This study investigates the interpretation of or in legal texts, focusing on two puzzles: “inclusive/exclusive” or and “free choice permission”. The study first examines various examples of or in American court cases described by Solan and the “and/or” rule that he describes. It then turns to occurrences of or in a different legal domain, that of the World Trade Organization, giving a brief introduction to the WTO dispute mechanism and its principles of interpretation before examining these occurrences of or. The study then introduces the inquisitive semantics framework as a way to account for these occurrences, offering an analysis of the inclusive/exclusive or and free choice or puzzles and of the interaction of or with obligation, permission, and negation more generally.

This article discusses the existential construction in Malagasy, focussing on the distribution and interpretation of nominals. It is argued that the existential construction involves the raising of specific NPs out of the small clause complement of the existential verb misy. Nonspecific NPs, on the other hand, are shown to remain within the complement. That raising correlates with interpretation provides evidence in favour of the Mapping Hypothesis of Diesing (1992). Although the syntactic analysis accounts for the specific/nonspecific distribution in the existential construction, it leaves unexplained the precise interpretation of the specific NP, which may be either partitive, possessive, or locative. This article therefore argues for a relation, PARTITIVE, which unites these three readings.

Recent studies of John Wilkins, author of An essay towards a real character, and a philosophical language (1668) have examined aspects of his life and work which illustrate the modernity of his attitudes, both as a theologian, sympathetic to the ecumenical ideals of seventeenth-century reformers like John Amos Comenius (DeMott 1955, 1958), and as an amateur scientist enthusiastically engaged in forwarding the interests of natural philosophy in his involvement with the Royal Society. His linguistic work has, accordingly, been examined for its relevance to seventeenth-century thought and for evidence of its modernity; described by a twentieth-century scientist as “impressive” and as “a prodigious piece of work” (Andrade 1936:6, 7), the Essay has been highly praised for its classification of reality (Vickery 1953:326, 342) and for its insight into phonetics and semantics (Linsky 1966:60). It has also, incidentally, been examined for the evidence it offers on seventeenth-century pronunciation (Dobson 1968).

Rule reordering as a principle of phonological change has come under heavy criticism in the recent past. A number of articles, e.g. Iverson (1973), Picard (1974), Hogg (1976), Dinnsen and Koutsoudas (1976), have been devoted to this question, endeavouring to show in one way or another that the reordering of phonological rules does not constitute a type of linguistic change. Some of the better known cases of alleged reordering have been examined, and many of these have been judged to be deficient for two main reasons: implausibility, due to the unjustified degree of abstractness involved, and inaccuracy, due to the omission or misinterpretation of crucial data. Generally, at the very least, a reasonable and plausible alternative solution has been put forth in each case.

Cette étude veut être un complément d’information à nos travaux déjà effectués sur le parler des Franco-Canadiens de la Saskatchewan. En août 1970, poursuivant notre série d’enquêtes phonétiques, nous avons visité les villages de Willow-Bunch et de Bellegarde dans le sud-est de cette province, dans le but d’examiner quelques aspects phonétiques du français parlé dans ces deux centres actifs de la minorité francophone de la région.

Many working syntacticians or phonologists do not care about what all linguists tend to call philosophical issues, such as “What kind of object is a language?” They are happy to leave the ontological basis of their work unanalyzed. It is possible to accept this situation. We may choose to inquire directly and separately in what way pieces of external evidence from Acquisition, Borrowing, Change, and Damage may have an impact on ideas considered seriously by working linguists. However, the moment we decide to group the ABCD of these four domains together under the E of Externality, thus trying to organize them into an area of inquiry, this decision leads naturally to a more general type of question. Unless we grapple with such a question, our ABCD list begins to look like the well-known Borges quotation from a fictitious Chinese encyclopaedia stating that animals are divided into:

The discovery that some processes are primitive rather than learned provides a window into the properties of the language faculty. One of the postulated modules of the language faculty is sociolinguistic competence, the ability to use language appropriately in its socio-cultural nexus. I present three cases where variable phenomena exhibit regularities that appear to be essential rather than accidental. First is the Ethan Experience, which inures children engaged in acquiring the community accent from learning foreign features that must later be unlearned. The experience entails an innate accent-filter, and its influence has been observed in all situations in which the accent being acquired differs from the home accent. Second is Sex-Based Variability, whereby women use fewer non-standard variants and have wider stylistic repertoires than men of the same social class in the same settings. Third is Vernacular Roots, the discovery that a number of sociolinguistic variables recur in English vernaculars wherever they have been studied, as well as in interlanguage, Creoles, and child language. The ubiquity of these features presumably reflects their privileged status in the language faculty.

