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’).

This article presents an analysis of Polish transitive clause order from the perspective of two competing word order principles, namely the form-driven principle of syntactic weight proposed by Hawkins and the pragmatically based Topic > Comment principle.

Eskimo languages are commonly characterized as displaying rather ‘free’ word order as compared to the major western European languages. Nevertheless, there is in West Greenlandic at least a clearly dominant, pragmatically neutral ordering pattern. Deviation from this – when possible at all – results in specifiable contextual marking (the factors involved will be discussed and illustrated in section 2). In fact, the degree of ‘freedom’ involved may vary considerably from dialect to dialect (and from language to language), also through time and according to register/medium. Specifically I shall be claiming that no Eskimo dialect is of the purely pragmatically based word order type (lacking a syntactic ‘basic order’) which Mithun claims is typical for polysynthetic languages with inflected verbs that can stand as independent sentences (Mithun, 1987: 323). Unlike the type of language that Mithun describes, which includes (Iroquoian) Cayuga and (‘Penutian’) Coos, for example, I shall argue that West Greenlandic (WG), a highly polysynthetic language, behaves more like Slavic languages in this respect, though the ‘neutral’ pattern there is of course SVO rather than SOV. Much as described for Czech and Russian by the Prague School functionalists, word order in WG seems to reflect the common ‘functional sentence perspective’ whereby – ignoring postposed ‘afterthought/clarificatory’ material – early position in the sentence is associated with given material of low communicative dynamism, whereas later position is associated with new or important material of high communicative dynamism (see Firbas, 1974). This is the reverse of the situation described by Mithun.

Algorithms for the assignment of main word stress in Dutch have never been systematically tested against foot-based segmental processes. The assumption has apparently been that such processes do not exist. In this article, it is suggested that Dutch has at least four segmental rules that make reference to the foot, and that Dutch has a chanted intonation contour whose realization is governed by foot structure. The evidence provided by all these processes largely confirms the more recent proposals for Dutch foot structure, including Kager (1989) and Trommelen & Zonneveld (1989), except where they fail to conform to (1).

Japanese, like many other languages, permits numeral expressions to appear in several positions relative to the argument whose number they specify. This article concentrates on just two of the possibilities, the ‘Pre-Nominal’ and the ‘Q-Float’ numeral positions, describing a number of semantic, syntactic and pragmatic differences between them.

The contrast between subordination and co-ordination, from both a syntactic viewpoint and a semantic viewpoint, is assumed by most formal theories of grammar today, so much so that generally only avowed a-formalists or anti-formalists seriously entertain the possibility that any other type of relationship may exist between clauses. Yet paratactic constructions persist in nagging us, undermining precisely that contrast, sometimes competing with co-ordination, sometimes with subordination, for the same semantic niche in language. In this article we focus on one such case in English, that of complex sentences containing the degree-adverbs so or such in which one clause serves to indicate an extent to which the predicate modified by so/such holds and the other clause expresses a result. As we argue below, there are two types of complex sentences with this general characterization, one of which is of the paratactic kind and is exemplified in (I):

(I) I fainted, the sun was so hot.

Like so many others before it, this exposition is of the meaning of the English modal auxiliaries, which are found in utterances conveying modal meanings such as ability, possibility and permission. However, unlike the majority of its predecessors, the present rendering admits to being about more than semantics. With the five central modal auxiliaries, can, may, must, will and shall, the modals for short, as a point of departure, a framework will be formulated to shed light on some central aspects of the immense cotext and context sensitivity involved in the meaning of utterances of sentences containing a modal auxiliary.

1. This article proposes a criticism and elaboration of the theory of Natural Morphology as it relates to inflection and to inflectional change. The theoretical framework I start from is that set out at length in Mayerthaler (1981/1988), Wurzel (1984/1989), Dressler (1987) and Kilani-Schoch (1988). The concept of naturalness involved here combines Prague School notions of markedness (see Andersen, 1989) with more recent typological approaches and a semiotic framework which derives from the work of C. S. Peirce. The goal of naturalness theories in historical linguistics is to identify some constraints on language change (for example, on sound change, analogy and grammaticalization) which are, broadly speaking, functionally motivated, that is, motivated by the nature of human psychology or of human communication. Naturalness theories offer an approach to explanation of Weinreich, Labov & Herzog's (1968; 102, 186) actuation problem. Among other things, Natural Morphology proposes explanatory principles and constraints for analogy.

In this paper we introduce a declarative approach to inflectional morphology, which we call Network Morphology, using the lexical representation language DATR. We show that we can account for a range of (Russian) data, for which previously various rule types were required, and can provide a more satisfying analysis than was previously available. First we outline the essential data (section 2), highlighting the problems they present. Section 3 introduces the basic tenets of Network Morphology. This draws heavily on DATR, which we present in outline in section 4. Next we reconsider the Russian declensional classes from this new perspective (section 5). We show how the approach described overcomes long-standing problems in an elegant fashion; the complexity of the data suggests that the approach adopted has implications well beyond Russian. We then tackle the complex problem of animacy in Russian, which exemplifies interesting regularities extending across declensional classes (section 6).

The evolution of phonological theory over the past fifteen years or so mirrors in important respects that of syntactic theory. The common evolutionary characteristic is the emergence of modularity. As is frequently noted following Chomsky (1986: ch. 3), in syntax, rich systems of rules have been supplanted by a relatively small number of discrete sub-theories, such as the theories of thematic relations, Case, Binding, Government, and the theory of empty categories. Characteristically, each sub-theory regulates one specific aspect of syntactic structure, at one or more levels of representation, for example the distribution of overt noun phrases at S-structure. The emergence of the sub-theories reflects a natural shift in investigative focus. Just as studying the facts of language from a systematic and formal perspective led to the discovery of generalizations of fact, originally expressed as ‘rules’, so the study of the rules themselves led to the discovery of higher-order generalizations, expressed by the various conditions or principles that make up the contemporary sub-theories. Although Chomsky (1986:70ff.) lists several important contributors to the development of the new perspective, in the mind of most syntacticians, a watershed event in this evolution was Chomsky's own ‘Conditions on transformations’ (1973). To the extent that this development of syntactic theory is a natural one towards deeper understanding, a comparable one is expected in phonological theory. Although the ‘modularity’ of phonology is less frequently noted and identification of a single watershed event is perhaps more difficult, there are clearly several ‘modules’ or sub-theories that have emerged in post-SPE history – three in particular.