This article aims to account for why verbless sentences in Standard Arabic lack a copular verb. In contrast to previous accounts which attribute the absence of the copula to some defect of present tense, I claim that a verbless sentence does not take a copula because its nominais do not need structural Case. The proposed analysis argues that structural Case is licensed by a “Verbal Case” feature on the relevant Case-checking heads, and assumes the Visibility Condition. The present analysis is based on a unique interaction between tense and word order, and on the observation that verbless sentences are finite clauses composed of a topic and a predicate, as well as on the observation that they do not involve licensing of structural Case.

This study investigates temporal and control interpretations with verbs of risk followed by non-finite complements in English. It addresses two questions: Why does the gerund-participle show variation in the temporal relation between the event it denotes and that of the main verb whereas the to-infinitive manifests a constant temporal relation? Why does the gerund-participle construction allow variation in control while the to-infinitive shows constant subject control readings? The study is based on a corpus of 1345 attested uses. The explanation is framed in a natural-language semantics involving the meanings of the gerund-participle, the infinitive, the preposition to, and the meaning-relation between the matrix and its complement. Temporal and control interpretations are shown to arise as implications grounded in the semantic content of what is linguistically expressed. It is argued that the capacity of a natural-language semantic approach to account for the data obviates the need to have recourse to purely syntactic operations to account for control.

This study investigates two concurrent phenomena— ’imala and rounding — in the Arabic variety spoken in the Syrian village of Oyoun Al-Wadi. ‘Imala refers to the use of [e] and [e:] in place of the urban vowels [a] and [a:] respectively; rounding refers to the use of [o] and [o:] in place of the urban vowels [a] and [a:] respectively. The use of two different vowels for each urban vowel is explained morpho-phonologically. The study economically proposes two phonological rules to account for ‘imala and rounding and shows that only one rule can apply per word, to the final syllable of a word. In light of Lexical Phonology theory, certain morphological patterns and suffixes explain the presence of ‘imala in initial syllables and in environments that induce rounding. That is, it is part of the lexical representation of a morphological pattern or suffix in the lexicon. Hence, ‘imala could occur in the initial syllable as part of the morphological pattern, and rounding could occur in the final syllable of the same word as a result of a post-lexical phonological rule.

The aim of this article is twofold. First, based on passives in Japanese and Korean, it expands the domain of the applicative head (Appl) to include an argument in the structural subject position. These languages provide evidence for a new type of Appl, peripheral Appl, distinct from the well-known high Appl in Bantu: unlike high Appl, peripheral Appl is the highest argument-introducing head under T, and can merge above VoiceP. The recognition of peripheral Appl makes it possible to account for the cross-linguistic positional variation among affectee arguments. Second, the article provides articulated clause structures for passives in Japanese and Korean in terms of Appl. The applicative account proves to be successful in providing a unified account of Japanese possessive and non-possessive passives, and of Korean possessive passives and causatives.

The main aim of this article is to describe the visual perception process of anticipatory rounding gestures in [iC(CCCC)y] sequences by considering the characteristics that contribute to their production (articulatory configurations, temporal data, and kinematic events). Productions of two French speakers were analyzed to obtain the data needed to interpret the results of a perception test composed of truncated visual sequences using the gating paradigm. The results indicate that the perceptually effective portion of the gesture usually begins when a significant velocity peak is observed. In contrast, if the sequence has no prominent velocity peak, the rounded vowel can be recognized only when the labial configurations are closer to the articulatory target. The results can be interpreted on the basis of general models for movement perception, in this case representational momentum.

This study investigates the development of wh-questions in French in a group of bilingual French-Dutch children. Fifteen children (aged 4 to 8, mean age 6;03, first exposure to French under age 4 for most of the children) participated in an elicited production task. Their results were compared to those of 4-year-old and 6-year-old monolingual children from a previous study. In order to examine possible influence from Dutch, two main hypotheses with contrasting predictions are proposed: structural overlap and derivational complexity. The results show that the bilingual children exhibited the same developmental course for wh-questions as their monolingual peers. The majority of responses involved wh-fronting without inversion, whereas wh-fronting with inversion, the only possible structure in Dutch, was not frequent. Therefore, the results do not provide clear evidence for influence from Dutch. Instead, they confirm that derivational complexity constrains the development of wh-questions in French.