bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Educated spoken Arabic in Egypt and the Levant, with special reference to participle and tense
Authors: Mitchell T. F.
Published: December 2008

Educated spoken Arabic (ESA), like any of the world's innumerable other koineized forms of speech, greatly depends for its maintenance and dissemination on the binding power of writing, on its quasi-permanence and transferability in space and time. It is understandable, too, that koines – and the koineizing tradition is an ancient one in the eastern Mediterranean – should regularly call upon earlier, whence written ancestral forms and, as far as the Arab and Islamic worlds are concerned, the fundamental importance of the immutable Koran cannot be over-estimated. Although a koine needs a spoken base, Classical Arabic, itself probably never the dialect of any single group or region (cf. Ferguson, 1959), substantially contributed through its more or less fixed written norms to an older koine and nowadays, via the so-called Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) of contemporary literature, journalism and ‘spoken prose’, to a more recently emergent pan-Arabic or, conceivably, pan-Arabics. In a not dissimilar way, in the Romance-speaking area, Latin existed for centuries as the language, for example, of clerics, side by side with developing regional koines and subsequent new literary languages which borrowed greatly from it, just as the Classical Latin koine was itself modelled by writers, like Cicero, whose cultural values were determined and carried by Greek. A crucial difference, however, between Latin vis-à-vis the Romance languages and Classical Arabic or the substantially similar MSA vis-à-vis ESA is that the latter qua spoken language may not be any more freely written than the regional vernaculars of Arabic. It is not, for instance, orthographic or orthoepic difficulties that inhibit the ‘transcribing“ of spoken Arabic of whatever kind but rather the almost mystical regard in which Arabs hold their written language to the detriment of spoken counterparts.
Uralic and Altaic vowel harmony: a problem for natural generative phonology
Authors: Ringen Catherine O.
Published: December 2008

According to Hooper (1976: 5), the theory of natural generative phonology places the strongest possible constraints on abstractness in phonological descriptions. She claims that ‘the major advantage of natural generative theory over previous theories is that it gives a realistic representation of linguistic competence by constraining the theory to allow only a small subset of the grammars allowed by the unconstrained theory’ (xi). She claims further that the subset of grammars which are consistent with the constraints of natural generative phonology (NGP) accurately represent a speaker's knowledge of his language. This paper considers how vowel harmony rules in languages such as Turkish and Hungarian would be formulated in NGP. It is argued that the analyses required by NGP for these and similar vowel harmony languages do not represent the internalized knowledge of speakers of these languages and, therefore, that such vowel harmony systems provide strong evidence against NGP.
The accusative and infinitive in Latin: a refractory complement clause
Authors: Pillinger O. S.
Published: December 2008

In this paper I set out to show that, contrary to expectation, Subject-to-Object Raising does not form part of the derivation of Accusative and Infinitive (A&I) complements in Latin: and that this, coupled with the apparent NP-status of these complements, causes some difficulties for two of the current ‘schools’ of transformational-generative grammar, namely Generative Semantics/Relational Grammar, and Chomsk's Extended Standard Theory.

After a brief note on the use of intuition in analysing a dead language, the basic positions of the above two schools are given, together with certain distinctions and terminology relevant to the Latin data under consideration.
Phonological rules and phonetic explanation
Authors: Dinnsen Daniel A.
Published: December 2008

Over the last several years there has been increased interest in and reliance on the role of phonetics in explaining various aspects of phonology. Such notions as ‘natural rule’ and ‘phonetically explainable’ are commonly equated and are incorporated into arguments over the appropriateness of some given rule formulation or over the range of analyses permitted under alternative theoretical approaches. Those who have made the strongest, most explicit appeal to phonetics in this regard include Stampe (1969, 1973), Ohala (1971, 1972, 1974a, 1974b, 1975, 1978), Schane (1972), Harms (1973), and Hooper (1976). The common thread in these various appeals is the claim that some or all defensible phonological rules are phonetically explainable.
Recovery of information in Relative Clauses: evidence from Greek and Hebrew
Authors: Joseph Brian
Published: December 2008

Modern Greek has a Relative Clause Formation process by which the target of Relativization is deleted under identity with the head of the Relative Clause – these Relative Clauses are introduced by the invariant complementizer particle pu, which also introduces factive complements. (Greek also has a movement strategy for Relative Clauses, with an inflected Relative pronoun, but the details of this process are irrelevant here.) Examples of the deletion strategy are given below in (i):
‘he danced his did’: an analysis
Authors: Cureton Richard D.
Published: December 2008

In the last twenty years, Cummings's line ‘he danced his did’; has been at the centre of almost every major discussion of the deviant language of literature. In the last two decades, hundreds of pages and scores of articles have been written which have attempted to assess and motivate its linguistic status and aesthetic success. Without question, ‘he danced his did’ has been more closely scrutinized and extensively analysed than any other single phrase in English literature.
Syntactic features
Authors: Corbett G. G.
Published: December 2008

