The inflexional paradigm, as a linguistic entity or concept, has not been a major preoccupation of theoretical linguists (at least in the English-speaking world) for several decades. For example, it is scarcely mentioned by Zellig Harris in his classic Methods in structural linguistics (1951). Nor have generative grammarians devoted much attention to it. Being interested originally in syntax, semantics and phonology to the almost total exclusion of morphology, they had no immediate incentive to reconsider such a squarely morphological concept. Quite apart from this, a positive reason for continuing to neglect, or reject, the paradigm seemed to flow from their approach to phonology. If phonological organization and phonological change were properly understood (they thought), then it could be seen that there was no need to invoke explicitly non-phonological factors such as ‘paradigm pressure’ or ‘analogical levelling’ in order to account for ‘exceptions’ to ‘sound laws’.

A key debate in loanword adaptation is whether the process is primarily phonetic or phonological. Is it possible that researchers on each side are viewing equally plausible, but different, scenarios? Perhaps, in some language situations, adaptation is carried out mainly by those without access to L2 phonology and is, perforce, perceptually driven. In other situations, adaptation may be done by bilinguals who actively draw upon their knowledge of L2 phonology in adapting loanwords. The phonetic strategy would most likely be favored in situations where the vast majority of the population did not know the L2, thus having no possible access to the L2 phonological system. The phonological strategy, on the other hand, is most likely to be favored in situations where there is a high proportion of speakers who are bilingual in the L1 and L2. This possibility is tested by comparing the adaptations of English loanwords in 19th- and early 20th-century Quebec French, when bilinguals were few, to those of contemporary Quebec French, in which the rate of bilingualism is far higher. The results show that even when the proportion of bilinguals in a society is relatively small, they determine how loanwords are pronounced in the borrowing language. Bilinguals adapt loanwords on the basis of phonology, not of faulty perception of foreign sounds and structures. However, in a society where bilinguals are few, there is a slight increase in non-phonological influences in loanword adaptation. We address the small role played by non-phonological factors, including phonetic approximation, orthography, and analogy (true or false), showing that false analogy, in particular, may give the impression that phonetic approximation is more widespread in a loanword corpus than is actually the case.

In this paper, we explore the possibility that machine learning approaches to natural-language processing being developed in engineering-oriented computational linguistics may be able to provide specific scientific insights into the nature of human language. We argue that, in principle, machine learning results could inform basic debates about language, in one area at least, and that in practice, existing results may offer initial tentative support for this prospect. Further, results from computational learning theory can inform arguments carried on within linguistic theory as well.

Does English have morphological case (as opposed to abstract Case)? Evidence is presented which suggests that it may be a completely case-less language like Chinese, contrary to the widely held view that the distinct pronoun forms and the ‘genitive’ 's involve morphological case. The existence of case in English has recently been accepted almost without question, but the question at least deserves serious discussion as it is easy to find alternative analyses. According to the analysis offered here, I and me are both personal pronouns whereas my, mine and 's are possessive pronouns; and the difference between I and me, like the one between my and mine, is handled by a very specific and local lexical rule which is sensitive to the syntactic structure but does not involve case.

This article analyses middle constructions in English, accounting for their key syntactic and semantic properties. The analysis rests on the observation that there are certain similarities between middle, tough and recipe-context null-object constructions, such as in (1a–c).(1) (a) This bread cuts—easily.(b) This bread is easy to cut—.(c) Take bread. Cut—carefully (and arrange—nicely).

This paper explores the fit between syntax and semantics in one small corner of English. It addresses two related questions: To what extent is the distribution of bare infinitive (BI) complements, as in (1) and (2) below, semantically motivated?

(1) I saw/heard Mary slam the door.

(2) I made/let John cross the street.

This paper focuses on two types of definites in Greek – MONADICS and POLYDEFINITES – and provides a constraint-based account of their form, meaning and use. Specifically, I discuss three core issues that have not been addressed in previous work. First, the special pragmatic import of polydefinites. These are associated with contextual constraints that go beyond the uniqueness entailments of standard (monadic) definites. Their idiosyncratic morphosyntax achieves effects similar to those induced in other languages solely by prosodic means and illustrated by phenomena subsumed within the term DEACCENTING. Second, the morphosyntax of definites. I argue that the Greek definite article can be best analysed as a PHRASALAFFIX, and provide a composition approach in the spirit of previous work couched in HPSG. Monadics and polydefinites are treated uniformly, without positing unmotivated complexity in the grammar for deriving the form of the latter. The definite concord and linear order facts that pose problems for previous analyses are directly derived and the morphosyntactic affinity between the Greek definite article and ‘weak form’ possessive is straightforwardly captured. Third, the semantics of definites. A quantificational semantics is provided that ensures that the semantic content of the definite article in polydefinites is integrated into the meaning of the sentence just once. Polydefinites are, therefore, semantically identical to monadics; the special import of the former originates from a contextual constraint on the anchoring of the index that interacts with the common morphosyntactic and semantic basis.

