With this issue of the Journal Ian Roberts steps down from the editorial team. He has been an editor since 1994 and we are most grateful for all he has done for the Journal. He becomes a member of the Editorial Board, and we look forward to receiving his advice. Ian's place as an editor is taken by Caroline Heycock of the University of Edinburgh. We are very pleased to welcome her to the editorial team.

Recent research has identified characteristic differences between the phonetic structures of names and of ordinary nouns, with particularly distinctive patterns being exhibited by feminine personal names. No explanation has yet been found. This paper suggests that the solution lies not in the English sound system, as has previously been assumed, but in differences between the linguistic origins of the various types of material.

The paper aims to clarify the Relevance theoretic notion of procedural meaning (cf. Blakemore 1987, Wilson & Sperber 1993) through the analysis of but and nevertheless. I show, first, that a procedural analysis is able to account for differences between these expressions that cannot be explained in terms of the speech-act theoretic notion of non-truth conditional indicators, and, second, that these differences show that the conception of procedural meaning as a constraint on contextual effects (cf. Blakemore 1987) is too narrow and must be extended to include all information about the inferential processes involved in utterance interpretation, including context selection.

Variation in language on the basis of formality (register variation) is often neglected both in grammatical descriptions and in sociolinguistic analyses. I demonstrate here that in Sinhala, and perhaps in other diglossic languages, register variation in syntax cannot be ignored. In a Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) analysis based on a corpus of naturally occurring Sinhala texts, I propose an analysis of register variation in which the syntax of all observed registers is accounted for within a single grammar. I further explain how the approach to register variation developed here can be extended to other types of sociolinguistic variation.

The head of an NP is taken to be that component which determines the categories of the NP as a whole. First impression of an NP in Jarawara (Arawá family, Brazil) involving inalienable possession (e.g. o-mano ‘my arm’) is that there is conflict of criteria concerning what is head. The gender of the NP, for verbal suffix agreement, is determined by the possessor (here Isg prefix o-), suggesting that this should be taken to be head. But the whole NP counts as 3rd person, for verbal prefix agreement, suggesting that the possessed noun (mano ‘arm’) should be taken as head. Furthermore, the NP counts as inanimate. Detailed analysis shows that there is in fact no conflict. All NPs in this language are 3rd person (1st and 2nd persons being confined to head marking within the predicate and functioning as possessors within an NP, not as full NPs). And all NPs involving inalienable possession count as inanimate. The only variable is gender, which is determined by the possessor; plainly, this is the unequivocal head of the NP.

Optional OV order in Later Middle English (LME) has given rise to conflicting theoretical accounts. Earlier analyses postulating movement to AgrOP or alternative base orders are found to be inadequate to deal with the occurrence of OV in non-literary LME; in a large database of 15th century private familial correspondence, residual OV order is found to have been productive only with negated objects. Multiple subject constructions with there expletives showed the same restriction. These phenomena are accounted for by postulating overt Neg Movement (Haegeman 1995) as a permitted option in LME. In this framework, it is argued that LME showed a mixed typology having both Neg movement and a null Neg operator. LME had three ways of satisfying the NEG Criterion (Haegeman 1995): Merge not in Spec NegP, coindex [OP]i … [XP(Neg)]i, and Move XP(Neg) to Spec NegP. Modern English has only the first two. The distribution in this period of negative concord with not is shown to support our analysis.

Close inspection of presupposition(= P-)cancelling and other metalinguistic negation data shows that natural language semantics must be (at least) trivalent, with the values ‘true’, ‘minimally false’ (assertion failure) and ‘radically false’ (presupposition failure). It is argued that presupposition is a semantic phenomenon originating in a distinction between two kinds of satisfaction conditions for predicates, the PRECONDITIONS generating presuppositions, and the UPDATE CONDITIONS generating classical entailments. The trivalence of language is a natural consequence of the acceptance of occasion sentences in an incremental Discourse Semantics. The logical properties of sentences are considered secondary and derived from their semantic properties. These include, besides propositional content, a speech act quality, specifying the personal commitment taken on by the speaker not only in respect of the propositional content, but also with regard to the linguistic forms selected. It is suggested that the classical truth-functional operators should be redefined as instructions under speech act commitment. The negation operator is singled out: it is redefined as an instruction to reject either an incrementable sentence, which may be a comment about a form used or to be used (P-preserving negation), or an already incremented sentence to be removed from the discourse along with some presupposition (P-cancelling negation).