The aim of this paper is to justify the use of syntactic features, to show how they relate to semantic features and how they operate in syntax and morphology. 1 Particular stress is laid on the elimination of redundant features. First we shall review the literature, to show why syntactic features should require justification. Then, as an illustration, we shall investigate the feature of animacy in Russian in all components of the grammar in which it has a rôle.
The status of variable rules in sociolinguistic theory1
Authors: Romaine Suzanne
Published: December 2008

INTRODUCTION In a recent paper, Botha (1976) suggests that the analysis of linguistic argumentation is a ‘non-normal’ thing for linguists to do. ‘Normally’, he maintains, ‘linguists are oriented towards uncovering the nature of human language, and not the nature of linguistic science.’ Botha (1976: 3) even goes so far as to claim that the analysis of a form of argumentation is not a sort of linguistic analysis; it is instead a form of philosophical analysis. Some philosophers would probably disagree here with Botha and say that philosophical analysis is a sort of linguistic analysis. I am thinking here of Wittgenstein, for example, and the so-called philosophers of language who accept the view that the business of philosophy is to deal with the question of how words mean what they mean, etc., rather than to offer a comprehensive theory of the universe. It is difficult to draw a line of demarcation between a discipline proper and the study of the methodological underpinnings of that discipline, which I am not sure is essential anyway. My point is that a certain amount of self-criticism and awareness of the status of theoretical concepts and arguments can do linguists no harm.
Some issues on which linguists can agree
Authors: Hudson Richard
Published: December 2008

At a time when linguistic theory is becoming increasingly fragmented and decreasingly dominated by a single orthodoxy, it has been an encouraging exercise to compile a list of statements about language which are likely to be accepted by virtually all linguists, irrespective of what they think about all the many issues on which linguists disagree. The following list contains no fewer than 83 claims which have been accepted by a wide range of British linguists, and there is no reason to believe that the sample of linguists who have helped me in compiling the list is particularly biased. It seems reasonable to claim that other linguists are LIKELY to accept these statements, although I certainly cannot claim that every linguist accepts every one of them. So far as I know, no attempt has ever been made before to find out what linguists at large actually believe, although any writer of an introductory text-book hopes that he is expounding a widely held set of views. Considered as a piece of research, this investigation seems to me to have produced at least one interesting result: linguistics really is making some progress, in a cumulative way, and we are not
just lurching from one 'paradigm' to another, as some of us sometimes suspect in our gloomier moments. Moreover, it raises the interesting question what other statements could be added to the list given here, which certainly is not meant to be exhaustive. I hope that other linguists with more imagination than me can bring the list into the hundreds, as should surely be possible.
Another look at definites in existentials
Authors: Ziv Yael
Published: December 2008

Existential sentences have usually been defined on the basis of their morpho-syntactic characteristics. In English, the term has been used to designate those sentences in which the unstressed, non-deictic there occurs. It has been further observed that most such sentences contain the verb be, an indefinite NP and a locative adverbial following there in that order. Despite this syntactic characterization, however, the term ‘existential sentence’ has been taken, erroneously, to refer to some semantic features of the sentence as well, and so it has been generally assumed that existential sentences always assert the existence of some entity.1
Remarks on intonation and ‘Ausrahmung’ in German
Authors: Fox Anthony
Published: December 2008

One of the most characteristic features of German sentence structure is the so-called ‘frame’ (Rahmen, Klammer). According to the ‘frame’ principle, complex verbal expressions in main clauses are split up in such a way that the finite portion occurs in second position (in interrogative and imperative clauses in first position), while the remainder is relegated to the end, thus enclosing most of the clause in a kind of frame.
The interpretation of adjectival comparatives
Authors: Klein Ewan
Published: December 2008

In this paper I shall present a truth conditional semantics for simple adjectival comparatives. The leading idea is that the semantics should hug closely to the surface syntax of the construction and should not depend on postulating degrees or extents as primitive entities. The remainder of this introductory section will raise some objections to existing accounts of the semantics of comparative constructions. In Section 2 it will be argued that an adequate analysis of compared adjectives must take into account the vagueness of positive adjectives, and that the latter can be captured by interpreting degree adjectives as partial functions. Section 3 contains an analysis of degree modifiers, and in Section 4 this analysis provides the basis for the interpretation of comparatives. Section 5 spells out some consequences of the theory, while the last section contains a summary and conclusion.
Semantic structure
Authors: Peterson Thomas H.
Published: December 2008

In generative–transformational theories of language, semantics has always played handmaiden to syntax. For example, the extended standard theory (EST) has as its core a component of base phrase structure rules and a lexicon which supplies lexical items for the deep syntactic trees generated by the base rules; ‘semantic representations’ are created from these lexicalized P-markers at various stages of their syntactic derivation from deep to surface structure (Jackendoif, 1972: 4 ff.). Similarly, the semantic representations of a rival theory, generative semantics (GS), are taken from deep pre-lexical syntactic P-markers generated by base PS rules (McCawley, 1971). Both of these models reflect the historical roots of generative–transformational grammar, for at its inception, this theory provided only a model of syntax with no description of semantic structure (Chomsky, 1957). So it is natural, though not necessary, that linguists working in this tradition would construct their semantic models as outgrowths of the original syntactic core.
Getting ‘tough’ withWh- Movement
Authors: Jones Michael A.
Published: December 2008