Only a small number of the world's languages have any kind of recorded history over more than a few generations, and in no case do records go back more than a few thousand years. From some perspectives, this doesn't matter. There are plenty of grammars to write and plenty of changes to describe accurately and then to explain in these recorded histories. Explanations for structural changes may be grounded in grammatical theory, and careful examination of historical changes, where the goal is explanation for how and why they happened, sometimes leads to innovations in grammatical theory, illuminating the nature of grammatical categories or the conditions for movement operations, for example. That has been the focus of some work on language change and data from changes have been used to argue for claims not only about grammatical theory but also about language acquisition, that children learn only from simple structures (DEGREE-0 COMPLEX) and that acquisition is cue-based (Lightfoot 1991, 1999). That is not to say, of course, that these propositions could not have been based on other kinds of data, but the fact is that they were based on analyses of historical change. From analyses of historical changes, we have learned things about the nature of the language faculty and about how it develops in children, unhampered by the limited inventory of changes.

This paper suggests an analysis of Modern Hebrew noun phrases in the framework of HPSG. It focuses on the peculiar properties of the definite article, including the requirement for definiteness agreement among various elements in the noun phrase, definiteness inheritance in construct-state nominals, the fact that the article does not combine with constructs and the similarities between construct-state nouns and adjectives. Central to our analysis is the assumption that the Hebrew definite article is an affix, rather than a clitic or a stand-alone word. Several arguments, from all levels of linguistic representation, are provided to justify this claim. Adopting the lexical hypothesis, we conclude that the article combines with nominals in the lexicon, and is no longer available for syntactic processes. This leads to an analysis of noun phrases as NPs, rather than as DPs; we show that such a view is compatible with accepted criteria for headedness. We provide an HPSG analysis that covers the above mentioned phenomena, correctly predicting the location of the definite article in constructs, accounting for definiteness agreement and definiteness inheritance constraints, and yielding similar structures for the two major ways of expressing genitive relations in Hebrew.

But it would only be fair to add that there is still an essential difference between the hope that never dies and the hope that it was all wrong. (Van der Laan, 1929: 28)

The main aim of this paper is to discuss the claim that discourse connectives are best treated as indicators of coherence relations between hierarchically organized discourse units. It will be argued that coherence relations cannot be seen as cognitively real entities. Furthermore, there is no evidence for hierarchical organization in discourse. The intuitions underlying the notion of hierarchical discourse structure are instead explained in terms of consequences of processing a text in the search for optimal relevance. This account draws attention to a hitherto not widely discussed set of data.

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.

This article argues that of English adjective–noun constructions involving associative adjectives (‘associative AdjNs’), some originate in the lexicon and others in the syntax. While in many cases such constructions are unambiguously and for identifiable reasons located on one side or the other of the lexicon–syntax ‘divide’, variation being possible only across speakers, a range of associative AdjNs is identified which must be simultaneously, and for the same speakers, of both lexical and syntactic provenance. There is therefore no lexicon–syntax ‘divide’: the two modules overlap.

The performative analysis claims that every sentence we utter refers, self-reflexively, to our utterance of it, that every sentence comes equipped in its underlying structure with a higher performative clause of the form I (or Speaker) + Verb of Communication + You (or Hearer) (see especially Ross, 1970; Lakoff, 1971, 1972). The self-reflexive nature of the performative clause is brought out even more clearly by the addition of hereby, which functions as a deictic instrumental adverb referring to the utterance-act. In this paper I shall deal with two sets of data that have been invoked in support of this analysis and I shall try to show that on closer scrutiny they disconfirm it, at least in its generally accepted form. Both concern sentence adverbials that modify not the propositional content of the sentence to which they are attached but what I shall provisionally call the pragmatics of the speech situation; the solutions I shall suggest as an alternative to the performative analysis will, however, differ considerably for the two sets.

