Many languages possess morphological rules which serve to express diminution or augmentation, endearment or contempt; examples are the Breton rule relating potr ‘boy’ to potrig ‘little boy’, the Shona rule relating chibikiso ‘cooking tool’ to zichibikiso ‘huge cooking tool’ and the Italian rule relating poeta ‘poet’ to poetastro ‘bad poet’. Because of the possibility of interpreting diminution and augmentation in affective rather than purely objective terms (Wierzbicka, 1980: 53ff.; Szymanek, 1988: 106ff.), morphological expressions of diminution or augmentation are not always discrete from those of endearment or contempt; that is, diminutives and augmentatives are frequently used as expressions of endearment (such as Italian sorella ‘sister’ → sorellina ‘dear little sister’, donna ‘woman’ → donnotta ‘fine, stout woman’) or disdain (Italian uomo ‘man’ → uomicciuolo ‘contemptible little man’, donna → donnona ‘overgrown girl’).

Starting from the traditional distinction between R(elational) and Q(ualifying) adjectives, we divide the former into two major subclasses: Th(ematic) and C(lassificatory) adjectives. This distinction has effects on semantic interpretation and word order. Th-adjectives obey the thematic hierarchy and C-adjectives follow patterns of subclassification of objects in different domains. R-adjectives are maximal projections mapped into specifier positions. Spanish, contrary to English, has overt raising for gender and number checking on the noun and the adjectives. R-adjectives are argued to form syntactic clusters by a series of adjunctions that satisfy antisymmetric c-command requirements and minimality constraints on movement.

The present paper shows that Right-Dislocation (RD) in Japanese shares a number of characteristics with scrambling, but nonetheless cannot be identified as rightward scrambling. The proposed solution to this apparent contradiction is that there is no direct syntactic movement of the right-dislocated phrase. Rather, the right-dislocated phrase is a remnant of an extra clause which is deleted (or sluiced) after scrambling. It is therefore concluded that RD involves leftward movement (scrambling) and that its rightward effect is only apparent. The proposed analysis is supported by a number of facts that have not previously been reported, including the distribution of adverbs, pronominal coreference, anaphor binding, idiom interpretations and wh-questions. The proposed analysis is also consistent with Kayne’s (1994) proposal that there are no rightward movement processes in syntax.

In this paper I argue that the polysemy view is not capable of giving a unified account of the meanings of CAN, MAY, MUST and SHOULD, whereas the unitary meaning view does not encounter the problems facing the polysemy view. I propose unitary meanings which are rich enough to account for the range of interpretations these modals can have, but which are specific enough to account for why they get these interpretations and not others. Proposing unitary meanings implies that we have to look for a theory of pragmatics which can explain how we achieve the different interpretations of these modals in use. I will argue that adopting the Relevance theory view of what drives interpretation gives us the basis for such an explanation.

In early Romance the finite verb raises in root clauses to the vacant C position, a movement operation frequently accompanied in turn by fronting of a pragmatically salient constituent to a preverbal position within the C-domain. Although this structural characterization of early Romance V2 word order overwhelmingly accounts for the core cases, there remains a smaller number of contexts in which the V2 effect appears to be satisfied by other means. More specifically, in addition to the move option, we argue that the V2 constraint may be met in early Romance by the Merge option: in the former case this involves movement of the finite verb to the empty C head, whereas in the latter case the V2 requirement is met by merging sì (<sic ‘thus, so’) directly in C°. This analysis radically departs from traditional analyses of Romance sì, which characterize it either as a coordinating conjunction or, in recent generative analyses, as a pleonastic phrasal category associated with a specifier position within CP. Our proposed analysis makes some interesting and novel predictions both about the rather restricted distribution of sì in Old Neapolitan, many aspects of which remain unexplained under the alternative accounts, and the C-related functional positions involved in medieval Romance V2.

