This paper examines Superiority effects with VP internal constituents in English, Spanish and Bulgarian. It is argued in the paper that certain data concerning Superiority effects provide evidence for the existence of AgrO. In particular, they provide evidence that Accusative wh-phrases undergoing syntactic wh-movement must move to SpecAgrOP on their way to SpecCP. The data examined in the paper are also shown to provide support for the Economy account of the Superiority Condition.

This paper presents a relational account of the Japanese constructions that are commonly referred to as ‘passives’. They are shown to all be multipredicate, monoclausal constructions, with the differences between them primarily attributable to optionality in the lexical argument structure of the ‘passive’ predicate. The proposed analysis explains the differences between passives and causatives, despite their sometimes identical case-marking. Further, evidence from the interaction of unaccusative verbs and passive is shown to lead to a formal revision of the 1-Advancement Exclusiveness law. Finally, the differences between Japanese and Korean with respect to passives is reduced to a simple lexical difference between the two languages.

This article deals with the relation between subcategorization and the notion head in OE [P-V] compounds. Many morphosyntactic properties such as category and morphological class percolate from the head to the mother. Subcategorization, however, can percolate to the mother from a nonhead as well as from the head. This is evident from the comparison of their case government properties. This paper shows that the process of ARGUMENT ATTRACTION developed within Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar permits a straightforward account of this phenomenon.

This paper examines the relationship between the use of names and other words in address and in reference: how does the way that speaker A addresses B differ from the way that A refers to B, and what are the factors affecting this difference? The study, based on observation and interviews, attempts both to solve a problem in pragmatics and to help historical linguists and others who need to know the extent to which it may be justified to extrapolate from referential to address usage and vice versa.

This paper offers a variationist critique of aspects of phonological theory and method, focusing on advances in descriptive methods and highlighting the problems that need to be addressed in explaining phonological variation. On the one hand, socially situated language samples which have been systematically collected and analysed constitute a legitimate – indeed often vital – source of evidence to be utilised by linguists for assessing and refining theoretical models. On the other hand, variationists cannot operate in isolation from theoretical concerns, and can benefit from an evaluation of the competing theoretical frameworks available to them.

The paper begins with a brief review of the philosophical foundations underlying the tension between ‘external’ and ‘internal’ methodology. We then focus on a particular phonological example – glottalisation in English. We demonstrate that phonological models of this can be complemented by systematic and accountable data collection and analysis of the kind associated with sociolinguistics. It is suggested that the patterns of variation produced by speakers are significantly more complex than has been indicated in the phonological literature. Consequently, these approaches can be usefully expanded and extended as theoretical models. We discuss some desiderata for extending the range of phonological models, focusing chiefly on the need to account for variability and change in language.

The Principle of Phonology-Free Syntax (PPFS) is a proposed universal principle of grammar that prohibits reference to phonological information in syntactic rules or constraints. Although many linguists have noted phenomena that appear to them to be in conflict with it, the appearances are misleading in all cases we have examined. This paper scrutinizes four instructive cases in French that appear to falsify the PPFS. Section 1 deals with the alleged relevance of syllable count to the description of attributive adjective placement; section 2 addresses the validity of a rule mentioning consonantality in stating the agreement rule for adverbial tout; section 3 turns to the issue of preposition choice (e.g. en vs. au) with geographical proper names; and section 4 takes a look at a purported case of phonological reference in stating the rule for ellipsis of a clitic pronoun and an auxiliary in a coordinate structure. In each case we bring independent evidence to bear on the problem in order to show that the analyses employing phonology-sensitive syntactic statements are in error and the prediction of the PPFS is confirmed.

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.

This paper investigates the relationship between variability and lexicality on the one hand and sound change on the other within the theory of Lexical Phonology. The former leads to the proposal of the Optionality Constraint (OC), which prohibits the application of optional rules in the lexical module. The constraint is found to be violated at the word level. The violation of OC as well as of other lexical modular principles is accounted for by the help of a new licensing principle, called the Polarity Principle. This allows for interacting modules to have different properties of representation and rule application at their opposite ends. The OC leads to a resolution of the Neogrammarian Controversy, that is consonant with the standard assumption concerning sound change, namely, the inherent relation between the latter and variability.