The classification of that is, or (in other words), and or rather as reformulation markers would seem to suggest that the utterances they introduce achieve relevance in the same way. However, the examination of a range of discrepancies between reformulations introduced by or, on the one hand, and reformulations introduced by that is, on the other, suggests that any account of the pragmatics of reformulation must be a non-unitary one. In this paper, I build on Burton-Roberts' (1993) suggestion that the reformulations introduced by or are meta-linguistic in character, and show how these can be distinguished from the reformulations introduced by that is, which must be analysed at the level of conceptual representation. I also show how this distinction corresponds to a distinction between the different ways in which a parenthetical construction may be pragmatically integrated with its host. As Potts (2005) would predict, parenthetical that is-reformulations are not themselves part of the truth-conditional content of their hosts. However, in contrast with or-reformulations, they communicate information about the propositional content of their hosts, and in this way can contribute to the identification of their truth-conditional content at the level of pragmatic interpretation.

Recent work has ascribed the adverb effect, the reduction or elimination of the that-trace effect by the addition of an adverbial phrase, to an elaborated CP layer. However, additional observations about a variety of adverb effects with both positive and negative effects on acceptability, including some experimental data, suggest that (i) adverbs may undergo lexical adjunction to a complementizer and (ii) the CP layer may be contracting or folding in rather than expanding. This proposal facilitates explanation of an array of facts including the Comp-trace effect, the adverb effect and other aspects of the behavior of complementizers in relative constructions and in complement constructions.

There have been claims in the literature that the variability of compound stress assignment in English can be explained with reference to the informativeness of the constituents (e.g. Bolinger 1972, Ladd 1984). Until now, however, large-scale empirical evidence for this idea has been lacking. This paper addresses this deficit by investigating a large number of compounds taken from the British National Corpus. It is the first study of compound stress variability in English to show that measures of informativeness (the morphological family sizes of the constituents and the constituents' degree of semantic specificity) are indeed highly predictive of prominence placement. Using these variables as predictors, in conjunction with other factors believed to be relevant (see Plag et al. 2008), we build a probabilistic model that can successfully assign prominence to a given construction. Our finding, that the more informative constituent of a compound tends to be most prominent, fits with the general propensity of speakers to accentuate important information, and can therefore be interpreted as evidence for an accentual theory of compound stress.

Representation of syntactic relations by dependency trees with nodes labelled by categories of lexical morphemes and with branches effectively labelled by relational morphemes reveals the relationships of elements to which selectional restrictions apply more directly than do current phrase structure characterizations and avoids certain defects of a configurational definition of relationships. The relations are those of CASE as defined by Fillmore and more generally those of HEAD-OF and COMPLEMENT-OF. Adoption of the view that SUBJECT-OF is a surface rather than a deep structure relation eliminates the need to distinguish strict subcategorization rules from selectional rules.

In current linguistic theory, the theoretical status of adjunct extractions, as in for example How often do you think Robin sees Kim? is, somewhat surprisingly, an unresolved issue, with some investigators arguing that only arguments extract syntactically, entailing analyses of adverbial gaps via fundamentally different mechanisms from those posited for argument extraction. We adduce extensive evidence against such positions from a number of languages which exhibit morphological or syntactic phenomena which are sensitive to binding (extraction) domains and where this morphosyntactic flagging is present in instances of adjunct extraction as well as argument extraction. We also present language-internal arguments for the syntactic nature of adjunct extraction in English, including the coextensiveness of adjunct and argument extraction and their parallelism with respect to strong/weak crossover effects. Finally, we discuss the challenge which binding domain effects pose for accounts of adjunct extraction in various frameworks.

Sociolinguistic studies have shown that variation may occur on any of the accepted levels of linguistic analysis. Variation on the phonological level has been the most commonly treated in studies of English from Labov's (1966) New York study onwards. By contrast, it is rather rare that we find studies of morphological or lexical variation (the latter being the variation in the lexical form of words, for example, the Belfast alternation of /Λ/ and /Λ/ in the word foot (L. Milroy, 1980: 118)). However, morphological and lexical variation has been favoured in studies of some other languages, for instance Norwegian (Fintoft & Mjaavatn, 1980; Kerswill, 1985a), Swedish (Thelander, 1982) and Persian (Jahangiri & Hudson, 1982). On the other hand, studies of syntactic and prosodie variation have been altogether much less common (but see Cheshire, 1982; Local, 1982). In spite of differences in emphasis, the various methodologies used have all had the aim of discovering co-variation between linguistic and non-linguistic parameters.