental; Liberman & Prince, 1977 and Kiparsky, 1979 – metrical; Anderson & Ewen, 1980, and Durand, 1986 a – dependency).

A number of languages have what can be called prepositional complementizers, items which look like prepositions and have some of the properties of prepositions but appear in positions in which complementizers appear. In this paper I shall be concerned with Welsh prepositional complementizers and, in particular, with their implications for the analysis of subjectless infinitives. I shall consider the possibility of providing an analysis of the Welsh facts within the government-binding (GB) framework of Chomsky (1981, 1982, 1984), in which subjectless infinitives are clauses. I will argue that GB assumptions preclude a satisfactory account of the data. I will also show that certain facts relating to agreement pose further problems for a GB approach. I will then show that the facts are quite straightforward if one assumes that subjectless infinitives are bare VPs, as argued for Welsh in Borsley (1984a), and that VPs and Ss are members of the same basic category, as proposed in Borsley (1983, 1984b). It looks, then, as if we have some interesting evidence here for these assumptions.

The positions of subject and object in simple active sentences, and object of a preposition are normally filled by NP's but they can also be filled by PP's. There are reasons for analyzing such PP's as just PP's and not as PP's embedded in NP's. Yet such an analysis appears to be problematic for the analysis of raising and passive sentences assumed within the government-binding (GB) framework, which is formulated with exclusive reference to NP's. Assuming that the basic mechanisms at work in sentences with PP's in typical NP positions are identical to those in sentences with NP's, PP's must sometimes require Case to avoid a violation of the Case Filter. It is possible to incorporate this idea into the GB framework given a particular view of Case and Case assignment, and a revised Case Filter. The analysis receives some further support from a range of related data.

This paper is an argument for the constraint on grammars known as the ‘true generalization condition’ (Hooper, 1976:13): all rules express generalizations true for all surface forms. I make this condition fully explicit by interpreting it to mean the prohibition of the three transformational rule-types: deletion, movement and feature-changing. The argument takes the form of a comparison of a recent autosegmental analysis of the intricate facts of Arabic root and pattern verb stem morphology with an alternative which observes the condition. I hope to show how the latter analysis in every empirical aspect is equivalent to the former in its claims about Arabic, and significantly differs, as the result of observing the true generalization condition, in its lack of numerous un-empirical claims made in the autosegmental analysis. In so far as both have descriptive adequacy, the analysis governed by the true generalization condition, termed ‘non-transformational’, has also explanatory adequacy in the sense of Chomsky, 1964: 28–9, since it is closely determined, or selected, by the true generalization condition.

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.

The history of the verb like has attracted a good deal of interest among linguists and students of the history of English, from Van der Gaaf (1904) and Jespersen (1927) up to Elmer (1981), Lightfoot (1981), and Fischer and Van der Leek (1983). The interest in this verb is caused by the fact that it presents a clear case of a verb changing its assignment of semantic to syntactic roles. In Modern English (ModE), this verb subcategorizes for a cause, which takes the grammatical role of object, and an experiencer, which plays the role of subject. But in Old English (OE), the semantic roles were assigned to the opposite grammatical roles:

It is generally assumed (with an exception to be discussed below), that this change is an instance of syntactic reanalysis. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that no reanalysis of a structure has taken place; rather, a new subcategorization frame has been introduced and gradually ousted the old one.

Remarkably little is known in detail about the phonetics and phonology of naturally occurring conversational talk. Virtually nothing of interest is known of the interactional implications of particular kinds of phonetic events in everyday talk: in particular about the ways in which participants in talk deploy general phonetic resources to accomplish specific interactional tasks. This is in part a consequence of the tendency of recent research on the phonological aspect of discourse to limit itself to ‘intonation’ as an area of primary interest. This work has moved away from the type of phonological analysis, such as that of Halliday (1967), that states intonational systems in terms of grammatically defined units or sentence types. Workers such as Brazil (1975, 1978, 1981), Brown, Currie and Kenworthy (1981), and Coulthard and Brazil (1981) have pursued Bolinger's suggestion that the relationship between intonation and grammar is ‘casual not causal’ and have sought to relate ‘intonation’ to discourse categories rather than to grammatical ones. These, and similar attempts to deal with aspects of discourse phonology, have suggested some organizational features which traditional linguistic accounts have not dealt with. On the whole, however, these recent attempts have been less than satisfactory for one or more of the following reasons.

A long recognized problem for linguistic theory has been to explain why certain sounds, sound oppositions, and sound sequences are statistically preferred over others among languages of the world. The formal theory of markedness, developed by Trubetzkoy and Jakobson in the early 1930's, and extended by Chomsky and Halle (1968), represents an attempt to deal with this problem. It is at least implicit in that theory that sounds are rare when (and because) they are marked, and common when (and because) they are not. Whether sounds are marked or unmarked depends – in the latter version of the theory, particularly – upon the ‘intrinsic content’ of acoustic and articulatory features which define them. There was, however, no substantive attempt among early proponents of the theory to show what it was about the content of particular features and feature combinations that caused them to be marked, and others not.