This article proposes a novel account of noun incorporation in Northern Iroquoian. It is proposed that there is no special mechanism for noun incorporation and that this phenomenon falls out naturally from the geometry of the phrase structure under Moro’s theory of Dynamic Antisymmetry. In a nutshell, when the verbal head and the nominal head undergo Merge, they form a point of symmetric c-command, which is resolved by the nominal head moving to the specifier of the verb phrase. Further, it is proposed that, in noun incorporation constructions with a full DP double, the incorporated noun and the DP form a constituent, which is merged in theta-position.

This article focuses on whether determiner omission by two-year-old children is constrained at the level of the prosodic foot or whether it is a function of the different levels of the prosodic hierarchy. Nine French-speaking children aged 2;0 to 2;7 were asked to repeat 54 four- or five-word sentences of the form “Pronoun V NP” with three conditions: a) det + monosyllabic noun; b) det + bisyllabic noun; c) det + monosyllabic adjective + monosyllabic noun. The results show 1) more determiner omission in condition b than in a; 2) more determiner omission in c than in b. It is shown that determiner omission is not accounted for by a low-level stress-alternation constraint and that the level of prosodic structure to which the determiner is attached plays a role in determiner omission.

The postwar decades are well known for having brought dramatic change to American linguistics on many fronts. This paper explores an internally focused aspect of this change: conditions of explanation. The two questions at stake are, firstly, what counts as explanation in linguistics? and, secondly, how is this decided? I argue that transformational grammarians dominated the setting of explanatory criteria in 1960s American syntax, and that this dominance was essential to the overall success of that theory. Importantly, rival grammarians were forced to devote as much time and effort to fitting their theories to the transformational criteria as they were to advancing their own explanatory priorities. By successfully naming the conditions for explanation, transformationalists provided their own supporters with significant questions to pursue and, simultaneously, drew energy away from rivals. This monopoly over explanatory criteria was central to the dominant position transformational grammar established in the American academic linguistics community.

This article reexamines the puzzling issue of where subjects, lexical and null, are located in Spanish and offers a novel explanation for the incompatibility of preverbal lexical subjects with fronted focussed constituents. Both SpecIP and the left periphery appear to be potential landing sites for subjects, according to discourse-pragmatic factors. Assuming that pro is a clitic, it is argued that the aforementioned incompatibility can be captured by a simple rule: SpecIP must be empty for focus fronting to occur. This is the case with pro, which adjoins to Infl, or with postverbal subjects since they remain in SpecVP. From this analysis it follows that: 1) the subject field in Spanish is less articulated than is generally assumed, 2) the differences between Spanish and other null subject languages with respect to the availability of preverbal subjets can be reduced to this rule and a different ordering of focus and topic phrases, and 3) it is unnecessary to posit two different topic positions.

This study provides the first wide-scale, apparent time, instrumental description of the Canadian Shift in mainstream Toronto English. In contrast with some previous findings, the Toronto data suggest that for the last 70 years or more the shift has not affected the high front lax vowel (i). We observe that the movement of the nonhigh front lax vowels (ε) and (æ) involves both lowering and retraction in Toronto English, although retraction is the primary direction of more recent change and the shift appears to be slowing down. Our findings also suggest that continued retraction of the vowel resulting from the low back merger is involved in the final stage of the shift. We do not find evidence of a chain shift but instead propose that a parallel shift is occurring and make reference to Vowel Dispersion Theory in our discussion.

Subject honorification is one well-known diagnostic for subjecthood in Japanese, and is often thought to target “subjects”. In this squib, I will provide a little more structurally oriented characterization of subject honorification, and propose that subject honorification involves agreement licensed at the level of vP: that is, subject honorification is rendered licit when an honorific head successfully agrees with an argument located in Spec of vP, comprising the honorific verb. It is suggested that the target of subject honorification can be defined without reference to the notion of “subject”, and that the “subject” orientation of subject honorification emerges as a natural consequence of vP-level agreement. The proposed analysis can capture one important exception for the “subject-orientation” generalization on subject honorification, which would remain unaccounted for if subject honorification were held to target only subjects. The facts of subject honorification also lead to the conclusion that when arguments undergo A-movement to TP, they need to go through all types of vPs in the clause.

The proper treatment of adjuncts has been a central issue in syntactic theory since the 1980s. In the X'-theoretic analysis in the Government and Binding (GB) Theory (Chomsky 1981, 1986), they were commonly treated as optional elements attached to an intermediate or maximal projection of the head they modify. However, this treatment has been shown to be no longer tenable in the more recent Bare Phrase Structure (BPS) Theory for several conceptual reasons (Chomsky 1995: ch. 4), which renders the status of adjuncts all the more puzzling. Recently, however, Hornstein and Nunes (2008) (henceforth H&N) have proposed a new theory of adjuncts that conforms to the precepts of the BPS. It proposes that adjuncts need not be labeled for purposes of syntactic computation in contrast to complements and specifiers, which require the result of concatenation to be labeled. This squib presents new evidence for H&N's theory from one-replacement.