This paper is concerned with the analysis of sentences such as (1) in terms of theWh- Movement transformation as proposed in Chomsky (1977: 102–110) and, in a revised form, in Chomsky (1981: 308–314):

(1) John is easy to please.
Voice alternations in Lac Simon Algonquin
Authors: Iverson Gregory K.
Published: December 2008

A highly unusual set of voice alternations obtains in the Lac Simon dialect of Northern Algonquin (Kaye, 1979, 1981). Here the distribution of voiced and voiceless obstruents reveals phonemic contrast in morpheme-internal positions (e.g. a:sɨbi: ‘net’, a:nɨpi:č ‘when’), but the initial obstruents only of morphemes which may begin the word are invariably voiceless when they do begin the word, voiced when they do not. The peculiar complementation, Kaye (1979: 276–277) reports, is due to the following historical developments affecting the Proto-Algonquian obstruent inventory.
Under stress: a functional explanation of English sentence stress
Authors: Erteschik-Shir Nomi , Lappin Shalom
Published: December 2008

In this paper we argue that it is possible to account for sentential stress in English in terms of the pragmatic property of Dominance, which is assigned to a constituent in discourse contexts. We have shown elsewhere (Erteschik-Shir & Lappin, 1979) that constraints on extraction from syntactic islands, and conditions on certain rules of semantic interpretation are best formulated in terms of the notion of Dominance. In the first part of the paper we review our definition of Dominance and provide operational tests for discerning its presence. In part 2 of the paper we state a rule which assigns primary stress to the constituent of the sentence which is marked for Dominance. We illustrate the operation of this rule with examples of stress patterns which it generates. In part 3 we then compare our analysis of stress with various other proposals for dealing with this phenomenon which are current in the literature. In part 4 we defend the distinction between contrastive and non-contrastive stress, while rejecting the notion of normal sentence stress. We claim that contrastive stress is, in fact, an instance of a distinct set of stress patterns which we refer to as restrictive stress. The assignment of restrictive stress is not marked, but is independently conditioned by three pragmatic features. We characterize these features and formulate rules for the prediction of restrictive stress. We also discuss the relationship between Dominant and restrictive stress. Finally, in the last section of the paper we indicate how the occurrence of primary stress on pronouns and reflexives can be analysed within the framework of our theory.
Some restrictions on clefts that highlight predicate nominals
Authors: Declerck Renaat
Published: December 2008

It is well known that a cleft whose focal item functions as predicate nominal in theWH/that-clause is often unacceptable, or at least questionable:

(I) (a) *It's a genius that he is. (Leech & Svartvik, 1975: 181)

(b) *It's a conductor that John is. (Stockwellet al.1977:107)

(c) *It's the football coach that John is. (Emonds, 1976:140) In this article I will investigate different types of clefts highlighting predicate nominals. I will point out five different restrictions that may lead to partial or complete unacceptability and develop a theory that can account for them.
Heads
Authors: Zwicky Arnold M.
Published: December 2008

Recent work on morphology – Lieber, 1981; Williams, 1981; Kiparsky, 1982; and Selkirk, 1982, in particular – has extended the notion of HEAD from syntax into new areas in morphology. In particular, these writers propose that in forms with derivational affixes, like Englishhappiness, the affix is the head of the combination; for instance, Kiparsky assumes (following Lieber) ‘that all word formation is endocentric’, meaning by this ‘that the category of a derived word is always non-distinct from the category of its head, in English usually the rightmost constituent (cf. Williams, 1981)’ (133).
Thematic predicates and the pragmatics of non-descriptive definition
Authors: Burton-Roberts Noel
Published: December 2008

The phenomenon that I describe in this paper is a specific class of indirectly conveyed meanings. The meanings involved are definitional, or partially definitional. Though conveyed by the utterance of sentences, they are not part of the meaning of those sentences. To begin with, I shall use the term ‘non-descriptive definition’ to refer to the act of conveying such a meaning by the utterance of a sentence that does not have that meaning. In due course, though, I shall refine the reference of that term.
‘Me Tarzan, you Jane!’ Adequacy, expressiveness, and the creole speaker
Authors: Rickford John R.
Published: December 2008