Syllables display symmetrical and asymmetrical properties in two Yoruba dialects. In the asymmetrical dialect, only a vowel with an onset participates in syllable-conditioned processes; an onsetless vowel is syllabically inert. In the symmetrical dialect, a vowel, with or without an onset, participates in syllable processes. It is argued that onsetless vowels are not syllabified in the asymmetrical dialect. Since there is no phonological contrast between syllables with onsets and those without onsets in the symmetrical dialect, all vowels are parsed into syllables exhaustively. Using ideas from Optimality Theory, attested interdialectal variation is shown to follow from different rankings of the same syllable and faithfulness constraints.

The analysis of French ‘what’ questions poses a number of difficulties. These questions exhibit numerous peculiarities, especially when they involve a subject wh-phrase. It is argued that the anomalous paradigm derives from three independent factors. The first is linked to the general status of matrix subject wh-phrases and the position they occupy at the interface levels. The second relates to the status of que ‘what’ as a phonological clitic. The third is argued to derive from the difference between strong quoi ‘what’ and weak que with respect to specificity. Once the interaction of these factors is taken into account, the unusual paradigm is completely explained.

Morphemes are sometimes expressed by elements that are less than full segments, and, in a given language, the position of these elements in a word may vary. A recent analysis of these ‘mobile morphemes’ claims that their distribution is best explained in an optimality-theoretic framework that incorporates a set of featural alignment constraints (Akinlabi 1996). This paper argues that featural alignment plays no role in the realization of ‘mobile morphemes’. Instead, it recognizes a set of licensing constraints that explicitly identifies where featural exponents of such morphemes may appear in a word. Crucially, these licensing constraints, unlike featural alignment, are not morpheme-specific and therefore enjoy cross-linguistic support. Analyses of Chaha labialization, Terena nasalization, High tone realization in the Edoid associative construction and Southern Sami vowel lowering in terms of licensing are shown to be superior to the alignment-theoretic ones on both descriptive and explanatory grounds.

In this paper we use an extensive archive of early New Zealand speakers, together with comparisons with the other Southern Hemisphere varieties of English, to argue that dialect mixture and new-dialect formation are not haphazard processes. We demonstrate that, given sufficient linguistic information about the dialects which contribute to a mixture, and sufficient demographic information about the proportions of speakers of the different dialects, it is possible to make predictions about what the outcome of the mixture will be. We also argue that we have arrived at a probabilistic solution to the problem of randomness in the transmission of dialect features from one generation to another in such situations.

Welsh has generally been analyzed as allowing two types of relative clauses and other A´-constructions, one involving movement leaving a wh-trace, the other involving a resumptive pronoun in situ. In this paper, I argue that, despite the appearance of agreement, which seems to license a null resumptive pronoun, relative clauses formed on a number of syntactic positions (object of periphrastic verb, object of preposition, embedded subject) may involve movement. Both movement and non-movement strategies are argued to be available for some syntactic positions (object of preposition, embedded subject), and separate constraints must therefore be established for the distribution of each. Resumptive pronouns are argued to be subject to a variant of the A´-Disjointness Requirement. For wh-trace, the Welsh evidence is compatible only with an account involving multiple cyclic movement via a VP-external position (SpecAgrOP) as well as SpecCP.

This paper suggests an analysis of Modern Hebrew noun phrases in the framework of HPSG. It focuses on the peculiar properties of the definite article, including the requirement for definiteness agreement among various elements in the noun phrase, definiteness inheritance in construct-state nominals, the fact that the article does not combine with constructs and the similarities between construct-state nouns and adjectives. Central to our analysis is the assumption that the Hebrew definite article is an affix, rather than a clitic or a stand-alone word. Several arguments, from all levels of linguistic representation, are provided to justify this claim. Adopting the lexical hypothesis, we conclude that the article combines with nominals in the lexicon, and is no longer available for syntactic processes. This leads to an analysis of noun phrases as NPs, rather than as DPs; we show that such a view is compatible with accepted criteria for headedness. We provide an HPSG analysis that covers the above mentioned phenomena, correctly predicting the location of the definite article in constructs, accounting for definiteness agreement and definiteness inheritance constraints, and yielding similar structures for the two major ways of expressing genitive relations in Hebrew.

Sandra Chung, The design of agreement: evidence from Chamorro. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. xii + 423.

