This article presents new data from a number of Germanic languages concerning the agreement patterns found in copular clauses that contain two nominais; in both clauses with specificational readings (such as The problem is your parents) and those with what are here termed readings of assumed identity (such as If I were you or In my dream I was you). It is argued that the specificational sentences involve asymmetric equative structures where one nominal is interpreted as in a concealed question, and that the cross-linguistic differences in agreement patterns found in the languages considered follow from the copula lexicalizing either Tense or a lower head.

The term ‘paralanguage’ and the corresponding adjective ‘paralinguistic’ are less than ten years old but already they loom large in the study of animal communication. In one sense all non-language communications (kinesics, haptics, as well as “vocalization”) are paralinguistic but this term is now almost exclusively applied to significant, non-linguistic noises made with the vocal tract. Observations of these phenomena are of course quite old. Demosthenes undoubtedly studied “delivery” and “tone of voice.” There are pre-Christian statements on phonology also, but no systematic study of that subject antedates that of Grimm in 1819, and that was a lucky forerunner. Actual investigation of phonology as structure, as patterns in a system, began with Ferdinand De Saussure late in the nineteenth and early in the twentieth century. The first systematic study of paralanguage was by Henry Lee Smith, Jr. in a paper called “The Communication Situation,” mimeographed for the Foreign Service Institute of the United States Department of State in 1950. This was later expanded into “An Outline of Metalinguistic Analysis” in the 1952 Georgetown Round Table Conference on Linguistics and Language Study. Smith did not use the term ‘paralanguage,’ however, but ‘vocalization,’ subdivided into ‘vocal qualifiers’ and ‘vocal modifiers.’ Paralanguage became established with the most complete study to date, the 1958 article by George L. Trager “Paralanguage: A Preliminary Statement.” Other writers in the field are Norman A. McQuown and Charles F. Hockett. This study is more systematic than that of Smith and less complex than that of Trager. The infancy of the field, I think, warrants various approaches.

Recent evidence of renewed interest in the Linguistic Atlas of Canada makes pertinent the publishing of relevant data gathered for the comparable regional atlases of the United States. To the information already published from the files of the Linguistic Atlas of the North Central States there can now be added that from the collections of the Linguistic Atlas of the Upper Midwest.

The Upper Midwest atlas, centered at the University of Minnesota, includes the five states of Minnesota, Iowa, the two Dakotas, and Nebraska. Fieldwork for the entire area, begun in 1947, has been completed, and editing of the materials is in process (though interrupted in 1958–59 by the Director’s absence abroad). Besides the records from 202 American field informants based upon personal interviews, these materials include five Canadian records and the responses for 136 lexical items on 1069 checklists returned by mail from informants in all but two of the counties in these five states. The Canadian field records were made at the suggestion of Albert H. Marckwardt of the University of Michigan, Director of the Linguistic Atlas of the North Central States. In advance of future atlas organization in Canada it seemed desirable to supply at least tentative answers to questions about the relationships of Canadian and American regional English.

Le présent article poursuit deux objectifs principaux. Le premier consiste à établir la base empirique d’un usage particulier du genre en français parlé du Canada (FC) à savoir la féminisation des noms qui commencent par une voyelle. Le second fait état des résultats d’une recherche sociolinguistique menée sur corpus et portant sur la relation qui existe entre cet usage linguistique et la stratification sociale des locuteurs canadiens-français.

0.1. Illustration du phénomène. Une observation empirique même sommaire de la façon dont les Canadiens français font usage du genre grammatical à l’oral amène à constater une tendance à la féminisation qui affecte généralement les noms à initiale vocalique (en abrégé les NIV). La même tendance ne semble pas se retrouver parmi les substantifs qui commencent par une consonne. C’est du moins la conclusion que l’on peut dégager de la recherche accomplie il y a quelques années par Tucker, Lambert & Rigault (1977). II s’ensuit que le genre s’y distribue de façon aléatoire (mais voir plus loin, section 2.6).

Ergativity is a term used in traditional descriptive and typological linguistics to refer to a system of nominal case-marking where the subject of an intransitive verb has the same morphological marker as a direct object, and a different morphological marker from the subject of a transitive verb. Languages in which this system is found are divided into two main types, A and B (following Trask 1979:388). In Type A the ergative construction is used equally in all tenses and aspects. Furthermore, if there is verbal agreement, the verb agrees with the direct object in person and number in exactly the same way it agrees with the subject of an intransitive verb. The verb agrees with the transitive subject in a different way. Well-known representatives of this type are Basque, Australian ergative languages, certain North American languages, Tibeto-Burman and Chukchee. In type B there is most often a tense/aspect split, in which case the ergative construction is confined to the perfective aspect (or the past tense), and the nominative-accusative configuration is used elsewhere. Furthermore, if there is verbal agreement, the verb may agree with the direct object in number and gender but not in person.

In recent literature on the decomposition of INFL (Pollock 1989), it has been proposed that the features of agreement morphology (henceforth the Ф features), and the features of Tense, each head a separate projection, AGR and T, respectively. There are languages which do not exhibit agreement in Ф features. This raises the question as to whether these languages have a functional category AGR. Kornfilt (1989), for example, shows that in contrast to Modern Turkish, Old Turkish does not exhibit agreement phenomena in person and number. She proposes that the difference between the two grammars be expressed in terms of the presence of AGR in the former and the absence of this projection in the latter. Similarly, on the basis of the fact that Haitian Creole lacks agreement in person and number, Ritter (1991b) suggests that Haitian Creole lacks the functional category AGR. In this paper, I demonstrate that there is ample motivation for positing AGR as a syntactic category in Haitian and in Fon.