Although linguists like to claim that all human languages are equal in a general sense, differing from systems of animal communication in possessing ‘design features’ like arbitrariness and productivity (Hockett, 1958), they sometimes join non-linguists in expressing the view that some languages are inadequate with respect to the cognitive or expressive resources which they offer their speakers. In the Middle Ages, this charge was commonly levelled against the European vernaculars, and it was sometime before Spanish and Italian were recognized as having autonomous grammatical and lexical resources comparable in regularity and power to classical Greek and Latin (Scaglione, 1984). By the middle of the twentieth century, following on the descriptive work of Boas, Sapir and others, the notion that the languages of ‘primitive’ peoples were fundamentally inadequate had also been eroded, at least in linguistics, anthropology, and other academic circles (Kay & Kempton, 1984:65). Yet, as Hall (1966:106) notes, there is still one group of languages which constitutes the ‘last refuge’ of the concept of inadequate grammatical or lexical resources: pidgins and creoles.
Reconsidering the history of like
Authors: Allen Cynthia L.
Published: December 2008

The history of the verb like has attracted a good deal of interest among linguists and students of the history of English, from Van der Gaaf (1904) and Jespersen (1927) up to Elmer (1981), Lightfoot (1981), and Fischer and Van der Leek (1983). The interest in this verb is caused by the fact that it presents a clear case of a verb changing its assignment of semantic to syntactic roles. In Modern English (ModE), this verb subcategorizes for a cause, which takes the grammatical role of object, and an experiencer, which plays the role of subject. But in Old English (OE), the semantic roles were assigned to the opposite grammatical roles:

It is generally assumed (with an exception to be discussed below), that this change is an instance of syntactic reanalysis. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that no reanalysis of a structure has taken place; rather, a new subcategorization frame has been introduced and gradually ousted the old one.
Towards a phonology of conversation: turn-taking in Tyneside English
Authors: Local J. K. , Kelly J. , Wells W. H. G.
Published: December 2008

Remarkably little is known in detail about the phonetics and phonology of naturally occurring conversational talk. Virtually nothing of interest is known of theinteractionalimplications of particular kinds of phonetic events in everyday talk: in particular about the ways in which participants in talk deploy general phonetic resources to accomplish specific interactional tasks. This is in part a consequence of the tendency of recent research on the phonological aspect of discourse to limit itself to ‘intonation’ as an area of primary interest. This work has moved away from the type of phonological analysis, such as that of Halliday (1967), that states intonational systems in terms of grammatically defined units or sentence types. Workers such as Brazil (1975, 1978, 1981), Brown, Currie and Kenworthy (1981), and Coulthard and Brazil (1981) have pursued Bolinger's suggestion that the relationship between intonation and grammar is ‘casual not causal’ and have sought to relate ‘intonation’ to discourse categories rather than to grammatical ones. These, and similar attempts to deal with aspects of discourse phonology, have suggested some organizational features which traditional linguistic accounts have not dealt with. On the whole, however, these recent attempts have been less than satisfactory for one or more of the following reasons.
Zwicky on heads
Authors: Hudson Richard A.
Published: December 2008

An interesting development in the last decade or so has been the increasing use that theoretical linguists have made of the notion ‘head’ – or rather, in order not to beg the question, of notions to which they have given the name ‘head’. The term has been around for a long time in linguistics, of course – for example Bloomfield uses it in relation to endocentric constructions (1933: 195), where the head is the daughter constituent which has the same distribution as the mother. Before that, Sweet had used ‘head-word’ to refer to any word to which another is subordinate (1891: 16, quoted in Matthews, 1981: 165). However, theoretical linguists made very little use of the term, or of the constellation of associated concepts, until quite recently. Its present status is due largely to work on X-bar syntax dating from Chomsky (1970), and especially to its recent manifestation in Generalised Phrase Structure Grammar (Gazdar & Pullum, 1981; Gazdaret al., 1985)–and even more so in the ‘head-driven’ variant of this (Pollard, 1985). But the improved status of ‘head’ is also due to some extent to the renewed interest in dependency grammar (Anderson, 1971, 1977; Matthews, 1981; Atkinson,et al, 1982; Hudson, 1984; Nichols, 1986). All these treatments agree not only in using the term ‘head’, but also in using it to refer to the element in some construction to which all the other parts of that construction are (in some sense) subordinate.
Suppressing the Zs
Authors: Zwicky Arnold M.
Published: December 2008

The label CLITIC has been applied to a wide variety of phenomena, from words that are prosodically dependent on neighbouring words (as are unaccented monosyllabic prepositions and personal pronouns in English) to words, or even individual morphemes, with idiosyncratic syntactic distributions (like the second-position pronominal and adverbial particles in many languages). I propose here to reserve the term for elements whose description requires more than the stipulation that they may or must be prosodically dependent.
Word-order change in progress: the case of Slovene and Serbo-Croat and its relevance for Germanic
Authors: Bennett David C.
Published: December 2008

