This work examines multiple-modal constructions in Mandarin Chinese. It is shown that modals in Mandarin Chinese are ordered in specific ways, and, while a number of factors contribute to the determination of the hierarchical order of modals, the finiteness of the complement clauses that the modals take plays a particularly important role. A generalization proposed in this paper is that (i) if a modal takes a finite clause as complement, then the modal itself can only occur in a finite context; and (ii) if a modal takes a nonfinite clause as complement, then it can occur in a nonfinite context too. This generalization is shown to account for some ordering phenomena of modals in Mandarin Chinese that would otherwise remain mysterious.

This paper attempts to present the Mandarin phonological system after the generative fashion.1 We find it convenient to treat this part of the grammar in two components: namely, a syllable grammar and morphophonemics. The former attempts to designate the structure of the basic syllables independently of the syntactic component of the grammar. It consists of a set of P-rules to generate strings of phonemes for the basic syllables. The latter operates on sequences of these syllables with intrasyllabic information designated by the syllable grammar, and with category and intersyllabic information which can be given by the syntactic component. It consists of T-rules and gives a phonetic representation of sentences as its output.

According to a ‘radical orphanage’ approach, non-restrictive relative clauses are not part of the syntactic representation of the sentence that contains them. It is an appealing view, and seems to capture some important properties of non-restrictive relative clauses. Focusing mainly on empirical shortcomings, this paper aims to show that the appeal of such approaches is illusory. It also outlines an empirically superior ‘syntactically integrated’ account.

Katz's statement of the core of the problem of ungrammaticalness is worth quoting at length: ‘The knowledge that enables a speaker to understand sentences – his knowledge of the rules of the grammar – must be identically the knowledge that enables him to understand semi-sentences, for semi-sentences are understood in terms of their well-formed parts. Moreover, the knowledge a speaker uses to recognize the respects in which a semi-sentence is ungrammatical is also his knowledge of grammaticality: knowledge of the grammatical rules is here employed to discover instances of their violation.…

In one of the many insightful passages in his Meaning and the structure of language (Chafe, 1970), Wallace Chafe characterizes sentences like It's hot, It's late, and It's Tuesday as referring to ‘all-encompassing states’. ‘They cover,’ he says, ‘the total environment, not just some object within it’ (101). His treatment, in common with most others – but in his case partly because of the centrality of the verb in his System – denies any value to it: ‘it need not reflect anything at all in the semantic structure’. I believe that the notion of ambience is correct, though that of totality must be qualified; but I think that not only is it more than an empty surface element: it has as its referent precisely the ‘environment’ that is central to the whole idea. There is a hint of this notion in a recent observation by Arthur Schwartz (1972: 70–71) concerning it seems: ‘the surface it is not really a pronominal substitute for the proposition, but closer to the impersonal situational it of It is cold today or It is crowded in here’.

The proposal that a grammar should be considered as a device which generates all and only the well-formed sentences of a language, which has already had a profound effect upon linguistics in general, has begun to exert some influence on the more particular (if less well defined) subject of stylistics. To understand this, it is necessary to consider the way in which one tests such a grammar. This includes checking that for any grammatical sentence we observe there exists in the grammar a partially ordered sequence of formulae which would generale it. It is an inevitable outcome of any prolonged examination of a theory of this kind that there will arise cases which can be generated but with regard to which a decision as to whether or not they constitute a genuine example of the phenomena the theory is supposed to cover cannot be arrived at merely by reference to existing data: cf. Weyl (1949: 150). In linguistics this is called the problem of GRAMMATICALNESS. (Chomsky, 1957: 15)

This paper contributes to an ongoing debate on the syntactic status of oblique subject-like NPs in the ‘impersonal’ construction (of the type me-thinks) in Old Germanic. The debate is caused by the lack of canonical subject case marking in such NPs. It has been argued that these NPs are syntactic objects, but we provide evidence for their subject status, as in Modern Icelandic and Faroese. Thus, we argue that the syntactic status of the oblique subject-like NPs has not changed at all from object status to subject status, contra standard claims in the literature. Our evidence stems from Old Icelandic, but the analysis has implications for the other old Germanic languages as well. However, a change from non-canonical to canonical subject case marking (‘Nominative Sickness’) has affected all the Germanic languages to a varying degree.

