A few years ago, a writer in a Canadian magazine complained that the word snye was not defined in any dictionary even though the Canadian Board on Geographical Names had certified it as “a lawful and proper generic term.” Later, another writer in another journal complained that none of his dictionaries included the word mukluk. About the same time, a Canadian novelist writing about a semi-rural part of Queen’s, near New York City, referred to a character living “near the end of a concession road”; unwittingly, he was using a term that would be quite unintelligible to Americans and, no doubt, to some Canadians. Still another Canadian, a historian, having found the word carcajou in an eighteenth-century document on the fur trade, glossed it as “the American badger”; had he had access to a Canadian dictionary, he could have ascertained that carcajou was a common traders’ synonym for wolverine, the word having come into Canadian English from Canadian French, the coureur de bois having borrowed it from the Cree, who also gave the English traders the term quickhatch, yet another Canadian synonym, one that entered another door, so to speak.

These anecdotes illustrate the long-felt need for readily accessible information about Canadian English, past and present. Happily, the situation has much improved in recent years, ever since the first volume of the Dictionary of Canadian English series became available in 1962; this series, completed in 1967 and revised in many particulars since, was the first extensive attempt to satisfy the need for Canadian dictionaries. To this series belongs the Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical Principles (Toronto: Gage, 1967), which attempts to provide a historical record of words that are peculiarly Canadian.

The aim of this article is to present a unified analysis of Romance past participle agreement. Data from 19 standard and non-standard Romance varieties are considered. It is shown that in order to account for the variation found across the various Romance varieties, past participle agreement should not be considered as following simply from another module of the grammar, such as Case Theory, coindexation or the theory of functional categories, but should rather be considered from the point of view of a general theory of grammatical agreement. It is also shown that past participle agreement must be treated as an example of nominal-modifier agreement rather than as an example of verb-argument agreement.

La plupart des études typologiques entreprises par les linguistes s’en tiennent généralement aux trois étapes citées par Bernard Pottier (1968:300): inventaire des traits typologiques; caractérisation d’une langue par ses traits; classement des langues du monde d’après certains de ces traits. Après un survol méthodique, mais bref, de tous les traits envisageables dans une telle investigation, Pottier conclut: “Les recherches actuelles s’efforcent d’introduire la notion de hiérarchie dans le fonctionnement de la langue” (1968:318).

C’est ce dernier point que j’aimerais envisager pour le français en comparant le rôle des voyelles par rapport à celui des consonnes dans le système de la langue.

DPs in several Austronesian languages from southwestern Sulawesi show the D head as an enclitic on an element within the DP. Where N is unmodified, D cliticizes to N, and where D is modified, D cliticizes to the modifier. A structure in which NP and the modifying phrase are treated as arguments of D is proposed, and the cliticization pattern is analyzed as resulting from head movement. Depending on the valency of the DP, NP will either be specifier or complement of D. This analysis extends easily to account for some otherwise puzzling patterns shown in relative clauses where D cliticizes to the right periphery of the verb of the modifying CP. Under the minimalist hypotheses that overt movement is a function of feature strength and that the strength of the relevant features can vary from language to language, certain patterns of head-adjunction involving V, I, C, and D are expected and the predictions are discussed.

The aim of this corpus-based study is to offer a syntactic and semantic characterization of sentences whose formal realization can be schematized as it + take + NP + (NP) + to-VP. The examination of the data suggests that this linear structure is shared by two distinct micro-constructions with different semantic properties: a construction with extraposition whose primary meaning is described in terms of consumption and an impersonal micro-construction which is analyzed as an anankastic construction expressing a necessary condition. It is shown that the apparently erratic grammatical behaviour of the string results from the existence in the hierarchical network of constructions of two different micro-constructions with similar formal realizations.

This article provides an analysis of verum marking in the Tsimshianic language Gitksan. Original fieldwork data are provided to show that Gitksan verum is very similar in its distribution and discourse effects to English verum, but displays two interesting differences. First, Gitksan verum is not marked by focal stress, but by a dedicated particle (k'ap). Second, Gitksan verum does not require givenness of the core propositional material. I argue that when applied to a proposition p, k'ap is (a) disallowed discourse-initially or in answer to a wh-question; (b) felicitous when responding to a prior assertion or implication of ¬p; and (c) felicitous in other contexts only if there is prior controversy in the discourse about the truth of p. I show that the semantic contribution of the Gitksan verum particle can be captured by a discourse management analysis: verum(p) is licensed only when the speaker believes that some interlocutor is committed to ¬p.

This paper is concerned with the formulation of a constraint on the set of NPs which can serve as “antecedent” for PRO and floated quantifiers. I will begin by showing that a principle formulated in terms of c-command encounters problems distinguishing between two classes of NPs occurring within PPs. I will then propose that a more comprehensive and successful constraint can be formulated in terms of thematic dependency, a relation holding between an NP and the lexical category which determines its thematic role.

O’Grady (1983) complains that in arguing for task-specific genetic principles the transformational-generative enterprise has not given proper consideration to the alternative Piagetian view that there are no genetic principles specific to language, but that the relevant principles hold for all cognitive domains (he does not specify what the “cognitive domains” are). Although he notes judiciously that “the current research program in linguistics cannot be undermined by simple reference to possible alternate analyses for one or two phenomena” (168), he nonetheless sketches alternatives to two analyses given in The Language Lottery (Lightfoot 1982), claiming that his alternatives do not require appeal to task-specific innate principles and are thus consistent with a Piagetian view of the mind.

