This paper presents a relational account of the Japanese constructions that are commonly referred to as ‘passives’. They are shown to all be multipredicate, monoclausal constructions, with the differences between them primarily attributable to optionality in the lexical argument structure of the ‘passive’ predicate. The proposed analysis explains the differences between passives and causatives, despite their sometimes identical case-marking. Further, evidence from the interaction of unaccusative verbs and passive is shown to lead to a formal revision of the 1-Advancement Exclusiveness law. Finally, the differences between Japanese and Korean with respect to passives is reduced to a simple lexical difference between the two languages.

This article deals with the relation between subcategorization and the notion head in OE [P-V] compounds. Many morphosyntactic properties such as category and morphological class percolate from the head to the mother. Subcategorization, however, can percolate to the mother from a nonhead as well as from the head. This is evident from the comparison of their case government properties. This paper shows that the process of ARGUMENT ATTRACTION developed within Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar permits a straightforward account of this phenomenon.

The Principle of Phonology-Free Syntax (PPFS) is a proposed universal principle of grammar that prohibits reference to phonological information in syntactic rules or constraints. Although many linguists have noted phenomena that appear to them to be in conflict with it, the appearances are misleading in all cases we have examined. This paper scrutinizes four instructive cases in French that appear to falsify the PPFS. Section 1 deals with the alleged relevance of syllable count to the description of attributive adjective placement; section 2 addresses the validity of a rule mentioning consonantality in stating the agreement rule for adverbial tout; section 3 turns to the issue of preposition choice (e.g. en vs. au) with geographical proper names; and section 4 takes a look at a purported case of phonological reference in stating the rule for ellipsis of a clitic pronoun and an auxiliary in a coordinate structure. In each case we bring independent evidence to bear on the problem in order to show that the analyses employing phonology-sensitive syntactic statements are in error and the prediction of the PPFS is confirmed.

This paper investigates the relationship between variability and lexicality on the one hand and sound change on the other within the theory of Lexical Phonology. The former leads to the proposal of the Optionality Constraint (OC), which prohibits the application of optional rules in the lexical module. The constraint is found to be violated at the word level. The violation of OC as well as of other lexical modular principles is accounted for by the help of a new licensing principle, called the Polarity Principle. This allows for interacting modules to have different properties of representation and rule application at their opposite ends. The OC leads to a resolution of the Neogrammarian Controversy, that is consonant with the standard assumption concerning sound change, namely, the inherent relation between the latter and variability.

Corpus data are used to investigate Yngve's claim that English usage avoids grammatical structures in which the number of left branches between any word and the root node of a sentence exceeds some fixed limit. The data do display a marked bias against left-branching, but the pattern of word-depths does not conform to Yngve's concept of a sharp limit. The bias could alternatively reflect a statistical invariance in the incidence of left-branching, but whether this is so depends on how left-branching is counted. Six nonequivalent measures are proposed; it turns out that one (and only one) of these yields strikingly constant figures for left-branching in real-life sentences over a wide range of lengths. This is not the measure suggested by Yngve's formulation; it is the measure whose invariance is arguably the most favourable for computational tractability.

J. A. Goldsmith (ed.),The handbook of phonological theory. Cambridge, MA & Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. Pp. xiv + 986.

To assess a book of nearly a thousand pages with thirty-two contributions is something of a tall order, if not an impossible task, if one wants to do justice to all of it. For this reason, I have chosen to approach it from my own standpoint on phonology and see to what extent the issues I see as crucial to the current vigorous debate in this area have been addressed and to examine how they have been dealt with. First, however, I will present a general description and discussion of the book as a whole.