This article advances two main claims. First, it argues that [Spec, VP], the base position of the external argument, is right-branching in French. It is shown that some surprising restrictions imposed on the order of complements in stylistic inversion can then be interpreted in terms of an adjacency condition restricting the occurrence of lexical material between the postverbal subject and its Case checker. Second, it asserts that [Spec, IP], the derived subject position, is occupied by a null expletive, pro. The limited distribution of the construction then follows from the licensing conditions governing the null expletive in French. Further, the proposed analysis sketches a possible interpretation of adjacency phenomena and of the notion of expletives within recent developments of generative grammar.

This article explores a defining property of implicit null object constructions, and how this property emerges during the L1 acquisition process. Implicit objects are non-referential and characterized by a strong semantic association between a null N in object position and the contents of the verb root. By means of an elicited production study, we examine children’s sensitivity to this association in terms of the typicality of implicit direct objects and of their use in a potentially contrastive context. Participants were 73 English-speaking children (between the ages of 2;09 and 5;08) and 20 adult controls. Our results show that children make a distinction between implicit objects with typical and atypical objects—even in scenarios where a previous use introduces a potential contrast—but at rates that differ from those of adults. This suggests an incomplete knowledge of the target properties of null objects and indicates that children use a referential null N until later in development, when the selectional link between V and the null object becomes entrenched and hyponymy with the verb root becomes the sole source of recoverability. We draw implications about the co-development of verb meaning and the null object construction.

In this article, a number of broad questions related to the acquisition of consonant clusters in a second language are investigated. Drawing on the structural relations and phonological principles of Government Phonology, it is argued that the behaviour of second language learners can be accounted for by a top-down, left-to-right phonological parser. Appealing to a model of cognitive architecture, it is demonstrated that one can account for the different behaviours of speakers of languages that share the trait of lacking tautosyllabic clusters (Korean and Finnish) when learning a language which allows such clusters (English). Properties of the LI segmental inventory and a licensing strength scale are proposed to explain why Finnish learners have less trouble than Korean learners when acquiring English clusters.

This article compares the results of measurements of objective language data with the subjective judgments of linguistically naïve individuals. The comparison is based upon recordings of speech orientated towards the standard language. The data surveyed are from the West Middle German city of Mainz and the northern Low German city of Neumünster. In both cases, recordings of council meetings, in which members of a defined social group are acting in an authentic situation, were evaluated. The data were first measured using a technique designed to quantify the phonetic divergence from the standard language. Subsequently, the recordings were played to various groups of non-specialists from different regions in both the Low German and Middle German dialect areas. Participants were asked to assess the speech of the councillors on a seven-step rating scale. The results show a high similarity between the intersubjective measurement of linguistic items and the metalinguistic judgments of the listeners.

The purpose of this paper is to present a complete syntactic analysis of the reflexives of English. Most of the work in this area, particularly work in the Government-Binding theory, has focused on one type of reflexive, what has come to be called the “anaphor” reflexive. Thus Koster (1984), in describing reflexives (among other things), postulates a number of essential properties characteristic of a core dependency relation between constituents. This relation, labelled “R”, is illustrated in (1). Its properties are listed in (2).

Inuit dialects with palatalization all distinguish between “strong i” and “weak i”: instances of surface [i] that cause palatalization and those that do not, respectively. All dialects that have completely lost this contrast also lack palatalization. Why are there no /i, a, u/ dialects in which all instances of surface [i] trigger palatalization? We propose that this typological gap can be explained using a contrastivist analysis whereby only contrastive features can be phonologically active, palatalization is triggered by [coronal], and contrastive features are assigned in an order placing [low] and [labial] ahead of [coronal]. In a three-vowel inventory only [low] and [labial] are contrastive, while in the four-vowel inventory [coronal] must also be contrastive to distinguish strong and weak i. It follows from these assumptions that [i] can trigger palatalization only if it is in contrast with a fourth vowel.

The difference between the two mechanisms for wh-question binding (i.e., sucessive cyclic movement and pronominal binding) is characterized, inter alia, by the presence of island constraints (subjacency effects) in movement but not pronominal constructions. Using experimental data from child and adult speakers of Akan (pronominal binding) and Serbo-Croatian (movement and pronominal binding), it is argued that: 1) Previous experiments on English-speaking children’s knowledge of the block on extraction from within adjuncts do not positively support early use of a movement grammar in English; 2) Apparent sensitivity to movement constraints may arise as a consequence of processing preferences; 3) The evidence to date is nonetheless compatible with movement as the default hypothesis for wh-binding; 4) The parsing preference for non-island locations for a wh-word may have utility for the learner, helping to correct overly permissive grammars.