In this paper I shall present a truth conditional semantics for simple adjectival comparatives. The leading idea is that the semantics should hug closely to the surface syntax of the construction and should not depend on postulating degrees or extents as primitive entities. The remainder of this introductory section will raise some objections to existing accounts of the semantics of comparative constructions. In Section 2 it will be argued that an adequate analysis of compared adjectives must take into account the vagueness of positive adjectives, and that the latter can be captured by interpreting degree adjectives as partial functions. Section 3 contains an analysis of degree modifiers, and in Section 4 this analysis provides the basis for the interpretation of comparatives. Section 5 spells out some consequences of the theory, while the last section contains a summary and conclusion.

Borrowing, or diffusion, of grammatical categories in language contact is not a unitary process. In the linguistic area of the Vaupés in northwest Amazonia, several different mechanisms help create new contact-induced morphology. Languages which are in continuous contact belong to the genetically unrelated East-Tucanoan and Arawak families. There is a strong cultural inhibition against borrowing forms of any sort (grammatical or lexical). Language contact in the multilingual Vaupés linguistic area has resulted in the development of similar – though far from identical – grammatical structures. In Tariana, an Arawak language spoken in the area, reanalysis and reinterpretation of existing categories takes place when diffusion involves restructuring a pre-existing category for which there is a slot in the structure, such as case. A new grammatical category with no pre-existing slots may evolve via grammaticalization of a free morpheme – this is how aspect and aktionsart marking was developed. The development of a five-term tense-evidentiality paradigm involves a combination of strategies: reanalysis with reinterpretation accounts for the obligatory tense marking, and the history of visual, inferred and reported evidentials. The nonvisual evidential evolved via grammaticalization of a lexical verb while the most recent, assumed, evidential involves reanalysis and reinterpretation of an aspect marker and grammatical accommodation.

In the literature on English tense usage, expressions of futurity such as

(1) (a) I will/shall leave next week.

(b) I'm going to leave next week.

have already received a lot of attention, especially so in the pedagogical descriptive tradition of English linguistics (cf. Close, 1977; Haegeman, 1981, 1983; Leech, 1971; Quirk et al., 1985; Palmer, 1974, 1979; Wekker, 1976, etc.). Although these accounts are attractive, they raise further questions because most of them do not propose to deal with the problem against a formal theoretical background. As a consequence, the rules formulated to describe the use of shall/will or be going to in (1) tend to be intuitive and often do not really allow any decisive choice to be made in many instances of usage. On the other hand, Reichenbach type analyses of tense interpretation are usually mainly concerned with the general problem of tense representation and treat both examples in (1) as illustrations of future tense without detailed discussion of the contrasts between them.

The main concern of this paper is sentences like the following containing so-called ‘cognate objects’:(1) (a) John died a gruesome death.(b) Harry lived an uneventful life.(c) Bill sighed a weary sigh.

This paper addresses the relationship between phonology and morphology, using the vowel alternations of Standard German Umlaut and Ablaut as relevant examples. Umlaut is analysed as a completely unified process of vowel fronting which can be found in a wide variety of morphologically derived environments. A number of non-linear phonological analyses of Umlaut, involving a floating feature, are presented and compared. While Umlaut is interpreted, in current analyses, as a morphological rule, the present paper argues for its status as a lexical phonological rule.

Ablaut, on the other hand, is, synchronically, a totally unpredictable vowel change found mostly in the paradigms of so-called strong verbs. On the grounds of its internal and external behaviour, it is argued that this phenomenon must receive a completely different description by means of additional specifications for lexical entries.

Greek polydefinites are cases of adjectival modification where the adjective features its own definite determiner. We propose an account of the phenomenon that treats it as an instance of close apposition. Like close appositives, polydefinites in Greek instantiate multiple definite determiners, display a freedom in word order, and involve a restrictive interpretation. We propose that close apposition in Greek forms a complex DP out of two DPs which are in a sisterhood relationship through identification of the Referential roles within the DPs. This operation, semantically tantamount to set intersection, is constrained to apply only when the resulting set is not co-extensive with either initial set. This ensures the restrictive interpretation of one DP over the other. The fact that in polydefinites, it is always the DP containing the adjective that obligatorily satisfies the constraint has to do with the presence of noun ellipsis within that DP: (noun) ellipsis is known to come with a disanaphora requirement. We show that noun ellipsis is also responsible for the distribution of adjectives and adjective interpretations, as well as those discourse effects of polydefinites that have been thought of as the result of a DP-internal Focus projection. Finally, we make a proposal for the encoding of definiteness in Greek, consonant both with the existence of polydefinites in the language and with the prerequisite for set intersection among DPs: the overtly realized Greek definite determiner does not itself contribute an iota operator but preserves the <e,t>denotation at the DP level. Our proposal thus deals not only with the multiple occurrence of definite determiners in a construction that picks out a single discourse referent, but also with the compositionality problem that such a situation gives rise to. In the final part we tie the cross-linguistic (un)availability of expletive determiners of the Greek type to the (un)availability of morphologically realized case.

