This paper proposes a unified analysis of adverb scope and quantifier scope phenomena in a lexicalist approach to complex predicates. I first observe that the availability of scope ambiguity for adverbs and for quantifiers always coincides for a given type of complex predicate, drawing on data from different kinds of compound verb constructions, the verbal noun-taking predicates and the nominative object construction. The challenge for a unified treatment in lexicalist frameworks comes from the fact that syntactic structures cannot be taken as the locus for representing the scope of adverbs and quantifiers, unlike in derivational frameworks where such an analysis is the most natural. Thus, a previous lexicalist analysis by Manning, Sag & Iida (1999) makes use of completely different mechanisms to account for adverb scope and quantifier scope, failing to capture the close parallel between them. I remedy this problem of Manning et al.'s analysis by proposing a unified account of adverb scope and quantifier scope that crucially makes use of a slightly enriched semantic representation explicitly encoding the property of mono-/biclausality with respect to scopal phenomena.

According to a ‘radical orphanage’ approach, non-restrictive relative clauses are not part of the syntactic representation of the sentence that contains them. It is an appealing view, and seems to capture some important properties of non-restrictive relative clauses. Focusing mainly on empirical shortcomings, this paper aims to show that the appeal of such approaches is illusory. It also outlines an empirically superior ‘syntactically integrated’ account.

The approach adopted here identifies finiteness with the capacity to license an independent predication. The prototypical independent predication is positive and declarative; other ‘moods’, or main-clause types, while finite, may fail to display the morphosyntactic properties associated with this prototype. These properties vary from language to language, but the recurrent core properties are verbal, since the verb is the prototypical predicator. Some constructions that occur in both main and subordinate clauses, such as the infinitival in English, differ in interpretation in these two different circumstances; this may be the only difference between finite (main-clause) and non-finite (subordinate-clause) use. This general approach is contrasted with one in which finiteness is identified with the presence of a particular set of morphosyntactic properties: such a view as the latter can be maintained, if at all, only on the basis of massive recourse to covert categories.

The term morphological reversal describes the situation where the members of a morphological opposition switch their functions in some context (as with Hebrew gender marking, where -Ø~-a marks masculine~feminine with adjectives but feminine~masculine with numerals). There is a long tradition of polemic against the notion that morphology can encode systematic reversals, and an equally long tradition of reintroducing them under different names (e.g. polarity, exchange rules or morphosyntactic toggles). An examination of some unjustly neglected examples (number in Nehan, aspect in Tübatulabal, tense in Trique and argument marking in Neo-Aramaic) confirms the existence of morphological reversal, particularly as a mechanism of language change. This is strong evidence for the separateness of morphological paradigms from the features that they encode.

The notion of subject in human language has a privileged status relative to other arguments. This special status is manifested in the behavior of subjects at the morphological, syntactic, semantic and discourse levels. Here we present evidence that subjects have a privileged status at the lexical level as well, by analyzing lexicalization patterns of verbs in three different sign languages. Our analysis shows that the sub-lexical structure of iconic signs denoting states of affairs in these languages manifests an inherent pattern of form–meaning correspondence: the signer's body consistently represents one argument of the verb, the subject. The hands, moving in relation to the body, represent all other components of the event – including all other arguments. This analysis shows that sign languages provide novel evidence in support of the centrality of the notion of subject in human language. It also solves a typological puzzle about the apparent primacy of object in sign language verb agreement, a primacy not usually found in spoken languages, in which subject agreement generally ranks higher. Our analysis suggests that the subject argument is represented by the body and is part of the lexical structure of the verb. Because it is always inherently represented in the structure of the sign, the subject is more basic than the object, and tolerates the omission of agreement morphology.

The classification of that is, or (in other words), and or rather as reformulation markers would seem to suggest that the utterances they introduce achieve relevance in the same way. However, the examination of a range of discrepancies between reformulations introduced by or, on the one hand, and reformulations introduced by that is, on the other, suggests that any account of the pragmatics of reformulation must be a non-unitary one. In this paper, I build on Burton-Roberts' (1993) suggestion that the reformulations introduced by or are meta-linguistic in character, and show how these can be distinguished from the reformulations introduced by that is, which must be analysed at the level of conceptual representation. I also show how this distinction corresponds to a distinction between the different ways in which a parenthetical construction may be pragmatically integrated with its host. As Potts (2005) would predict, parenthetical that is-reformulations are not themselves part of the truth-conditional content of their hosts. However, in contrast with or-reformulations, they communicate information about the propositional content of their hosts, and in this way can contribute to the identification of their truth-conditional content at the level of pragmatic interpretation.