Corpus data are used to investigate Yngve's claim that English usage avoids grammatical structures in which the number of left branches between any word and the root node of a sentence exceeds some fixed limit. The data do display a marked bias against left-branching, but the pattern of word-depths does not conform to Yngve's concept of a sharp limit. The bias could alternatively reflect a statistical invariance in the incidence of left-branching, but whether this is so depends on how left-branching is counted. Six nonequivalent measures are proposed; it turns out that one (and only one) of these yields strikingly constant figures for left-branching in real-life sentences over a wide range of lengths. This is not the measure suggested by Yngve's formulation; it is the measure whose invariance is arguably the most favourable for computational tractability.

This study focuses on the development of complex word formation in L2 acquisition. We examine experimentally elicited data on English deverbal synthetic compounding (such as toe-painter) by native Spanish speakers and conclude that: (a) development proceeds in stages which clearly reflect UG-constrained L1 influence; (b) nontargetlike productions (e.g. painter-toes) show attempts to spell out the grammatical features associated with functional categories in deverbal compounding; though nontargetlike, they are nonetheless consistent with the compound's required feature-marking; (c) such attempts implicate the early existence in the Interlanguage of those functional heads and their projections in the (lexical) syntax; i.e., the absence of the correct phonological form cannot be taken to imply lack of knowledge of morphosyntactic features and their corresponding phrase structure.

This paper provides a relevance theoretic account of the semantics of the be going to construction in English, based on Klinge's (1993) model for the semantics of the modal auxiliaries, and in particular of will. The semantics of both forms will be accounted for in terms of the relation between linguistic representations of situations and cognitive domains. Finally the pragmatics of utterances of sentences containing will and be going to will be discussed.

J. A. Goldsmith (ed.),The handbook of phonological theory. Cambridge, MA & Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. Pp. xiv + 986.

To assess a book of nearly a thousand pages with thirty-two contributions is something of a tall order, if not an impossible task, if one wants to do justice to all of it. For this reason, I have chosen to approach it from my own standpoint on phonology and see to what extent the issues I see as crucial to the current vigorous debate in this area have been addressed and to examine how they have been dealt with. First, however, I will present a general description and discussion of the book as a whole.

Attractive as might seem the challenge to build a process or performance model that can account for every behavioural decision, there are a number of sound reasons to tackle first the still difficult (but hopefully manageable) task of developing a competence model; of trying to find the underlying system that informs and constrains (if it doesn't always actually govern) choice. (Spolsky 1988: 105)

This article aims at showing the predictability of phonological adaptation, segment preservation and deletion in borrowings. It is shown that ill-formed segments are preserved and adapted in the vast majority of cases; segment deletion occurs only when an ill-formed segment is embedded within a higher level ill-formed structure, such as the syllable. This conclusion is based on the study of 15,686 segmental and syllabic malformations found in 11,348 loanword forms from five different corpora of loanwords. The analysis, which is set within the Theory of Constraints and Repair Strategies, is illustrated with the data from a corpus of 545 French loanwords in Fula.

This paper sketches a grammar of English relative clause constructions (including infinitival and reduced relatives) based on the notions of construction type and type constraints. Generalizations about dependency relations and clausal functions are factored into distinct dimensions contributing constraints to specific construction types in a multiple inheritance type hierarchy. The grammar presented here provides an account of extraction, pied piping and relative clause ‘stacking’ without appeal to transformational operations, transderivational competition, or invisible (‘empty’) categories of any kind.

Late Middle English is a VO language in which surface OV order can nevertheless be found. This has been taken to show that the language has both OV and VO as possible underlying orders. However, there are various types of data that this hypothesis cannot account for. It is therefore argued in this article that late Middle English only had VO order underlyingly, and that all surface OV orders are derived by means of leftward movement of the object across the verb, in a manner fully compatible with the Minimalist Program. In surface OV, the object moves overtly to the functional projection AgrOP for feature-checking; LF movement is also possible (yielding surface VO), since the two derivations are equally economical. Pronominal objects can move to a higher clitic position. This analysis is shown to account for a wide range of data.

This paper shows, after Watkins (1967) and Tremblay (1989, 1991), that the possessive phrase of This is John's does not necessarily include an elliptical Possessee. This ambiguity is argued to arise from the dual nature of the possessive marker, which may either be inflectional or derivational in Modern English. In the first case, it may be analysed as a functional head, as proposed by Abney (1987) and Kayne (1993, 1994); in the second case, it operates in the lexicon, deriving possessive adjectives which exhibit complementary morphological and semantic properties in adnominal and predicate positions.