In a recent paper in this journal, Hawkins (1980), it was observed that there was considerable, but quite principled, variation both in the types and in the quantities of word order co-occurrences found in Greenberg's (1966) data (cf. his Appendix I (AI) and Appendix II (AII), reproduced here as Tables 1 and 2 respectively). We formulated two types of universal statements to account for this data: implicational universals, which define permitted versus non-permitted co-occurrences of word orders (matching the attested versus non-attested co-occurrences respectively), and which are of the form ‘if a language has some property (or properties) P, then it will also have some property (or properties) Q’; and a ‘universal of language distribution’, entitled the principle of ‘Cross-Category Harmony’ (CCH), which predicts the different quantities of languages having the permitted co-occurences.2 The present paper is intended as a sequel to the last. We now relate our universals to the cross-category, X-bar, generalizations of generative grammar and to issues of markedness, suggesting that our universals and X-bar theory can be of mutual benefit to one another.

Recent work by Lightfoot (1976a, 1977) and Malsch (1976) has led to conflicting hypotheses about the underlying order of old English. Lightfoot hypothesizes that OE is an SOV language, while Malsch hypothesizes that it is a VO language. Although Malsch's argument is far more rigorous than Lightfoot's, both arguments are unconvincing because both suffer from a conspicuous lack of attention to the data available in surviving OE texts:Lightfoot asserts the nonexistence of constructions which do in fact exist (1977: 211), while Malsch cites only constructions drawn or elaborated from secondary sources (39, note 1). Furthermore, the two arguments are not directly opposed to each other. Lightfoot argues for a verb-final underlying order and an NP Postposing rule, while Malsch argues for a verb-initial underlying order and a Verb Postposing rule. Neither argues against the postposing rule of the other. At the same time, their only common assumptions seem to be that underlying representations of sentences have linear ordering and that surface auxiliaries in OE are derived from higher verbs.

The Slavonic notion of ‘vid’ (= ‘aspect’) has recently received much attention from the viewpoint of general linguistics. Not surprisingly, perhaps, some of the major contributions to the study of aspect as a general metalinguistic category are offered by linguists who are anxious to treat aspect in terms so general that the category applies to as many specific problem areas in non-Slavonic languages as possible (such as the opposition between the so-called progressive and non-progressive forms in English and the opposition between the imparfait and the passé simple in literary French). However, in my view, a satisfactory assessment of aspect in non-Slavonic languages can only be arrived at if we obey the following two conditions: (1) the general metalinguistic category of aspect must be defined independently of problem areas in non-Slavonic languages; (2) the relationship between aspect and other categories traditionally associated with the verb (especially tense and Aktionsart) must be specified.

Existential sentences have usually been defined on the basis of their morpho-syntactic characteristics. In English, the term has been used to designate those sentences in which the unstressed, non-deictic there occurs. It has been further observed that most such sentences contain the verb be, an indefinite NP and a locative adverbial following there in that order. Despite this syntactic characterization, however, the term ‘existential sentence’ has been taken, erroneously, to refer to some semantic features of the sentence as well, and so it has been generally assumed that existential sentences always assert the existence of some entity.1

One of the most characteristic features of German sentence structure is the so-called ‘frame’ (Rahmen, Klammer). According to the ‘frame’ principle, complex verbal expressions in main clauses are split up in such a way that the finite portion occurs in second position (in interrogative and imperative clauses in first position), while the remainder is relegated to the end, thus enclosing most of the clause in a kind of frame.

Langendoen and Bever (1973) contended that both expressions in (1) are ungrammatical in English, despite the acceptability of the first to native speakers of English.

(1) (a) a not unhappy person

(b) a not sad person

We came to this conclusion because we believed, first, that all grammars of natural languages should be subject to a constraint ‘M’ that no syntactic rule is able to make use of the morphological structure of lexemes (1973:402); and, second, that we had shown that no grammar that satisfies M can distinguish the grammaticality of(1a) from that of (1b). Our exact wording of M was as follows: ‘no syntactic transformational rule is permitted to make use of the internal morphological structure of lexical items’. Since the only syntactic rules of the standard theory, within which we were operating that are not transformations are base-categorial rules, which by definition make no use of the internal morphological structure of lexical items, the word ‘transformational’ in our formulation of M is unnecessary.

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.

English rather than clauses display obvious surface similarities with comparative clause constructions. The parallelism between expressions where rather than is followed by clause remains, and such ordinary comparative expressions as better than, taller than, etc., followed by a clause or clause remains, suggests that the rather than expressions are just comparatives, derived in much the same way as the more familiar comparative forms. However, the derivation of rather than expressions as comparatives is not entirely straightforward. First, although rather has the form of a comparative adjective, rath+er (as required in comparative clause constructions), this is apparently a fossil form: in current English there is no adjective rath of which rather is the comparative. Thus, any treatment that derives comparatives from structures containing compared adjectives (e.g., -er much tall in Bresnan [1973]), would have to postulate an ajective rath, never realized in modern English, in order to give a unified treatment of rather than expressions as comparatives. Part of the purpose of this paper will be to argue for just such an account.

The industry of explaining away apparent cases of extrinsic rule-ordering in phonology has been in recession recently. Kenstowicz and Kisseberth, in a recent textbook (1979), make rather soothingly conservative noises about ordered-rule solutions. In this lull, during which (it is clear) ordered-rule solutions are still reckoned to be a possibility, Vago's claim (1977) to be able to substantiate such a position has gone unchallenged.