English exhibits PP, AP and NP resultative secondary predicates (SPs). Italian freely exhibits PP resultatives and, less commonly, AP resultatives. This difference follows from two facts. First, resultatives, being arguments of the V except in constructions involving ‘fake’ objects (see section 4), may appear only in positions that non-predicative arguments of the V of their same category can appear in (a correlation stated in (155) below). Since English allows PP, AP and NP non-predicative arguments in the position immediately following the direct object, all three categories can also appear as resultatives in the same position. But since Italian allows only the first two types of non-predicative arguments in this position, only PP and AP resultatives can appear there. Second, Italian sentences with AP resultatives are subject to a rule of semantic interpretation by which the primary predicate must be interpreted as focusing on the endpoint of the activity it denotes (as stated in (110) below). English sentences with AP resultatives are only slightly sensitive to this interpretation rule. As a result, AP resultatives are appropriate in fewer situations in Italian. That AP resultatives are sensitive to this rule of interpretation is consistent with the fact that AP arguments of verb that appear in post-object position are marked in a number of ways.

Robyn Carston,Thoughts and utterances: the pragmatics of explicit communication. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002. Pp. x+408.

Robyn Carston's Thoughts and utterances is, in every sense, a big book. The result of years of thinking about communication from a relevance-theoretic perspective, it is long, wide-ranging, rich, intricate, demanding and radical. And it is (or should be) controversial. Essential reading therefore for anyone with any interest in language and communication, philosophy of language, semantics and pragmatics.

Nominal classification remains a fascinating topic but in order to make further progress we need greater clarity of definition and analysis. Taking a Canonical Typology approach, we use canonical gender as an ideal against which we can measure the actual gender systems we find in the languages of the world. Building on previous work on canonical morphosyntactic features, particularly on how they intersect with canonical parts of speech, we establish the distinctiveness of gender, reflected in the Canonical Gender Principle: In a canonical gender system, each noun has a single gender value. We develop three criteria associated with this principle, which together ensure that canonically a noun has exactly one gender value; we give examples of non-canonicity for each criterion, thus gradually building the typology. This is the essential groundwork for a comprehensive typology of nominal classification: the Canonical Typological approach allows us to tease apart clusterings of properties and to characterize individual properties with respect to a canonical ideal, rather than requiring us to treat the entire system as belonging to a single type. This approach is designed to facilitate comparisons of different noun classification systems across languages.

The continuous gradation of colour which exists in nature is represented in language by a series of discrete categories. Athough there is no such thing as a natural division of the spectrum, every language has colour words by which its speakers categorize and structure the colour continuum. The number of colour words and the manner in which different languages classify the colour continuum differ. Bassa, a language of Liberia, has only two terms for classifying colours; hui and ziza (Gleason, 1955: 5). Hui corresponds roughly to the cool end of the spectrum (black, violet, blue, and green) and ziza corresponds to the warm end of the spectrum (white, yellow, orange and red); in Bambara, one of the languages of the Congo area, there are three fundamental colour words: dyema, blema and fima (Zahan, 1951: 52). Dyema includes white, beige, and natural (cotton) colour; blema denotes reddish, brownish shades; and finally fima includes dark green, indigo and black. Maerz and Paul (1930) list over 3000 colour names in English, but generally it is considered to have eight basic names: black, white, red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet.

One of the milestones in typological studies is Berlin & Kay's (1969) account of basic colour terms, which has produced a steady stream of research of various types. Berlin & Kay summarized their work as follows.

In sum, our two major findings indicate that the referents for the basic color terms of all languages appear to be drawn from a set of eleven universal perceptual categories, and these categories become encoded in the history of a given language in a partially fixed order (1969: 4–5).