Greenberg (1963) formulated a number of implicational universals that refer to the order of various syntactic elements. He classified languages on the basis of their order of subject, object and verb into three types, which he labelled I, II and III, and which correspond to what are commonly known as VSO, SVO and SOV languages, respectively. Since that time, evidence for the existence of the three other logically possible orders, VOS, OVS and OSV, has been presented (see Keenan, 1978; Derbyshire & Pullum, 1981, 1986), thus leaving us with a typology of six types. Lehmann (1973, 1978) and Vennemann (1974, 1976) collapsed these six types into two types OV and VO. Implicit in this move is the idea that the fundamental parameter is the order of verb and object and that the position of the subject is less important. In treating VSO, VOS and SVO as subtypes of the general type VO, the claim is that these three types are similar to each other in their other word order characteristics and different from OV languages. More recently, a number of linguists, including Comrie (1981: 90, 94–95; 1989: 96, 100–101), Mallinson & Blake (1981: 379), Siewierska (1988: 18–19) and Payne (1990: 19), but most particularly Hawkins (1980: 199; 1983: 30), have criticized Lehmann and Vennemann for collapsing VSO, VOS and SVO languages into a single category VO. They all argue that the available evidence does not support the claim that SVO languages pattern like VSO and VOS languages. The purpose of this paper is to argue that, although some of these criticisms are not without merit, Lehmann and Vennemann were largely right: with certain well-defined exceptions, the word order properties of SVO languages differ little from those of VSO and VOS languages. In short, it will be shown that with respect to a large number of word order characteristics, we do find a basic split between VO and OV languages.

In this paper I argue that the lexeme time constitutes a lexical category of distinct senses instantiated in semantic memory. The array of distinct senses constitutes a motivated semantic network organised with respect to a central sense termed the SANCTIONING SENSE. The senses associated with time are derived by virtue of the interaction between the Sanctioning Sense, conceptual processing and structuring, and context. Hence, semantic representations, cognitive mechanisms, and situated language use are appealed to in accounting for the polysemy associated with time. The model adduced is termed PRINCIPLEDPOLYSEMY. The conclusion which emerges, in keeping with recent studies in lexical semantics, most notably Lakoff (1987), Pustejovsky (1995), Tyler & Evans (2003) and Evans (2004), is that the lexicon is not an arbitrary repository of unrelated lexemes; rather, the lexicon exhibits a significant degree of systematicity, and productivity. In order to adduce what constitutes a distinct sense, I introduce three criteria: (1) a meaning criterion, (2) a concept elaboration criterion and (3) a grammatical criterion. A further claim is that the lexicon exhibits significant redundancy. This position is at odds with SINGLE-MEANINGAPPROACHES to polysemy, which posit highly underspecified lexical META-ENTRIES, such as the generative approach of Pustejovsky (1995) or the monosemy position of Ruhl (1989). That is, I propose that lexical items constitute highly granular categories of senses, which are encoded in semantic memory (=the lexicon). This necessitates a set of criteria for determining what counts as a distinct sense without deriving a proliferation of unwarranted senses, a criticism which has been levelled at some studies of word-meaning in cognitive linguistics (e.g. Lakoff 1987).

There is a widespread current assumption that the semantic relations underlying linguistic constructions reflect the way human beings ineluctably, and hence universally, perceive events and situations. This assumption will be questioned in this paper. To make the point, a linguistic construction purportedly expressing the instrumental case will be examined. It will be convenient here to juxtapose my treatment of this construction with the one proposed by case grammarians, and by Fillmore in particular. However, the discussion has implications for semantic relations in any linguistic theory, whether they appear there as semantic roles, thematic relations, theta roles, or whatever. These implications will be discussed in the final section.

Many linguists describe the underlying structure of sentences in terms of cases (e.g. Fillmore, 1968) or relations between the verb and nouns (Chafe, 1970), the, usually tacit, assumption being that this reflects the way we view the world. The underlying linguistic structure would accordingly be a formalization of cognitive structure. Elsewhere (Schlesinger, 1977: Ch. 5 ), I have argued that a distinction has to be made between cognitive structures and semantic deep structures. Cognitive structures correspond to the way we perceive the world.

In this paper, we explore the interaction between lexical semantics and pragmatics. We argue that linguistic processing is informationally encapsulated and utilizes relatively simple ‘taxonomic’ lexical semantic knowledge. On this basis, defeasible lexical generalisations deliver defeasible parts of logical form. In contrast, pragmatic inference is open-ended and involves arbitrary real-world knowledge. Two axioms specify when pragmatic defaults override lexical ones. We demonstrate that modelling this interaction allows us to achieve a more refined interpretation of words in a discourse context than either the lexicon or pragmatics could do on their own.

