Most recent measures of morphological productivity are reliable only if they are based on a large corpus of the language. This article presents a detailed demonstration of a method for establishing an inventory of productive affixes in a language for which a large corpus is not available. This method evaluates the productivity of an affix first and foremost on the basis of its threshold of profitability (the number of different words derived via the affix) in correlation with other diagnostics to bolster reliability. These other diagnostics are the semantic and phonological transparency of derived words and the decomposability of such words. The application of the method is illustrated step-by-step with data from St. Lucian.

Nous voudrions examiner, dans son ensemble, le processus de grammémisation (Pottier 1974:68) ou passage du lexème au morphème grammatical en québécois. Il y a là un vide à combler, car le sujet n’a guère fait l’objet d’une étude large. Il convient cependant de signaler que, dans un champ lexical particulier, Thibault et Vincent (1981) ont déjà constaté le passage des lexèmes ayant un dénoté de caractère religieux et sacré au statut de sacres (jurons) puis de quantificateurs ou de modalisateurs (modalisateurs assertifs ou qualificatifs).

1. A not insignificant problem of Spanish syntax is that of relating the subdeletion sentence (1) to its comparative-deletion congener (2)

• (1) Juan comió más manzanas que peras había traído.

  Juan ate more apples than he had brought pears.

• (2) Juan comió más manzanas de las que había traído.

  Juan ate more apples than he had brought.

At first glance there appears to be little that is problematic and the solutions that have been proposed for English seem readily applicable; under such an analysis (as we shall see below) both sentences are held to be structurally identical, but subject to a more or less extensive deletion rule in accord with the extent of the identity of lexical elements in the compared constituents of the matrix and subordinate clause.

Old French (OF) is often characterized as a Germanic-style asymmetric V2 language, although this characterization is often questioned. The present study evaluates the nature of OF V2 from a quantitative perspective. An extensive set of data provided by syntactically annotated corpora shows that both IP and CP structure change over the OF period. Focusing on Germanic inversion – XVS word order – I argue that most of the attested inversion in OF occurs within an elaborated IP structure and that this type of subject inversion dwindles over time due to the decreasing use of null expletives. True Germanic-style embedded V2 does not appear until the late 12th century, and is only rarely used throughout the 13th century. Thus, OF is an asymmetric V2 language, but with a difference, namely in having an IP field that allows for apparent V2 orders and a CP field that is only marginally employed.

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.

Les études plus ou moins récentes consacrées expressément ou en partie au système des pronoms déterminatifs en français parlé européen ou canadien ont mis à jour l’étonnante diversité des formes qui peuvent coexister au sein de ce système. Si ces travaux contiennent parfois en plus d’un simple inventaire des formes relevées, des explications sur les origines possibles de ces formes, ils laissent cependant de côté plusieurs questions qui intéressent de près la sociolinguistique contemporaine. C’est ainsi par exemple que très peu de renseignements sont fournis relativement à l’effet des caractéristiques sociales des locuteurs (âge, sexe, appartenance socio-professionnelle, etc.) sur leur fréquence d’emploi des différentes formes determinatives. Or de tels renseignements pourraient permettre de dégager les tendances évolutives du système pronominal déterminatif dans les différents dialectes du français. Par le biais de cette étude nous voudrions combler en partie cette lacune en examinant non seulement la morphologie mais aussi l’évolution des pronoms déterminatifs dans le français parlé de Welland (Ontario). Le français parlé à Welland se prête à une telle étude dans la mesure où il possède lui aussi un système pronominal déterminatif dans lequel les formes standard côtoient de nombreuses formes non standard.

The present paper is concerned with a historical puzzle: the changing position of the marker si in the extant Baltic languages, Lithuanian and Latvian. Si appears before the root in prefixed verbs and verb-finally in prefixless verbs in Lithuanian and dialectal Latvian, as opposed to a consistently verb-final position in standard Latvian and in Slavic languages, specifically Russian. This ordering is examined within a larger picture of morpheme linearization – focusing primarily on Lithuanian, but also bringing in Latvian and Latgalian data – to account for the Baltic paradigm. Historically a pronoun, si is argued to have incorporated into the verbal structure, and to maintain nowadays a binding relation with the subject of the sentence. The placement of si within the verb is shown to depend on two factors: the type of the antecedent and the morphosyntactic composition of the verb. The findings presented here also provide new evidence against the Lexicalist Hypothesis.

Any theory of semantics must account for the role of inference in the interpretation of a sentence, however, it is not clear at which level of the grammar this inferencing capability must be represented. In Sperber and Wilson (1986) for example, inference plays an important role in the interpretation of an utterance in discourse, yet their theory does not integrate lexical representations with discourse and inferencing. Jackendoff (1987, 1990) on the other hand, while giving explicit representations for sentences and lexical items, does not address the question of discourse and inference. In this paper I will argue that it is essential to take account of discourse-level factors when analyzing sentence meaning, and indeed word meaning. In particular I will show that the meaning of the auxiliary verb fεla. in Bengali can be properly represented only if such discourse-level factors are included.

John B. Smith (1987) recently drew attention to the occasional use of an adverb + infinitive construction in English dialects, and specifically to the non-finite phrase away to go. Joseph Wright included examples of the construction in the English Dialect Dictionary under both away and go, with away to go meaning basically ‘be off, go away, away he went’. Under away (A.5.Phr. away to go):

The notion ‘drift’ plays an important role in the development of the modals have to and must in early Canadian English in relation to British and American English during the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Have to is first found in texts that reflect informal usage, and for the period in question (1750–1849), have to is only attested with deontic readings; the data suggest that its rise was not exclusively conditioned by the defective paradigm of must. Must maintains its epistemic function in relation to its Late Modern English competitors. In early Canadian English, changes progress gradually, with individual variables following different directions. Canadian English epistemic must lags behind, while deontic have to has spread more quickly in North America, with Canadian English more progressive than British English varieties, but less so than American English. Within a more general drift towards have to, Canadian English shows independent development in successive periods.