In this paper we present a detailed new analysis of the English expressions once, twice and thrice. These, we claim, are primarily compound determinatives, analogous in many respects to expressions like someone and somewhere. The new analysis exploits the framework of the Cambridge grammar of the English language (2002) in which the morphological nature of the compound determinative category reflects a fusion of functions, typically determiner (or modifier) and head of NP. We refine the notion of fusion of functions, and show that constructions which employ fusion of functions have properties which clearly distinguish them from superficially similar constructions which employ incorporation or hybridization. The paper therefore provides further evidence for the existence of fusion of functions as a distinct syntactic configuration, and indirectly supports theoretical frameworks which treat functions and categories as distinct primitives.

In generative metrics, a meter is taken to be an abstract periodic template with a set of constraints mapping linguistic material onto it. Such templates, constrained by periodicity and line length, are usually limited in number. The repertoire of Classical Sanskrit verse meters is characterized by three features which contradict each of the above properties – (a) templates constituted by arbitrary syllable sequences without any overtly discernible periodic repetition: APERIODICITY, (b) absolute faithfulness of linguistic material to a given metrical template: INVARIANCE, and (c) a vast number of templates, ranging between 600–700: RICH REPERTOIRE. In this paper, I claim that in spite of apparent incompatibility, Sanskrit meters are based on the same principles of temporal organization as other versification traditions, and can be accounted for without significant alterations to existing assumptions about metrical structure. I demonstrate that a majority of aperiodic meters are, in fact, surface instantiations of a small set of underlying quantity-based periodic templates and that aperiodicity emerges from the complex mappings of linguistic material to these templates. Further, I argue that the appearance of a rich repertoire is an effect of nomenclatural choices and poetic convention and not variation at the level of underlying structure.

Welsh vowel mutation is a purely positional vowel alternation, the effects of which serve to obscure phonemic contrasts between three vowels in the system, namely barred-i, schwa and [u]. The theoretical interest in this alternation stems from the surface orientation of current phonological theory: is such a non-surface-true state of affairs amenable to plausible modelling in an optimality-theoretic framework, or are the relevant relationships best accounted for through lexical listing? In this paper I argue that a straightforward optimality-theoretic account is available and that this account is simpler than any of its predecessors. The analysis differs from previous derivational analyses (e.g. Thomas 1979, 1984; Williams 1983; Bosch 1996) in various ways, including the underlying values of some of the vowels involved, the avoidance of ad hoc extrinsic rule ordering, and the lack of reliance on intermediate representations. Furthermore, reference to phonological position alone is sufficient, with no need to refer either to stress or to morphological complexity. The correct results emerge primarily through the interaction of a high-ranking structural constraint prohibiting schwa in a final syllable, an input–output faithfulness constraint on vowel features, and a constraint prohibiting a high central rounded vowel, [u with bar through].

A common view in theoretical syntax and computational linguistics holds that there are no grammatical restrictions on multiple center-embedding of clauses. Syntax would thus be characterized by unbounded recursion. An analysis of 119 genuine multiple clausal center-embeddings from seven ‘Standard Average European’ languages (English, Finnish, French, German, Latin, Swedish, Danish) uncovers usage-based regularities, constraints, that run counter to these and several other widely held views, such as that any type of multiple self-embedding (of the same clause type) would be possible, or that self-embedding would be more complex than multiple center-embedding of different clause types. The maximal degree of center-embedding in written language is three. In spoken language, multiple center-embedding is practically absent. Typical center-embeddings of any degree involve relative clauses specifying the referent of the subject NP of the superordinate clause. Only postmodifying clauses, especially relative clauses and that-clauses acting as noun complements, allow central self-embedding. Double relativization of objects (The rat the cat the dog chased killed ate the malt) does not occur. These corpus-based ‘soft constraints’ suggest that full-blown recursion creating multiple clausal center-embedding is not a central design feature of language in use. Multiple center-embedding emerged with the advent of written language, with Aristotle, Cicero, and Livy in the Greek and Latin stylistic tradition of ‘periodic’ sentence composition.

The point of departure of this paper is the consideration of how words with the meanings of property concept states (states that are lexicalized as adjectives in languages that have that lexical category, cf. Dixon 1982), e.g. ‘red’, are related to words denoting their corresponding change of state, e.g. ‘redden’. It is shown that while many languages relate words with these meanings to one another via some morpholexical process, this is not so in the Polynesian language Tongan. A detailed case study shows that in this language there are no non-causative change of state lexemes based on property concepts. Rather, these meanings are derived pragmatically from verbs denoting the corresponding state via aspectual coercion (Moens & Steedman 1988, Jackendoff 1997, de Swart 1998, Zucchi 1998, Michaelis 2004). This finding is shown to have consequences for the understanding of the typology of change of state predicates (Koontz-Garboden 2005, 2006, Koontz-Garboden & Levin 2005) and for theories of event structure: (a) the typological space is broader than previously thought and (b) theories of event structure need to be reconsidered in order to account for the postlexical derivation of meaning.