In linguistics, explanation is based on whatever initial conditions are imposed on language, and so it necessarily functions within the range of options allowed by the laws of nature. Thus, since syntax is a computational system, it is subject to principles of efficient computation. Moreover, the Faculty of Language is located in human beings, so this means that it is constrained by the conceptual and perceptual systems of human beings. In this context, three topics are presented that have been repeatedly discussed over the last 50 years: inversion in interrogatives, long-distance dependencies, and recursion. For these cases, the computational approach favoured by Generative Grammar leads one to inscribe lists of unexplained elements in Universal Grammar. This is but a measure of our ignorance. On the other hand, a fully biolinguistic approach that takes into account the conceptual and perceptual basis of language opens a way to a true explanation.

Nuu-chah-nulth presents a set of exceptions to Condition C of the Binding Theory that involves co-construal between certain R-expressions and a c-commanding pronoun. These exceptions to Condition C are not reducible to structural properties of the language, and are not confined to coreference anaphora, as they extend to bound variables without quantificational antecedents. Nuu-chah-nulth also shows strong crossover effects, and more generally obeys a strict c-command condition on variables bound by quantifiers. We account for these facts by distinguishing quantifier binding from other types of dependent reference, and parameterize the latter based on reverse dependency, where a pronoun may precede and/or c-command its antecedent. Reverse dependency reflects the non-presuppositional nature of Nuu-chah-nulth pronouns, which allows them to be introduced ahead of their descriptive content.

0. The Purpose of this short study is to show that phonetic rather than graphemic considerations predominate in scribal errors in Greek Biblical manuscripts and to suggest an explanation for this phenomenon.

1. In preparing my critical edition of the Greek Genesis, all available extant mss of Genesis prior to the 16th century were collated, the only exceptions being a 15th-century ms which was unavailable to the Göttingen Academy, and two other 15th-century mss which proved to be copies of mss already collated. The mss collated constituted 9 uncial texts dating from the 3rd to the 7th centuries and 98 minuscules dating from the 9th to the 15th centuries. Also collated were 32 papyri ranging from ca. 50 Bc (a tiny fragment containing only a few letters) to the 9th century. Three of these papyri are substantial, the so-called Berlin Genesis (late 3rd century) and the Chester Beatty Papyri IV and V (4th and late 3rd centuries respectively).

The Cowichan Dialect of Halkomelem, a Coast Salishan language, has a reduplication process in three morphological categories that copies stem-initial CV. When a stem-initial resonant (voiced sonorant) is reduplicated, a prefix hə- results. Two possible explanations for h instead of the predicted resonant support distinct, although not necessarily mutually exclusive, claims for the status of h in a universal classification. One possible explanation is that the reduplicated resonant devoices to h-lending support to Chomsky and Halle’s (1968) classification of h as a voiceless sonorant, since h would be functioning as the voiceless counterpart to Cowichan voiced sonorants. But an alternative is that the prefixed sonorant elides, with the subsequent insertion of h as a juncture phenomenon—suggesting that h functions here as a neutral nonsyllabic segment.

Although generalizations about Canadian versus American or British English are still premature, the series of articles by Avis, Gregg, et al seems to suggest two: (1) that Canadian English “is neither American nor British, but a complex different in many respects from both…;” and (2) that “Canadian English is not so uniform as it is often made out to be”. This article is a brief contribution to the above-mentioned series and presents some evidence in support of both-assertions.

The primary source of the data on which this study is based is the writer’s idiolect. Geographically this can be identified as Central Saskatchewan, specifically the rural area surrounding the village of Herschel which lies about twenty miles west of Rosetown, and about one hundred miles southwest of Saskatoon.

In many countries in continental Europe the simple present is extensively used in main clauses in legislative texts to express obligation. Several English-speaking legal systems have witnessed an increased usage of the simple present in legal English over the last few decades, largely at the expense of shall. I examine the continuing debate among law scholars and writers of legal drafting manuals over the adoption of the simple present in prescriptive texts in English. I conclude by observing that the decision in some countries to do away with shall would appear to be linked principally to socio-pragmatic factors relating to the way this modal auxiliary is perceived in many parts of the English-speaking world today, that is, as being outdated and smacking of “legalese”, a style of legal writing that plain language exponents have been trying to eliminate.

Bilingualism is one of the most important problems of linguistics; yet it is also one of the most neglected. More than a quarter of a century ago certain linguists agreed that of all the problems with which linguistics was faced at the time none had more significance than those of bilingualism. Yet linguists have not yet given these problems the attention they deserve. As a result, the work done in bilingualism in related fields such as education has lacked the necessary linguistic foundation and guidance and has consequently led to conclusions which are often meaningless.

This paper offers a discourse-pragmatic account of the constraint on indefinite DPs as subjects of specificational copular clauses (a doctor is Mary). Building on Mikkelsen's (2004) proposal that specificational subjects are topics, I argue that they must be contrastive topics which properly contain F-marked constituents. I show that this can account for the absolute ban on simple indefinite subjects, and allow for more complex indefinites to be subjects. Finally, I discuss the syntactic analysis that would be predicted given my pragmatic analysis, and the puzzles that arise from it.

Vowel-consonant metathesis is observed in a variety of contexts throughout the Nivaĉle (Mataguayan) grammar. It occurs in both verbal and nominal domains, characteristically resulting from the affixation of a consonant-initial suffix to a consonant-final stem. This paper provides an optimality theoretic account for vowel-consonant metathesis and vowel epenthesis in Nivaĉle. It is demonstrated that metathesis responds to phonological requirements; specifically, it serves to avoid marked structures in the language: complex codas, derived complex onsets, and bad syllable contacts. The prosodic analysis of syllable structure constraints aims to provide broad empirical coverage, as well as a coherent and integrated theoretical interpretation.