Sandra Chung's leading contribution to the development of generative analyses of the morphosyntax of Austronesian languages is widely known. This book is the culmination of some two decades of research on Chamorro and is also, as the title suggests, an attempt to embed that body of research within a particular theory of agreement – one which has an explicitly syntactic flavour and which emphasizes the separation of morphology and syntax. Quite apart from the treatment of agreement itself, Chung also discusses a host of fascinating issues surrounding the analysis of Chamorro that have important ramifications for the analysis of languages that are typologically and genetically related to it, including the issue of configurationality and the nature of VSO word order. Additionally, there is extensive discussion of the treatment of wh-movement and the relationship of the Chamorro phenomenon of Wh-Agreement to the constraints on extraction observed in numerous other Austronesian languages and elsewhere. This book, along with the research program it represents, is an important addition to the literature on the less well-studied languages of the world and is obligatory reading for any syntactician with an interest in the cross-linguistic viability of syntactic theory.

Juan Uriagereka,Rhyme and reason. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. Pp. xliii+669.

In this wide-ranging and ambitious volume, Juan Uriagereka sets as his goal both a conceptual and a technical explication of Chomsky's Minimalist Program as well as the siting of it within the broader context of scientific inquiry into the nature of human beings and the natural world. Reintroducing an old rhetorical device into modern scientific discourse, the book is framed as a series of dialogues over six days between a Chomskyan linguist and a sceptical interlocutor called ‘The Other’, a ‘hard’ scientist whose knowledge encompasses not only contemporary physics and biology, but also mathematics and philosophy.

The temptation to frame a review using the same rhetorical device is considerable. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that Uriagereka has attempted to create a book about everything for anyone, and has attempted to do so in a way that is unusual, clever and interesting. That he is largely successful in this enterprise is truly remarkable. On the other hand, there is also the lingering feeling that it is fractionally too clever, and fractionally too ambitious, with the result that what could have easily been a classic of modern scientific writing does not quite fulfill its potential.

Gilles Fauconnier & Eve Sweetser (eds.),Space, worlds, and grammar. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1996. 355 Pp.

Masayoshi Shibatani & Sandra Thompson (eds.),Grammatical constructions: their form and meaning. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Pp. xvii+345.

Several years ago a volume of articles appeared called The view from Building 20 (Hale & Keyser 1993). As suggested by the title, the contributions reflected trends guiding the theoretical paradigm pre-eminently associated with MIT. After reading this collection, a colleague quipped that she wondered how well the view from Building 20 accorded with the broad research world beyond it. In this connection, the two books under review represent perspectives on language analysis which encourage one to pause and consider the present theoretical landscape in linguistics, and, less directly, the role of linguistics within modern cognitive science. Among their other merits, both books provide a rich and useful illustration of some of the perspectives on language analysis outside of Building 20. In doing so, they also help to define a more interesting research landscape than that usually characterized as an opposition between ‘formalists’ versus ‘cognitive/functionalists’.

Pavol štekauer,A theory of conversion in English. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996. Pp. 155.

When, in 1891, Henry Sweet (1891–98, I: 38–40) used the term CONVERSION for the process that today is also known as ZERO-DERIVATION, he was probably not aware of the debate that the description of this process would still raise one century later.

štekauer's book bears witness to a renewed interest in conversion. Such an interest partly stems from the fact that it is a simple (or, at least, apparently so), extremely productive process, but also because it remains a challenge to descriptive linguistics. How conversion operates, what its limits are, how converted units should be categorised in the study of morphology and lexis, and even what its real nature is are still open questions despite the attention given to this issue ever since Sweet's grammar.

This book meets some of these questions in the framework of an onomasiological theory, which will be briefly discussed below. The book consists of nine chapters, a section for notes and another for references. The introduction (chapter 1, pp. 11–13) justifies the work and outlines the structure of the book. The remaining eight chapters deal with the description of conversion in the literature (chapter 2, pp. 15–22), its interpretation as zero-derivation (chapter 3, pp. 23–43), the onomasiological theory and conversion (chapter 4, pp. 45–53), phonological variation (chapter 5, pp. 55–95), the use and semantic range of converted units (chapter 6, pp. 97–113), proper nouns and conversion (chapter 7, pp. 115–126), directionality (chapter 8, pp. 127–133), and the productivity of conversion (chapter 9, pp. 135–141).

Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy,The origins of complex language: an inquiry into the evolutionary beginnings of sentences, syllables, and truth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xi+260.

Simon Kirby,Function, selection, and innateness: the emergence of language universals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xvi+156.

Daniel Nettle,Linguistic diversity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xi+168.

If I find that a book I am reading for review is interesting, then I count myself lucky. If it turns out to be insightful, then I am fortunate indeed. The fact that I was given three books to review, each of which is not only interesting and insightful, but downright ENJOYABLE, makes me feel like a winner of the Linguistic Lottery. The books are the first three to appear in a new series on language evolution published by the Oxford University Press. Given the quality of the first entries, my advice to all linguists is to put yourselves down for standing orders for the ones to follow.