Although a preliminary survey of the vocabulary and pronunciation of a Central Newfoundland dialect is the chief concern of this paper, some tentative observations about the development of Newfoundland dialect as a whole may perhaps also be put forward here. Both the terms discussed and the observations made are based primarily on a field-trip made in the Summer of 1963 as part of the expanding programme of research in dialect, toponymy, and folklore which is now being carried out at Memorial University. Some of the theoretical points are drawn both from the fieldwork and a sampling of the material available in the University’s Folklore and Dialect Archives. From these sources it would appear that two main speech-groups probably exist in Newfoundland as a whole, one descended from Southern Irish and the other from the English West Country. Historical evidence of settlement in Newfoundland of course supports this, but proof of such a hypothesis as regards the language must await further collecting and more intensive analysis. However, the dialectal differences so far examined seem to indicate that this is the probable pattern.

This article analyzes Marshallese pronouns and demonstratives, arguing that both privative and binary morphosemantic features are necessary, and that the two types coexist in a single domain. Marshallese encodes number with atomic, and person with [$\pm$author] and [$\pm$participant]. In the complex system of Marshallese demonstratives, atomic and [$\pm$human] map to the same head, subject to a constraint that only one feature appears at a time. The element $\chi$, which derives person orientation in demonstratives and pronouns, does not universally map to the same syntactic position. While in Heiltsuk $\chi$ is a dependent of the person head, in Marshallese it heads a projection above the person head. And while in Heiltsuk the person features occupy the same position in both pronouns and demonstratives, Marshallese pronouns have a different structure, with person and number features mapping to a single syntactic head. The contribution of UG is thus not a set of specific features or specific structures, but a set of more abstract principles.

The title of this paper should by no means be interpreted as a recommendation diplomatically couched in the form of a question. As I write it, I am wondering whether or not we could achieve more clarity in our exchanges among linguists if we decided to judge on its own merits each one of the cases where we are used to operating, or tempted to operate, with the notion of subject, and if we tried to devise new and less ambiguous labelings for every specific complex of syntactic criteria. Yet, considering the difficulty of reaching agreement among all scholars concerned, would we not, thereby, increase the existing confusion rather than reduce it?

Certain Peninsular Spanish varieties have two third-person plural forms in the simple past indicative of verbs with ‘strong’ (stem-stressed) preterites. While this phenomenon is documented in large-scale linguistic atlas surveys, its current geographic distribution and diachronic origins remain under-studied. This paper sets out to: 1) establish the geographic distribution of these variants; the differing methodologies and epochs of the data sources make them particularly interesting to compare, showing that these analogical strong preterites have suffered a drastic decline over the last century; 2) use historical corpus data to show that the vernacular variant is by no means a recent phenomenon; 3) examine external history as a source of explanation in linguistic reconstruction, showing that this process of analogical levelling took place after the reconquest and resettlement of these regions. These findings support the hypothesis of a feature which spread over the centuries by linguistic diffusion.

This article proposes an account of genitive case marking in the Maori DP which shows how the licensing requirements for genitive depend both on thematic role distinctions and on the presence of a functional projection situated immediately below D. An investigation of ordering alternations including genitives, demonstratives, adjectives, and the lexical head indicates that the FP below D is also the location of an identifying or specifying function within the DP. The label “IdentP” is proposed as a cover term for this FP projection. It is also proposed that DPs containing nominalized verbs include a head, Nmz, that has the capacity to license additional instantiations of genitive case marking.

Aoun and Li (2003) argued that whether the head of Chinese relative clauses can reconstruct at Logical Form is determined by its phrasal category. When the head is a noun phrase, it can reconstruct; but when it is a quantifier phrase, it cannot. This paper uses a sentence-picture matching experiment to investigate this claim. The results showed that a quantifier phrase can reconstruct. Thus, we do not need to stipulate a noun phrase/quantifier phrase distinction for the reconstruction of heads in Chinese relative clauses. Both types of phrases can reconstruct, predicted by the head-raising analysis of relative clauses.

This article presents research into derivational properties of onomatopoeias in English and in Slovak. Onomatopoeias are defined narrowly in our approach, being restricted to the direct imitation of sounds of extra-linguistic reality. Our sample of 40 onomatopoeic words consists of two sound types: the sounds of animals and the sounds resulting from various falls, strokes, and bursts. A derivational network was produced for each such word. The evaluation parameters comprise derivational capacity, maximum derivational network, saturation value, number of derivation orders, most productive semantic categories by order of derivation, typical combinations of semantic categories, and derivational processes. An evaluation of the networks enabled us to answer the question of whether onomatopoeias are productive word-formation bases, to compare the two Sound Types, and to compare onomatopoeia-based networks to those based on non-iconic vocabulary. These results contribute to a better understanding of the word-formation systems in the compared languages and of the status of onomatopoeias with regard to non-iconic vocabulary.

What does it take to run a full substance-free phonology (SFP)? Because in classical approaches only items below the skeleton have phonetic properties that, according to SFP, need to be expunged, current work in SFP only ever concerns segmental aspects. If substance is removed from segmental representation and primes and computation are therefore arbitrary, the non-trivial question arises: how can such a system communicate with a system where primes and computation are not arbitrary (at and above the skeleton)? The two phonologies below and at / above the skeleton that exist in production are complemented with a third phonology that occurs upon lexicalization, that is, when L1 learners or adults transform the acoustic signal into a stored representation. The core of this article argues that this broad architecture is inhabited by three distinct computational systems along the classical feature geometric divisions: Son(ority) is located at and above the skeleton, while Place and Lar(yngeal) live below the skeleton. The question then is how a multiple-module spell-out works, that is, how ingredients from three distinct vocabularies can be mapped onto a single phonetic item. It is argued that the skeleton plays a central role in this conversion.

Various proposals have been made in the literature, arguing that bound pronouns are, in some sense, deficient. This article tests this hypothesis with Malagasy pronouns, specifically in the context of Zribi-Hertz and Mbolatianavalona's (1999) claim that Malagasy pronouns may be bound only when they are missing the NumP layer of DP. Zribi-Hertz and Mbolatianavalona show further that other syntactic properties are also attached to the lack of NumP. The variety of Malagasy investigated here (Malagasy2), behaves differently from the one described by Zribi-Hertz and Mbolatianavalona (Malagasy1), and these differences lead to two conclusions. First, there are no syntactically deficient pronouns in Malagasy2, yet these syntactically complete pronouns may, in fact, be bound. Second, Zribi-Hertz and Mbolatianavalona are nevertheless correct that the lack of NumP accounts for a cluster of properties, since none of these distinctions between pronouns that they describe are found in Malagasy2. More broadly, we conclude that pronominal binding does not require syntactic deficiency.

Omission of various components of a sentence is a common phenomenon in first language (LI) acquisition across different languages. Omission can affect arguments, such as subjects and objects, as well as functional elements, such as determiners and inflectional morphology (Borer and Rohrbacher 2002, Pérez-Leroux et al. 2008, among others).