This paper discusses the status of the Ezafe particle -(y)e in Persian and provides an affixal analysis of the Ezafe, formalized within Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). The Ezafe, a feature of certain Western Iranian languages, is realized as an enclitic and links the head noun to its modifiers and to the possessor NP. The latter follow the head and are linked to one another by the Ezafe. On the basis of crucial empirical facts that have never been discussed in previous studies, I argue that the Ezafe is best regarded as an affix attaching to nominal heads (nouns, adjectives and some prepositions), as well as to nominal intermediate projections, and marking them as expecting a modifier or a direct nominal complement. Viewed as such, the Ezafe construction is an instance of the head-marked pattern of morphological marking of grammatical relations. This analysis differs from all previous accounts of the Ezafe (i.e. as case-marker, syntactic or phonological linker) and entails that the Ezafe, which originated in the Old Iranian relative particle -hya, has undergone a process of reanalysis-grammaticalization, to end up as a part of nominal morphology.

In this paper, we explore the possibility that machine learning approaches to natural-language processing being developed in engineering-oriented computational linguistics may be able to provide specific scientific insights into the nature of human language. We argue that, in principle, machine learning results could inform basic debates about language, in one area at least, and that in practice, existing results may offer initial tentative support for this prospect. Further, results from computational learning theory can inform arguments carried on within linguistic theory as well.

Cappelen & Lepore (2005, 2006a, 2007) note that linguistic communication requires ‘shared content’ and claim that Relevance Theory makes content sharing impossible. This criticism rests upon two important errors. The first is a flawed understanding of Relevance Theory, shown in the application of an omniscient third party perspective to parts of Relevance Theory that depend only upon subjective judgements made by the addressee of an utterance. The second is confusion about different definitions of content. Cappelen & Lepore's evidence actually involves the communication of what they term Speech Act content, which need not be perfectly ‘shared’ according to their own position. Looking beyond this flawed criticism, a general comparison of Relevance Theory with Cappelen & Lepore's semantic minimalism reveals significant parallels, pointing to a notable convergence of two distinct approaches – one cognitive-pragmatic, the other philosophical-semantic – on the rejection of currently dominant assumptions in linguistic semantics. The key remaining difference is Cappelen & Lepore's claim that shared content is propositional. This contradicts other claims made for such content and in any case plays no active role in the explanation of communication. Cappelen & Lepore's position thus poses no threat to Relevance Theory; rather, Relevance Theory can benefit from their philosophical analysis of the state of semantic theory.

This paper argues for a constructional approach to English progressives. On this view, progressivity is a construction-level property, rather than a lexical property of the ing forms that progressive verb phrases contain or of the auxiliary. The incompatibility of ing forms with state verbs in progressive constructions provides crucial evidence in support of the construction-based perspective, given that stative ing forms are fully acceptable in gerundive and other ing constructions. Of course, underlying this approach is the proposal that gerund is neutralizable with present participle (Huddleston 1984, 2002b, c; Pullum 1991; Blevins 1994). A lexicalist and construction-based analysis of gerundive nominals, as in Pullum (1991) and Blevins (1994), offers a means of claiming that progressivity is a property of the combination of an auxiliary and ing participle, just as the perfect aspect is expressed by the combination of have and a past participle, as proposed in Ackerman & Webelhuth (1998) and Spencer (2001b), and implicitly in Curme (1935) and other traditional grammars.

The paper discusses phonologically motivated gaps in inflectional paradigms. A model is offered in which the appearance of gaps is based on a tension between markedness constraints, faithfulness constraints, and constraints which require the expression of morphological categories. After presenting the model, additional implications are analyzed. Situations in which the same problem has different solutions in different morphological contexts are predicted insofar as constraints requiring the expression of different categories can vary in their ranking relative to some faithfulness constraint. Hence, the same phonotactic problem can yield a gap in one situation and a repair in another. This prediction is illustrated and further details of the prediction are explored, including the identification of a situation requiring a more restrictive version of the model. This is achieved by drawing on Smith's (2001) proposal that faithfulness constraints can be indexed to lexical categories to model this situation.

Adger (2006) claims that the Minimalist Program provides a suitable theoretical framework for analysing at least one example of inherent variability: the variation between was and were after you and we in the Scottish town of Buckie. Drawing on the feature analysis of pronouns and the assumption that lexical items normally have equal probabilities, his analysis provides two ‘routes’ to we/you was, but only one to we/you were, thereby explaining why the former is on average twice as common as the latter. This comment points out four serious flaws in his argument: it ignores important interactions among sex, age and subject pronoun; hardly any social groups actually show the predicted average 2:1 ratio; there is no general tendency for lexical items to have equal probability of being used; the effects of the subject may be better stated in terms of the lexemes you and we rather than as semantic features. The conclusion is that inherent variability supports a usage-based theory rather than Minimalism.