It will be suggested in this article that Slovene, a South Slavonic language, is on the way to acquiring verb-second (V2) word order. In providing evidence in support of this view I shall compare Slovene, on the one hand, with the closely related language Serbo-Croat and, on the other hand, with relevant details from the history of the Germanic languages. The point of comparing it with Serbo-Croat is to discover the respects in which the word order of these two languages has diverged. Taken together with what is known about the word order of Common Slavonic, the facts emerging from this comparison allow us to identify one major respect in which Slovene has changed and two respects in which it is still changing. At the same time, they reveal a major respect in which Serbo-Croat word order is also changing. The point of comparing Slovene with the Germanic languages is twofold. First, since all the present-day Germanic languages either have or have had V2 word order (Haiman, 1974), it is possible that their history can help us to understand the changes currently taking place in Slovene and to predict how Slovene might change in the future. Secondly, where details of the history of the Germanic languages are poorly understood, the possibility exists of gaining fresh insight into them in the light of the changes that have taken place more recently, or indeed are still taking place, in Slovene. In this connection we shall assess the plausibility of two theories concerning the adoption of V2 word order by the Germanic languages, those of Vennemann (1975) and Wackernagel (1892).
The theory of empty categories and the pro-drop parameter in Modern Greek
Authors: Philippaki-Warburton Irene
Published: December 2008

One of the most promising new developments of recent research into theoretical syntax within the model of Government and Binding (GB) as presented in Chomsky (1981) and (1982) has been the new importance given to the study of languages other than English. This has stimulated a great deal of work into a variety of languages (see, for example, Rizzi, 1982; Borer, 1983; Bouchard, 1984; Huang, 1984 and others). It has also been welcomed by linguists outside the TG tradition. Thus, Comrie, (1984:155) expresses his delight that ‘Chomsky (1981) makes clear that generative grammarians have come to realize that an adequate study of syntax within universal grammar requires the study of languages of different types. Chomsky's main concern has always been to formulate a theory that would achieve ‘explanatory adequacy’ by providing a restrictive set of principles which could characterize universally the notion ‘natural language’. However, detailed and in-depth analyses of various languages have revealed that in order to achieve ‘descriptive adequacy’ the theory has to allow for cross-linguistic differences, or ‘parametric variation’. The concept of parametric variation weakens some-what the restrictiveness of the universal grammar (UG) hypothesis and even more so its purported innateness, since the values for the parameters must be arrived at by the child through induction from empirical evidence. Nevertheless, explanatory adequacy may still be attained if the number of parameters is very small and each parameter has few values.
Referring and accessibility
Authors: Ariel Mira
Published: December 2008

The analysis of referring expressions can be divided into two branches for our purposes. The first includes theories of definite descriptions and proper names. The key to the riddle of the appropriate use of such expressions, it was thought, is the notion of presupposition: existence and/or uniqueness. Indeed, this was the question that dominated the literature for many years, starting with the early philosophical analyses of Frege (1982), Russell (1919) and Strawson (1956, 1964), and ending with the much later pragmatically oriented linguistic analyses, such as Liberman (1973), Kempson (1975), Prince (1978, 1981b), Gazdar (1979), McCawley (1979), Hawkins (1974, 1984) and even Loftus (1972, 1974, 1975), although this last approach is more psychological. The second branch of research totally neglected the question of presupposition. Non-syntactic/semantic theories of anaphoric expressions, pronouns especially, were psychologically oriented, and hence saw the issue to be accounted for quite differently. In fact, the objective of these theories has been to elucidate processing procedures by examining anaphoric expressions, rather than to make claims about anaphoric expressions as such.
Nominal agent incorporation in Indonesian
Authors: Myhill John
Published: December 2008

One of the most important types of grammatical process in the languages of the world is that involving the intransitivization of a transitive verb and the deletion or demotion of its subject or direct object. The first such process to be analysed was passivization, involving the demotion of a transitive subject to an oblique role or its deletion altogether; this process is central to all linguistic theories and has been known as long as linguistics has been studied.
A valency model for nouns in English
Authors: Herbst Thomas
Published: December 2008

The distinction between complements and peripheral elements, which is made in valency theory, applies not only to verbs and adjectives but also to nouns (cf. Matthews, 1981: 231–233), as is shown by examples such as the following: (1a) You will not find many signposts to Exeter on Dartmoor, (1b) You will not find many signs for Exeter on Dartmoor. (2a) He presented his arguments against the proposal at the meeting. (2b) He presented his objections to the proposal at the meeting.
It-Clefts and Wh-clefts: two awkward sentence types
Authors: Sornicola Rosanna
Published: December 2008

The aim of this paper is to examine two constructions, It-Cleft Sentences (e.g. It is me who/that wrote the book) and Wh-Cleft Sentences (e.g. The one who wrote the book is me), which constitute a problematic area of contemporary research in grammar.

