It is a well-known fact that the verb dare can be used with either modal or main verb characteristics both in its inflection and in its syntax. When used as a modal, it drops the -s ending in the third person singular present indicative (She dare not mention it in his presence), has no imperative, infinitive or participial forms, takes direct negation by not, AUX-inverts in questions (Dare I ask you another question?) and is followed by the bare infinitive. In main verb use, on the other hand, it has all the normal forms of the verb, occurs with do auxiliary in negatives and interrogatives, and is construed with the to infinitive (She doesn’t dare to mention it in his presence).

This paper describes an empirical investigation as to the utility of a principles and parameters model of grammar in describing the interlanguage grammars of second language learners. I argue that the framework of parameterized universal grammar is useful in accounting for second language learner knowledge and behaviour. The vast majority of their errors can be accounted for by the transfer of their first language (L1) parameter setting into the second language (L2).

A phenomenon that is encountered fairly frequently in Spanish but has received relatively little attention on the part of linguists is the use of the singular indirect object pronoun le when the plural les would be expected, as illustrated in the following examples:

Hay que darle un justo precio a las personas. (BOG-8:107)

Mi papá le tenía terror a las balas perdidas. (CAR-34:615)

Nosotros le calentamos a los niños la comida. (HAV-2:30)

Se le ponía bola negra a las que se lo merecían. (MAD-16:266)

Es poco el tiempo que puedo dedicarle a mis hijos. (MEX-13:168)

To my knowledge, only Kany (1951:107–109) has attempted to deal with this topic in a comprehensive, global manner, and his presentation is limited to one brief paragraph of commentary illustrated by examples taken primarily from works written in the 1920s and 1930s. The present paper will present a general study of this construction focusing primarily on a description of its contemporary usage as reflected in the spoken Spanish of educated speakers from eleven cities, Bogota, Buenos Aires, Caracas, Havana, La Paz, Lima, Madrid, Mexico City, San Juan (Puerto Rico), Santiago (Chile) and Seville.

This paper provides a syntactic and semantic analysis of sentences such as those in (1).

1. (1) a. Mary has to leave early.

2. b. I have a paper to write/a dress to wear.

3. c. Mary has only/but to call, and Fred comes running.

4. d. We have yet to figure out why the car won’t start.

The motivations of sound change are almost exclusively treated as articulatory phenomena, even when the source and the target sounds are generated by very different articulatory mechanisms and no transitional stages can be found. What will be argued here is that seemingly regular place shifts in the articulation of consonants, such as the ones known under the term of “Rhenish Velarization” or “Rhenish Gutturalization” are actually manifestations of acoustically induced variants, very similar to those known as “slips of the ear”, which differ from one another only by the presence or absence of a single acoustic feature. The data assembled from a larger Rhenish corpus show that the operative process entails variations between labial, dental and velar place of articulation and involves stops, fricatives and nasals; its directionality is basically undetermined. Data from other sources and languages suggest that such place variations may be much more general than previously thought.

In investigations of the question of whether or not Universal Grammar (UG) is available in non-primary language acquisition, a number of researchers have tried to isolate situations where the way principles of UG operate in the first language (L1) could not help the learner acquire the relevant properties of the second language (L2). If learners show evidence of acquiring properties of the L2 that could not be acquired from the input alone and could not be reconstructed via the L1, this suggests that UG is available in non-primary acquisition; in contrast, if learners fail under such circumstances, this supports the claim that UG is no longer directly accessible. In particular, there has been a tradition of looking at island constraints in this light, using L1s and L2s which differ radically in terms of the surface effects of principles like Subjacency and the Empty Category Principle (ECP) (e.g., Bley-Vroman et al 1988; Johnson and Newport 1991; Martohardjono 1991a, 1991b; Martohardjono and Gair 1992; Schachter 1989, 1990; White 1989, 1992).

In recent literature on the decomposition of INFL (Pollock 1989), it has been proposed that the features of agreement morphology (henceforth the Ф features), and the features of Tense, each head a separate projection, AGR and T, respectively. There are languages which do not exhibit agreement in Ф features. This raises the question as to whether these languages have a functional category AGR. Kornfilt (1989), for example, shows that in contrast to Modern Turkish, Old Turkish does not exhibit agreement phenomena in person and number. She proposes that the difference between the two grammars be expressed in terms of the presence of AGR in the former and the absence of this projection in the latter. Similarly, on the basis of the fact that Haitian Creole lacks agreement in person and number, Ritter (1991b) suggests that Haitian Creole lacks the functional category AGR. In this paper, I demonstrate that there is ample motivation for positing AGR as a syntactic category in Haitian and in Fon.

In this paper, we will investigate certain phenomena which appear sensitive to particular conditions of adjacency and provide an explanation of these conditions in terms of syntactic structure and principles defined over such structure. Two interesting results which follow from such an explanation are: (i) the Case Filter given in (1) below, which stipulates that phonetically realized NPs must receive Case, may be subsumed under the Empty Category Principle, and (ii) the claim that only Case-marked traces are visible at PF (which has been suggested as an explanation of wanna contraction facts) can be given a structural account.

The morphological shape of a noun in Berber is determined by the syntactic context in which it appears. The alternation is between what has come to be known as the Construct State and the Free State. Since the alternation is syntactically determined, it has been suggested that the State phenomenon may be a form of case (cf. Prasse 1974; Chaker 1983; Bader and Kenstowicz 1984; Ouhalla 1988). But the link between Case and State has not been established in a conclusive manner. One reason why the nature of the Construct State has remained a puzzling aspect of Berber is that the contexts in which the Construct State forms appear and those where the Free State forms appear do not seem to constitute natural classes. For instance, most prepositions take a Construct State complement, but some take Free State forms. The subject of a verb in the VSO order is in the Construct but a left dislocated subject is not. The object of a verb is in the Free State, but when it is clitic doubled it is in the Construct State.