This paper presents patterns of adjacency in performance data and in cross-linguistic grammatical conventions. It is argued that a common principle of processing efficiency explains both: the more syntactic and semantic relations whose processing domains are minimized, and the greater the minimization preference in the processing of each relation, the more adjacency we find. The preferences of performance are quite systematic and it is suggested that they are ultimately motivated by reductions in simultaneous processing demands in working memory. The correlations with patterns of grammatical variation exist because grammars have conventionalized the adjacency preferences of performance.

This paper argues that the theory of Universal Grammar must include both implicational universals and universals of language distribution in the description and explanation of word order.

Implicational universals are of the form: if a language has some property (or properties) P, then it will also have some property (or properties) Q. These ‘if P then Q’ statements require that a language must not have property P without property Q (*P –O).

Recent research on the acoustic realization of affixes has revealed differences between phonologically homophonous affixes, e.g. the different kinds of final [s] and [z] in English (Plag, Homann & Kunter 2017, Zimmermann 2016a). Such results are unexpected and unaccounted for in widely accepted post-Bloomfieldian item-and-arrangement models (Hockett 1954), which separate lexical and post-lexical phonology, and in models which interpret phonetic effects as consequences of different prosodic structure. This paper demonstrates that the differences in duration of English final S as a function of the morphological function it expresses (non-morphemic, plural, third person singular, genitive, genitive plural, cliticized has, and cliticized is) can be approximated by considering the support for these morphological functions from the words’ sublexical and collocational properties. We estimated this support using naïve discriminative learning and replicated previous results for English vowels (Tucker, Sims & Baayen 2019), indicating that segment duration is lengthened under higher functional certainty but shortened under functional uncertainty. We discuss the implications of these results, obtained with a wide learning network that eschews representations for morphemes and exponents, for models in theoretical morphology as well as for models of lexical processing.

This study examines grammatical and discourse-pragmatic reflexes of the existential and resultative readings of the English present perfect. I present both negative and positive arguments in favor of the claim that the present perfect is ambiguous (rather than vague) with respect to these readings. In particular, I argue that the resultative present-perfect represents a formal idiom: a morphosyntactic form characterized by idiosyncratic constraints upon grammar, meaning and use. Certain constraints upon the resultative present-perfect, in particular that which prevents it from denoting a pragmatically presupposed event proposition, can be MOTIVATED with respect to a discourse-pragmatic opposition involving the preterite. However, such constraints cannot be PREDICTED from functional oppositions or any general semantic principles. Finally, I suggest that mastery of aspectual grammar crucially entails knowledge of such idiomatic form-meaning pairings.

In this paper we focus on the ability of ArgumentSupporting Nominalizations (ASNs) to realizemorphological plural. We think that this aspect of their behavior isinstrumental in our understanding of their properties and their syntax withinone language and across languages. Our factual investigation deals withRomanian, English, German and Spanish, as well as Polish and Bulgarian ASNs. Weshow that the interplay between the aspectual properties – eitherinner or outer aspect – and the nominal/verbalcharacteristics, as justifying the internal structure of ASNs, allows us tocharacterize the ability of ASNs to accept plural marking across languages. Wefurther argue for a flexible syntactic theory that enables us to capture themixed properties of ASNs. We provide evidence for two parameters of variation.The first parameter is whether ASNs involve a nominalizer or not. If anominalizer is not included, ASNs lack nominal internal properties. If anominalizer is included, the second parameter comes into play and allows forlanguage variation with respect to the height of attachment of the nominalizer.Specifically, a nominalizer can attach to (and thusnominalize) distinct layers of syntactic structure (VP vs.AspectP).

I. Noam Chomsky turned the previously rather specialized discipline of linguistics into a subject of considerable general philosophical interest by his argument that the discovery of universal properties of natural language requires us to adopt a ‘nativist’ or ‘rationalist’ view of human mind – a view according to which ‘our systems of belief are those that the mind, as a biological structure, is designed to construct’ (Chomsky, 1976: 7). (I shall use the terms ‘nativism’ and ‘rationalism’ interchangeably in this article, since any difference we make between them is not important in the context of Chomsky's work. The truth is that, as with many philosophical ‘isms’, the two words do duty for a range of many more than two closely related, partly overlapping theses.) When Chomsky began publishing, a widespread attitude to human language was that expressed by Martin Joos (1957: 96): ‘languages [can] differ from each other without limit and in unpredictable ways’. Chomsky claims that this is false: to quote one of his favourite examples, it is perfectly possible to imagine a language which forms yes/no questions simply by reversing the order of the words in the corresponding statements, yet in fact no natural language has a rule remotely like this (even though this rule seems rather simpler, in an absolute sense, than many of the rules which are found in natural languages). Human languages differ in some respects, but in other respects they are all cut to a common pattern. Much of Chomsky's and his followers' work consists of formulating and testing increasingly refined hypotheses about the precise limits within which natural languages may vary.

