It is well known that German utterance-initial lenis stops are voiceless but that German intervocalic (or intersonorant) lenis stops are sometimes produced with voicing. This variable voicing can be understood as passive voicing, voicing that results because of the voiced context, rather than from active voicing gestures by speakers. Thus, speakers are not actively aiming to voice intervocalic stops, just as they are not actively aiming to voice utterance-initial stops (Jessen & Ringen 2002, Jessen 2004). If this is correct, the variable voicing that occurs in aspirating languages should be different from the voicing that occurs in true voice languages (such as Russian), in which speakers are actively aiming to voice both initial and intervocalic lenis stops. Since there is little data on the relative amount of intervocalic voicing in true voice languages, however, it has been difficult to evaluate this prediction. The purpose of this paper is to compare data on the voicing of intervocalic stops in German and English with data on the voicing of intervocalic stops in true voice languages. We find that the differences are substantial, supporting the claim that aspirating languages are not like true voice languages, in which the feature of contrast is [voice].

Subject phrases impose particularly strong constraints on extraction. Most research assumes a syntactic account (e.g. Kayne 1983, Chomsky 1986, Rizzi 1990, Lasnik & Saito 1992, Takahashi 1994, Uriagereka 1999), but there are also pragmatic accounts (Erteschik-Shir & Lappin 1979; Van Valin 1986, 1995; Erteschik-Shir 2006, 2007) as well as performance-based approaches (Kluender 2004). In this work I argue that none of these accounts captures the full range of empirical facts, and show that subject and adjunct phrases (phrasal or clausal, finite or otherwise) are by no means impermeable to non-parasitic extraction of nominal, prepositional and adverbial phrases. The present empirical reassessment indicates that the phenomena involving subject and adjunct islands defies the formulation of a general grammatical account. Drawing from insights by Engdahl (1983) and Kluender (2004), I argue that subject island effects have a functional explanation. Independently motivated pragmatic and processing limitations cause subject-internal gaps to be heavily dispreferred, and therefore, extremely infrequent. In turn, this has led to heuristic parsing expectations that preempt subject-internal gaps and therefore speed up processing by pruning the search space of filler–gap dependencies. Such expectations cause processing problems when violated, unless they are dampened by prosodic and pragmatic cues that boost the construction of the correct parse. This account predicts subject islands and their (non-)parasitic exceptions.

The syllable has been credited with hosting a wide range of segmental patterns in phonology. However, there is increasing evidence that many of these patterns have a broader prosodic scope than is suggested by established syllabic analyses. Non-rhoticity is one of a collection of r-related effects in English that illustrate this point. Some of these effects have to do with the distribution of r itself: it can appear in positions that can be specified syllabically only by enriching prosodic theory in undesirable ways. Others have to do with the influence r exerts on neighbouring segments, particularly coronal consonants and preceding stressed vowels. Specifying the phonological context of these segmental effects requires explicit reference to the foot and the word rather than the syllable.

Starting with the seminal work of Klima & Bellugi (1966) and Bellugi (1967), young English-speaking children have been observed to pass through a stage at which their negative utterances differ from those of adults. Children initially use not or no, whereas adults use negative auxiliary verbs (don't, can't, etc.). To explain the observed mismatches between child and adult language, the present study adopts Zeijlstra's (2004, 2007, 2008a, b) Negative Concord Parameter, which divides languages according to whether they interpret negation directly in the semantics with an adverb, or license it in the syntactic component, in which case the negative marker is a head and the language is a negative concord language. Our proposal is that children first hypothesize that negation is expressed with an adverb, in keeping with the more economical parameter value. Because English is exceptional in having both an adverb and a head form of negation, children must also add a negative head (i.e. n't) to their grammar. This takes considerable time as the positive input that triggers syntactic negation and negative concord is absent in the input for standard English, and children must find alternative evidence. The Negative Concord Parameter accounts for an intricate longitudinal pattern of development in child English, as non-adult structures are eliminated and a new range of structures are licensed by the grammar.

This paper investigates a phenomenon that has been referred to in the linguistic literature as contrastive topic. Traditionally, contrastive topic is analyzed as an independent information-structural notion that is linked to a particular interpretation and intonation. The paper, however, argues that the information-structural notion of contrastive topic is redundant and can be reduced to that of contrastive focus. The apparent dissimilarity between contrastive topics and contrastive foci is attributed to a difference in the structures that contain them rather than any particular difference between the associated information-structural notions themselves. The structures that host contrastive topics and contrastive foci are claimed to be distinct due to the nature of an additional focused element obligatorily present in the sentence. Contrastive topics and contrastive foci themselves, in contrast, are shown to be associated with identical interpretations, which results in their identical syntactic distribution, strongly suggesting that they in fact represent one and the same information-structural phenomenon in two different types of construction.

This review article examines the major premises concerning the evolution of language offered in Tecumseh Fitch's The Evolution of Language (2010). Various aspects of Fitch's argumentation are disputed, specifically including the idea that language was preceded in evolution by a musical protolanguage stage in which there were no words, but which instead exhibited a prosodic, meaningless ‘bare phonology’. According to Fitch, this putative stage in language evolution also laid the foundations for syntax, providing musical phrases which were subsequently filled by meaningful words. Counterarguments to these ideas are presented, and an alternative, word-based model of protolanguage is defended.