It-Cleft Sentences and Wh-Cleft Sentences (henceforth ICS and WCS, respectively) appear in a number of languages which are typologically different from each other, and have some, but not all, of their characteristics in common. In Malayalam, for example, in the configuration of the ICS, S¯ is not recognizable: cf. Mohanan, 1978. Both ICS and WCS are present in many European languages (although ICS seem to have a more limited geographic distribution) and in Chinese. In the Semitic languages (Arabic, Hebrew) only the WCS type occurs. The present paper will deal mainly with English constructions and will also present, at the syntactic level, a comparative analysis between the constructions in English and the corresponding constructions in the Romance languages (French, Italian and Spanish). This comparison is useful in that it allows us to study the existence of a field of variability in the syntactic properties characterizing the way these types of sentences are realized in European languages.
Instruments as agents: on the nature of semantic relations
Authors: Schlesinger I. M.
Published: December 2008

There is a widespread current assumption that the semantic relations underlying linguistic constructions reflect the way human beings ineluctably, and hence universally, perceive events and situations. This assumption will be questioned in this paper. To make the point, a linguistic construction purportedly expressing the instrumental case will be examined. It will be convenient here to juxtapose my treatment of this construction with the one proposed by case grammarians, and by Fillmore in particular. However, the discussion has implications for semantic relations in any linguistic theory, whether they appear there as semantic roles, thematic relations, theta roles, or whatever. These implications will be discussed in the final section.
A neo-Gricean pragmatic theory of anaphora
Authors: Huang Yan
Published: December 2008

Anaphora clearly involves syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors. Although it is generally acknowledged that pragmatic factors are predominant in discourse anaphora, it is equally widely held (especially among Government-Binding (GB) theorists) that only syntactic and semantic factors are crucial to intrasentential anaphora. In this article, I shall argue, in the spirit of an ongoing debate about the ‘division of labour’ between grammar and pragmatics regarding anaphora (Reinhart, 1983a, b, 1986; Kempson, 1984a, b, 1988a, b; Levinson, 1987a, b, 1991; Yan Huang, 1987a, 1989), that contrary to this popular but erroneous view, the contribution of pragmatics to anaphora is much more fundamental than has been commonly believed, even at the heart of intrasentential anaphora, at least with respect to languages like Chinese. Such a position, if established, would seem to decrease the plausibility of Chomsky's (1981, 1982, 1986) claim that anaphora, and zero anaphora in particular, have a privileged access to the alleged underlying principles of the innate Universal Grammar (UG), the biologically determined endowment of the human mind.
SVO languages and the OV: VO typology
Authors: Dryer Matthew S.
Published: December 2008

Greenberg (1963) formulated a number of implicational universals that refer to the order of various syntactic elements. He classified languages on the basis of their order of subject, object and verb into three types, which he labelled I, II and III, and which correspond to what are commonly known as VSO, SVO and SOV languages, respectively. Since that time, evidence for the existence of the three other logically possible orders, VOS, OVS and OSV, has been presented (see Keenan, 1978; Derbyshire & Pullum, 1981, 1986), thus leaving us with a typology of six types. Lehmann (1973, 1978) and Vennemann (1974, 1976) collapsed these six types into two types OV and VO. Implicit in this move is the idea that the fundamental parameter is the order of verb and object and that the position of the subject is less important. In treating VSO, VOS and SVO as subtypes of the general type VO, the claim is that these three types are similar to each other in their other word order characteristics and different from OV languages. More recently, a number of linguists, including Comrie (1981: 90, 94–95; 1989: 96, 100–101), Mallinson & Blake (1981: 379), Siewierska (1988: 18–19) and Payne (1990: 19), but most particularly Hawkins (1980: 199; 1983: 30), have criticized Lehmann and Vennemann for collapsing VSO, VOS and SVO languages into a single category VO. They all argue that the available evidence does not support the claim that SVO languages pattern like VSO and VOS languages. The purpose of this paper is to argue that, although some of these criticisms are not without merit, Lehmann and Vennemann were largely right: with certain well-defined exceptions, the word order properties of SVO languages differ little from those of VSO and VOS languages. In short, it will be shown that with respect to a large number of word order characteristics, we do find a basic split between VO and OV languages.
Reflexivization across clause boundaries in Italian
Authors: Napoli Donna Jo
Published: December 2008

At first glance Reflexivization in Italian seems to obey the same restrictions we find in English. Thus, if we consider the proposal that reflexive pronouns and their antecedents must be clausemates in English, we find in Italian that the same clausemate condition holds and that for any two coreferential pronouns within the same clause, the second of them is a reflexive pronoun. If, on the other hand, we consider the proposal that a reflexive pronoun and its antecedent may be indefinitely far apart provided that certain circumstances are not present, such as an intervening specified subject or the reflexive's being in a tensed S to which the antecedent does not belong (as in Chomsky (1973)), again the same conditions hold for Italian Reflexivization; as illustrated in (I)–(3).
Scandinavian gender agreement revisited
Authors: Eriksson Olof
Published: December 2008

In a recent article published in this journal (Faarlund, 1977), an attempt was made to account for the problem raised by the well-known fact that Scandinavian languages often use the neuter form of the predicative adjective in cases where the non-neuter form would seem to be called for by the ordinary rules of gender agreement.
A note on some aspects of the use of WILL in affirmative declarative sentences
Authors: Robinson Brian , Haegeman Liliane
Published: December 2008

Although there has been extensive research into the usage and interpretation of the modal auxiliary WILL (Leech, 1971: 52—54; Palmer, 1974: 104—115) sentences of the type
(1) John will fight for justice.
(2) Men will fight for justice.
(3) John will be here.
may still present problems of analysis.