In the present paper we provide an account of VSO in Greek and its (relative) absence in Italian, despite the fact that both languages allow for postverbal subjects. We argue that this parametric difference reduces to different lexicalisation options regarding the D-system of the two grammars. We assume that the clause structure divides into three basic domains (V, T, and C), and that nominal (clitic) positions are available in each of these domains, which, as we argue, can be lexicalised not only by clitics but also by full DPs. On this basis, we argue that the subject and object DP in Greek can appear in the same domain (V), as they spell out different features depending on their grammatical function, while this is not so in Italian, given that DPs spell out the same set of features irrespective of their grammatical function. This basic difference is responsible for the presence of VSO in Greek but not in Italian. We also consider the implications of our approach for the interpretation of subjects and arguments in general.

This paper considers how the notion of phatic communication can best be understood within the framework of Relevance Theory. To a large extent, we are exploring a terminological question: which things which occur during acts of verbal communication should the term ‘phatic’ apply to? The term is perhaps most frequently used in the phrase ‘phatic communication’, which has been thought of as an essentially social phenomenon and therefore beyond the scope of cognitive pragmatic theories. We suggest, instead, that the term should be applied to interpretations and that an adequate account of phatic interpretations requires an account of the cognitive processes involved in deriving them. Relevance Theory provides the basis for such an account. In section 1, we indicate the range of phenomena to be explored. In section 2, we outline the parts of Relevance Theory which are used in our account. In section 3, we argue that the term ‘phatic’ should be applied to interpretations, and we explore predictions about phatic interpretations which follow from the framework of Relevance Theory, including the claim that phatic interpretations should be derived only when non-phatic interpretations are not consistent with the Principle of Relevance. In section 4 we consider cases where cognitive effects similar to those caused by phatic interpretations are conveyed but not ostensively communicated.

I. In Korean, alternation between certain vowels or consonants in sound symbolic adjectives and adverbs is regularly correlated with a connotation shift in those words. The examples below illustrate such alternation and the resulting connotation shift: (i) Vowel alternation: /piŋkwl/ ‘(turn) round and round’ /pεŋkwl/ ‘round and round (the circle involved is smaller and the movement faster)’

(2) Consonant alternation: /piŋkwl/ ‘round and round’ /phiŋkwl/ ‘round and round (the movement is more powerful and faster)’ ‘ppiŋkwl/ same as /phiŋkwl/ The alternation between /i/ and /ε/ in the examples in (1) brings about a connotation shift in the speed of the movement and also in the size of the moving object and of the circle made by the circular movement. In the examples in (2), the alternation between the word initial lenis stop /p/ on the one hand, and its aspirated or tense counterpart on the other, signals a connotation shift in the speed and force of the movement, but curiously not in the size of the circle or of the moving object. These means of changing the connotation of words are highly productive in the sense that, given a basic word that belongs to the category of sound symbolic words, native speakers can predict the form and connotation of the paired member resulting from the phoneme alternation.

The main purpose of this paper is to provide experimental evidence that two syntactic reflexes of split intransitivity in German – the selection of perfective auxiliaries and the impersonal passive construction – are sensitive to an aspectual/thematic hierarchy of verb classes. We show that there is a split between ‘core’ verbs that elicit categorical intuitions from native speakers, and ‘intermediate’ verbs that exhibit gradience. Furthermore, crossdialectal differences between northern and southern German with respect to auxiliary selection tend to occur only with intermediate verbs. We argue that these findings lend support to the view that the unaccusative/unergative distinction is considerably more unstable than often assumed, and suggest that projectionist theories of the lexicon-syntax interface such as those directly derived from the Unaccusative Hypothesis may not be able to account for the systematic variation exhibited by the data.