This article provides an analysis of participial constructions in English, within the feature-checking approach to inflectional morphology. It argues for a unified treatment of the perfect, passive and adjectival uses of the past participle, involving a monosemous inflectional head checking a monosemous affix. There are two classes of constructions with -ing, each of which is given a unified treatment. The analysis requires the assumption that head-adjoined structures can be generated directly, rather than arising only as a result of movement. It also demonstrates that inflectional and derivational affixation are inherently different processes. An affix may in principle be attached by either process, with each process resulting in a different output structure. With these two provisos, it is possible to maintain both Johns’ (1992) One Form/One Meaning Principle and the more restrictive Strong Monosemy Principle proposed here.

The main goal of this article is to provide a more global approach to the question of cooccurrence restrictions which hold among classes of segments in Hamito-Semitic languages. It is demonstrated that the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) combined with the directionality conventions is not sufficient to predict all of the observed cooccurrence restrictions found in the Classical Arabic verb root and that it is necessary to postulate two other constraints that interact with the OCP. By establishing a parallel between the facts observed in Classical Arabic and the labial dissimilations in two other Hamito-Semitic languages, Akkadian and Imdlawn Tashlhiyt Berber, it is argued that, at the Proto-Hamito-Semitic stage, the OCP hierarchically dominated the Multiple Association Constraint operative at the level of articulator nodes, but that this hierarchy is no longer synchronically manifested in languages like Arabic and Hebrew. The existence of a constraint that imposes a minimal sonority distance on rising sonority contours is also postulated to account for an asymmetry indicating a tendency to prefer certain sequences of segments over the reverse order.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the various lexical and syntactic properties of the reduplicated adverbial form benben in Quebec French. It can be observed that this form differs syntactically from its Standard French synonyms beaucoup and très. Benben can indeed appear with various lexical categories: nouns, adjectives, adverbs, transitive and intransitive verbs. Moreover, in many contexts, its use is sensitive to the presence of verbal negation, rather than to that of constituent negation. In comparison with other Quebec French quantifiers, benben is very flexible. It can be used in both negative and positive contexts and, as an adverbial form, it can appear in various positions in the sentence.