Utilizing Palmer's system, we can interpret sentence (I) as
implying the following:
(i) simple futurity
(ii) volition
(iii) insistence (closely related to (ii) (Palmer, 1974: III))
(iv) characteristic activity.
On universal 22
Authors: Andersen P. K.
Published: December 2008

Greenberg's pioneering work on word order universals (Greenberg, 1966) in which he proposed a total of universals concerning the ‘order of meaningful elements’ as well as a typology based on this order distinguishing 24 language types has truly had a great influence on linguistic research in the past few years. Not only has this important contribution to our understanding of language universals and typology precipitated such widespread interest in this particular field of linguistics which has culminated in a number of language specific monographs (see for instance Heine, 1976; Lehmann, 1974; Friedrich, 1975); symposia (see Li, 1975, 1976, 1977) and even larger projects (for example the Language Universals Project of Stanford University, and the Cologne project on language universals, see Greenberg, 1978; Seiler, 1973, 1978), but it also has influenced linguistics in general to such an extent that many consider syntactic description and research to be incomplete without a thorough discussion of word order, in some cases to the virtual exclusion of other topics.
The syntactic bases for French liaison
Authors: Morin Yves-Charles , Kaye Jonathan D.
Published: December 2008

Recent transformational analyses of liaison in French have postulated in one form or another a simple general syntactic basis for this phenomenon (Schane, 1968; Selkirk, 1974; Klausenburger, 1978). This contrasts with the traditional approach in which all the syntactic contexts in which liaison is obligatory, impossible, or depends on stylistic factors are painstakingly listed (Fouché, 1959; Delattre, 1947, 1955, 1956). This may appear to be due to the fact that the traditional approach lacked an appropriate syntactic theory which would unify the apparently unmotivated series of contexts in which liaison capriciously wandered. Working within the framework of theX̄Syntactic theory, Selkirk (1974) was able to discover a small set of simple rules to account for a wide array of previously recalcitrant data. This success has sometimes been taken as an argument for the superiority of theX̄syntactic theory, cf. Jackendoff (1977).
A nonlinear analysis of vowel harmony in Luganda
Authors: Katamba Francis
Published: December 2008

In some languages, vowels occurring in some specified domain, which is usually the word, must share some phonetic property or properties. Such languages are said to have vowel harmony.

Luganda, a Bantu language of Uganda, is unusual in having a vowel harmony system which is entirely morphologically conditioned. There is one subsystem which operates in the noun phrase and another irregular subsystem which operates in the verb phrase. The aim of this paper is to show how the non-linear theory of phonology developed by writers like Clements (1980, 1982) can throw some light on this apparently irregularity-ridden system.
The difference between English restrictive and nonrestrictive relative clauses
Authors: Fabb Nigel
Published: December 2008

A nonrestrictive relative clause (henceforth NRR) is shown in (I) and a restrictive relative clause (henceforth RR) in (2).

(1) The swans, which are white, are in that part of the lake.

(2) The swans which are white are in that part of the lake.

Example (1) implies that all the swans under discussion are white. Example (2) implies that the white swans are being distinguished from some other not white swans which are also under discussion. There are many superficial differences between restrictive and nonrestrictive relative clauses; in this paper I show that there is no need for construction-specific stipulations which distinguish between them. The differences arise from the fact that the RR is a modifier, while the NRR is not, and in fact has no syntactic relation to its host/antecedent. Co-indexing (involving a referential index) between the relative clause and its antecedent is central to this account. I examine the requirement that a relative pronoun must have an antecedent, which in the case of a NRR is the sole manifestation of the relationship between the relative clause and its host), and suggest that this holds at a level of discourse structure.
On the interpretation of VP inversion in American English
Authors: Birner Betty J. , Ward Gregory L.
Published: December 2008

Previous functional analyses of American English inversion constructions (for example, Hartvigson & Jakobsen, 1974; Gary, 1976; Green, 1980, 1982) have recognized – either implicitly or explicitly – that inverted sentences and their canonical-word-order counterparts are semantically equivalent. None the less, in Ward & Birner (to appear), we describe a non-truth-conditional asymmetry between the interpretation of certain VP inversions and that of their canonical-word-order counterparts.2 Consider (1a) and (2b) in the following context:
(1) Free elections were held yesterday in Czechoslovakia for the first time since the war.
(a) The main opposition party was losing the election.
(b) Losing the election was the main opposition party.
(c) The main opposition party lost the election.
Strict Cyclicity, Structure Preservation and the Scottish Vowel-Length Rule
Authors: Carr Philip
Published: December 2008