This article investigates the spread of the le/la/les-forms in the diachrony of French on the basis of large-scale corpora. It focuses on the issue of their “mixed” distribution viz. the observation that during a long period of time the le/la/les-forms in French do not pattern as either (anaphoric) demonstratives from which they originate (Late Latin ille), nor as (uniqueness-based) definites, which they end up becoming in Modern French. We model the phenomenon as a competition between two grammars which ascribe different Logical Forms to the l-forms and test model predictions in contexts which differ with respect to whether they satisfy the relevant conditions for either demonstrative or definite semantics. We also suggest that this change was part of a larger change involving the spread of presupposition triggers within noun phrases. We show that our model correctly predicts the relative rates of determiner spread in various contexts.

Theories of phonology claim variously that phonological elements are either innate or emergent, and either substance-full or substance-free. A hitherto underdeveloped source of evidence for choosing between the four possible combinations of these claims lies in showing precisely how a child can acquire phonological elements. This article presents computer simulations that showcase a learning algorithm with which the learner creates phonological elements from a large number of sound–meaning pairs. In the course of language acquisition, phonological features gradually emerge both bottom-up and top-down, that is, both from the phonetic input (i.e., sound) and from the semantic or morphological input (i.e., structured meaning). In our computer simulations, the child's phonological features end up with emerged links to sounds (phonetic substance) as well as with emerged links to meanings (semantic substance), without containing either phonetic or semantic substance. These simulations therefore show that emergent substance-free phonological features are learnable. In the absence of learning algorithms for linking innate features to the language-specific variable phonetic reality, as well as the absence of learning algorithms for substance-full emergence, these results provide a new type of support for theories of phonology in which features are emergent and substance-free.

Dans un article stimulant dans cette revue, Walker (1978) cherche à établir le statut phonologique des alternances du type (1) en ancien français, qui remontent à une ancienne règle phonétique d’épenthèse introduisant une occlusive à l’intérieur des suites constituées d’une des consonnes /m n ɲ l ʎ s z/ suivie d’une liquide—suites qui résultent en général de la syncope d’une voyelle atone, et dont on note les effets dans les mots (2), par exemple.

The postulation of diachronic universals derives from certain conclusions reached in the investigation of synchronic universals, i.e., that there are natural (universal) phonological subsystems in languages or dialects, and that there are natural (universal) structural relationships between the elements in these subsystems. In essence, a hypothesis about a particular diachronic universal is a claim that a shared natural state in various languages or dialects is the product of the same diachronic process (a sound change, series of linked sound changes, etc.). A counterproposal to this hypothesis would specify that there are multiple diachronic routes which can link two parallel states in the history of two or more innovating languages or dialects. If the latter view is correct, and I believe that it is, then the theory of diachronic universals will require refinement if it is to retain theoretical value.

Progress in linguistic theory during the past 20 years has made it increasingly clear that language acquisition must be viewed as an essentially deductive process in which the child analyzes the input data s/he is exposed to on the basis of an innately specified set of restrictive principles — technically known as Universal Grammar — which narrowly constrain the kinds of hypotheses a child will consider vis-à-vis a given set of data (cf. Chomsky 1980, 1981, 1986; Hornstein and Lightfoot 1981; White 1982; Felix 1987). As a consequence, there is a growing interest in the question of how exactly principles of Universal Grammar interact with the child’s linguistic experience during the course of language acquisition (see e.g., Pinker 1984; Hyams 1986; Lust 1986b; Roeper and Williams 1987 among others for some more recent proposals). It appears that there are currently at least two competing views about the nature of this interaction. One of these views which I shall call “perceptionism” holds that the task of Universal Grammar (UG) is essentially restricted to constraining the types of intermediate grammars that the child will construct, while the developmental process itself is essentially data-driven, i.e., driven by the child’s (changing) perception of the external evidence. The other view which may be termed “maturationism” claims that UG is both responsible for the types of (intermediate) grammars that in principle may emerge and at the same time for the specific nature of the developmental process. Under the maturationist view language acquisition is therefore seen as a process that is driven primarily by internal, i.e., biologically determined maturational mechanisms.