The purpose of this paper is to examine psycholinguistic work on attraction with a view to enriching our knowledge of the grammar of agreement. Following Franck et al. (2006),I assume that the different theories of agreement should relate to the way speakers err when they implement agreement operations. As an aberrant computation of the mind, attraction is interesting due to its frequency: in English experiments 13% of complex NPs (i.e. NPs which consist of two or more constituent NPs) establish incorrect agreement with the verb (as in *the key to the cabinets are in the kitchen; Eberhard, Cooper Cutting & Bock 2005). This is what makes it a magnet for both linguistic and psycholinguistic research. Here I examine the main findings and models in the psycholinguistic literature, and how they relate to existing theories of agreement in grammar. It will be argued that agreement cannot be properly understood unless models incorporate an adequate measurement of the size of the morphological component of every language studied, as agreement operations are continuously sensitive to this. The general idea, which I extend from Berg (1998) and Acuña-Fariña (2009) is that a strong morphosyntactic component blocks (rather than facilitates) semantic interference, and that languages opportunistically use more or less semantics in establishing agreement ties depending not only on morphological richness but also on the direction of encoding.

So-called respectively readings have posed serious challenges for theories of syntax and semantics. Sentences like George and Martha respectively denounced and were denounced by the governor (McCawley 1998) show that although the conjoined verbal expressions share the same syntactic subject, they do not predicate that subject in the same way; George (not Martha) denounced the governor, and Martha (but not George) was denounced by the governor. Postal (1998: 160–163) and Gawron & Kehler (2004: 193–194) show that this phenomenon poses problems for contemporary theories of grammar and argue that it is particularly acute for theories where subcategorization and predication are linked via unification. As these authors note, the problem is even more severe in respectively readings involving filler–gap constructions. In this paper I argue that the severity of these problems has been overstated and that the data do not entail any special dissociation between predication, subcategorization, or extraction. In this paper I propose an account which is fully compatible with unification-based theories of grammar. Gawron & Kehler (2004) propose an account of respectively phenomena which covers a remarkably wide range of cases. That approach relies on a Respf operator, which it stipulated to be optionally overt. However, I argue that this analysis is problematic because there are significant semantic differences between respectively readings with and without an overt realization of ‘respectively’. Rather, the data suggest that respectively readings may be special cases of more general phenomena which happen to create interpretations that are compatible with the semantics of the adverb respectively. This explains why respectively readings can arise without the adverb, and does not require us to posit a disconnect between predication and subcategorization. In fact, a sentence with a respectively reading will not differ in syntactic or semantic structure from sentences without such a reading.

Japanese has two peculiar types of relative clause (RC), No-RCs and De-RCs. In these types of relative clause, what looks like a (pivot) head noun appears at the left edge of the clause and is accompanied by no and de, respectively. This sharply contrasts with regular prenominal relative clauses in Japanese, which conform to the head-final word order pattern. The aim of this article is to investigate the syntax and semantics of these two types of relative clause in detail and reveal differences between them. Specifically, I will propose that (i) no in No-RCs is an appositive genitive particle licensed by a silent linker head, and (ii) de in De-RCs is a continuative/participial form of the copula da. Drawing a parallel with NP-no NP constructions and building on an idea from S.-Y. Kuroda's dissertation, it will be argued that No-RCs are derived by DP-internal inversion mediated by the linker. On the other hand, De-RCs will be shown to be relatives conjoined with the copula de. It will be further suggested that the fact that Korean and Mandarin Chinese lack equivalents of De-RCs is due to the absence of the appositive genitive particle and hence of DP-internal inversion.

The aim of this paper is to provide an analysis of the positive effect that modification has on the distribution of noun phrases in otherwise illicit environments. I focus on de nominals in French. By focusing on these nominals, whose distribution is altered by the addition of modifiers, the paper shows that modifiers can do much more than simply modify: they can change the syntactic and semantic status of a noun phrase. The licensing property of modifiers is an intriguing topic and has not been greatly discussed in the literature. I argue that modifiers can come to play the role of determiners in French as long as they are accompanied by a head de, which is the spell-out of a Cardinal head (see Lyons 1999). My proposal goes back to an old idea put forward by Damourette & Pichon (1911–1940)according to which, in modified contexts, de functions as one half of the article while the adjective functions as the other half. More generally, articles in French are seen as dual entities comprising of a specifier and a head. In the absence of the determiner les, an adjective can raise to the specifier of CardinalP. This is achieved via phrasal rather than head movement.

This paper describes and analyses the pattern of word stress found in the standard dialect of Koshur (Kashmiri) spoken in Srinagar. The significance of Koshur for studies of stress lies in that taken together, its pattern of stress assignment and a pervasive pattern of syncope conspire to produce a four-way syllable weight distinction that has sometimes been expressed as the scale CVːC>CVː>CVC>CV. The interesting feature of this type of scale is that closed syllables, CVːC and CVC are preferred as stress peaks over open syllables with vowels of the same length. Other researchers have noted that in languages with this scale, or the abbreviated ternary version CVː>CVC>CV, CVC syllables behave ambiguously with respect to stress. They seem to be heavy in relation to CV when CVː syllables are absent. In a stress clash context however, CVC defers to CVː. ‘Mora-only’ accounts of other languages with this scale have interpreted the ambiguous behaviour of CVC as evidence that CVC syllables are bimoraic where their behaviour seems to group them with CVː but monomoraic elsewhere (e.g. Rosenthall & van der Hulst 1999, Morén 2000). To account for the CVːC>CVː effect, mora-only accounts have been forced to assume that CVːC are trimoraic. We show that a mora-only analysis does not offer a satisfying account of the Koshur facts, and we argue instead that the origin of the CVC>CV and CVːC>CVː effects is the presence of a coda that branches from the final mora of a syllable, making the closed syllables more harmonic as prosodic heads. Under this view, branchingness emerges as another dimension of the mora, along with moraic quantity and the quality of segments linked to moras, which contributes to syllable prominence.

In an article in this journal, Bao (2005) proposes a constraint on functional transfer that he claims accounts for features of colloquial Singapore English (and other language contact varieties) better than the congruence constraint proposed by Siegel (1999) and subsequently developed in later works (e.g. Siegel 2003, 2008a). More specifically, Bao argues that the requirement of surface syntactic similarity for transfer is too strong. His analysis uses Mandarin to exemplify the Chinese substrate languages that were the source of transfer, following the view that there is a universal Chinese grammar (Chao 1968: 13). However, the present article shows that Bao's claim is unjustified because the actual source of transfer was a variety of Chinese that differs significantly from Mandarin in the area of grammar he examined.