The analysis of vowel length in Standard Scottish English (SSE) and Scots dialects has proved problematical for some time now. With most analyses the Scottish Vowel-Length Rule (SVLR) is taken to lengthen underlyingly short vowels, and the principal problem with this approach has been in giving a phonological characterization of the set of vowels which act as input to the rule. A complicating factor here is the fact that the set of input vowels seems to vary across dialects. A recent analysis by Anderson (to appear), couched in dependency-phonology (DP) representations which allow for non-specification, argues rather persuasively that SVLR is a shortening operation on underlyingly long vowels, thus resolving the problem of the phonological definition of the input set (for some dialects at least). It also goes some way towards dealing with variation across dialects by giving an explanation for the variable behaviour of the lower mid vowel [ↄ,], which participates in SVLR in some dialects but not in others.
Subjects and configurationality: Modern Greek clause structure
Authors: Horrocks Geoffrey
Published: December 2008

This article considers a range of evidence relevant to the determination of the configurational/non-configurational character of clause structure in Modern Greek (an issue that has led to some recent controversy, see Catsimali (1991) versus Tsimpli (1990, 1992)), and also re-examines the status of preverbal subjects in that language; some linguists (e.g. Tsimpli 1992; Philippaki-Warburton 1985, 1987, 1990) have argued that these are invariably topicalized, while others (e.g. Horrocks 1983, 1984) have maintained that they may, just like postverbal subjects, function simply as subjects. The overall conclusion supports that of Woolford (1991), who has queried the current fashion for universally configurational analyses, but at the same time new evidence is offered in favour of the view that preverbal subjects in Greek may indeed simply be subjects, lacking formal topic status.
Syntax and the single mother
Authors: Anderson John
Published: December 2008

1.Consider a string s = a1 a2 …an over a finite vocabulary Va, such that s is structured by an asymmetric binary relation R: i.e. there are ordered pairs of elements in the string, ai, and aj, where a, R aj.1 S is a simple structured string if (a) there is a unique element ak such that there is no a1 for which it is true that a1 R ak, and if (b) for all am am, ≠ akit is true that there is a unique a1 such that a1 R am. In graph-theoretic terms these conditions define a tree where a1, a2 …a are paired with nodes in the graph and each a, R a is represented by an arc, and where the tree has a unique root or centre associated with a. Figure i is an instance of such a tree, where k = 3. In Figure a, condition (a) is infringed, in that an arc converges on each node; i.e. for all a, there is an aj such that aj R ai. Figure 3, on the other hand, violates condition (b), in that two arcs converge on a2 i.e. there is not a unique ai for whch it is true that a1 R a2.
The terms brun and marron in modern standard French
Authors: Forbes Isabel
Published: December 2008

My main purpose here is to examine the basic colour vocabulary of modern standard French in the light of recent research on colour vocabularies and in particular to account for the fact that two highly salient terms, brun and marron, are used to designate a single colour category which I shall call BROWN. (The notion of saliency is defined in § 1.2 below.) Before the publication in 1969 of Berlin and Kay's Basic color terms with its universalist hypothesis, the fact that the English term brown has no one equivalent term in French would generally have been regarded as evidence for the structuralist view that languages are anisomorphic in their semantic structures (Lyons, 1968). Linguists before 1969 turned to colour vocabularies to demonstrate not only that languages are anisomorphic in their semantic structures but that the colour continuum is cut up in a completely arbitrary way in different languages (Hjelmslev, 1943; Gleason, 1955). Recent research, however, suggests that some modification of this view may be necessary.
Verb triggers of Tough Movement
Authors: Iannucci David
Published: December 2008

Since Postal (1971: 27–31) first used the term Tough Movement, a great deal of material on this phenomenon has appeared in print. In all of this research, there has been a widespread (often tacit) assumption that the characteristic - in fact, exclusive - triggers for Tough Movement are adjectives (e.g. tough, hard, interesting) and nouns (e.g. bitch, bear, snap). For example, Lasnik and Fiengo (1974: 568) list 21 common Tough predicates. Although their list is not meant to be exhaustive, it is a characteristic one, especially in that adjectives outnumber noun triggers two to one and half the nouns are limited to vernacular usage (the most frequent use of noun triggers probably involves obscene usage).
Indicators of linguistic competence in the peer group conversational behavior of mildly retarded adults
Authors: Rosenberg Sheldon , Abbeduto Leonard
Published: December 2008

Samples of the communicative behavior of a group of higher-level mentally retarded adults engaged in conversation with peers were examined for indications of mature linguistic competence, specifically, grammatical morpheme and complex sentence use. The findings confirmed the expectation that the eventual level of mastery of these aspects of linguistic competence in higher-level retarded individuals is relatively high. Evidence for a normal developmental progression in the mastery of the grammatical morphemes was also forthcoming. In an analysis of individual complex sentence structures, no relationship was found between relative frequency of use of different types of complex sentences and presumed order of acquisition. However, subjects' ability to combine complex sentences did appear to be related to the presumed order of acquisition, although other factors may have also contributed to this relationship. Unexpectedly, a significant negative correlation was observed between relative frequency of complex sentence use and an estimate of conversational communicative competence. A possible reason for this finding was discussed.