In this article, a system of categorizing the c’esf-cleft into different types is developed, based on their pragmatic, syntactic and prosodic properties. This goal has already been accomplished in English linguistic studies for a similar construction, the it-cleft. The c’est-cleft, however, is found more frequently than the it-cleft, and in many contexts, it is obligatory. In general, in the relative clause of the c’est-cleft, there is an open proposition that is saturated through replacing the missing variable by the element that is found in post-copular position. In most cases, the material found in the relative clause is presupposed; however, there are some cleft types for which this is not necessarily the case. This study is based on Lambrecht’s study of Information Structure.

Compound words allow us to investigate lexical storage, retrieval, and interpretation. The role of storage and computation in compound processing is reviewed. It is claimed that morphological processing is automatic and obligatory, and that multi-morphemic words require resolution of a conflict between whole-word and constituent activation. This leads to the conclusion that morphological constituents are created through morphological processing so that strawberry comes to be composed of straw- and -berry; these constituents are positionally bound so that berry-, -berry, and berry are distinct processing units. This proliferation of morphological representations resolves long-standing puzzles concerning semantic transparency and challenges traditional psycholinguistic approaches that investigate the effect of some independent variable (such as semantic transparency) on task performance as a dependent variable. It is suggested that psycholinguistic inquiry may be understood as the study of the correlation of dependent variables within the language processing system.

The position that languages require both coda and onset options for the syllabification of word-final consonants is adopted. The latter option is further divided into languages where final consonants are onsets of empty-headed syllables and those where final consonants are syllabified through onset-nuclear (ON) sharing. ON sharing is reserved for languages where final consonants display fortition (overt release): the nucleus hosts the release of the consonant. Empirical evidence from across populations demonstrates that ON sharing is unmarked. It is favoured among the outputs of first and second language learners and individuals with Specific Language Impairment. It is further argued that final onsets are optimal for parsing in end-state grammars, as they demarcate the right word-edge more effectively than codas. Among the two types of onsets, ON sharing is preferred: through the nuclear release, it is better able to host the range of contrasts that right-edge onsets display. The parsing argument serves to illustrate how ON sharing provides an advantage to end-state grammars, beyond being an emergent property from acquisition.

This paper discusses and expands upon various ideas concerning the structure of nominals in general (DPs) and of French nominals in particular, with the underlying idea that CP and DP have parallel argumental and functional structure. The main topics discussed are: (i) the projection of arguments in French and English; (ii) the parameterization of N-movement, which accounts for some word order differences between French and English; (iii) the distribution of adjectives in event nominals, which reflects that of adverbs in clauses in both French and English; (iv) a peculiar case of rightward movement out of DP that provides further evidence for N-movement as well as for the claim concerning the prohibition on right adjunction of genitive nominals within DP; and (v) extraction facts that are a consequence of the status of [Spec, DP] as an A′-position in French.

This article is concerned with cognate objects (COs) in Russian, of which there are shown to be two types. Only one type of CO exhibits argument properties, while the other type is shown to pattern with predicative nominals. Furthermore, it is argued that the two types of COs pattern with non-cognate nominals with the same function. It is therefore proposed to analyze argument COs on a par with their non-cognate counterparts as thematic direct objects, checking their accusative case in the specifier of Aspect Phrase. In contrast, the non-argument COs are analyzed as secondary predicates over the event argument projected by the main predicate of the clause. Finally, it is argued that a narrow, English-based definition of a CO (i.e., based on zero affixation) cannot be applied to other languages with richer derivational morphology. Yet, once the definition is widened to include all nominals based on the same root as the verb, it is concluded that being cognate is not relevant for the theory of syntax and must therefore be relegated to the morphological component of the language.

There are various ways to construe the relationship between linguistic research and studies in language development. They can range in principle from strict dependence (one domain being parasitic on the other) to complete independence. Thus, it is now commonplace to find some developmental psycholinguists turning to generative linguistics for models through which to interpret child language (Chomsky 1969; Roeper 1973, 1982; Goodluck and Solan 1978, inter alia). This is not simply a matter of descriptive convenience. Research in grammatical theory and developmental psycholinguistics has grown increasingly interconnected since Chomsky first argued (1965:27) that hypothesized grammatical models within linguistics should be justified on the basis of their relation to a theory of language which specifies the innate abilities that make language acquisition possible. Hence the claim that linguistic theory is responsible for the “logical problem of language acquisition” (Baker 1979; Hornstein and Lightfoot 1981), i.e., gross properties of learning (relative rapidity, relative ease, overall lack of variability, general success, all on the basis of restricted input).

New words can be formed by adding suffixes to other words. Derived words formed in this way may be phonologically transparent with respect to their base word, or they may be opaque; monstrous is preserved in monstrous#ness but not in monstro+sity. The juncture between suffix and stem is either a word boundary (#) or a formative boundary (+), and while word boundary derivations are always transparent, formative boundary derivations usually result in stress shifting to a syllable other than the syllable which is stressed in the base word, vowel quality changing, etc.

Quantity and quality of input affect language development, but input features also depend on the context of language emission. Previous research has described mother-child interactions and their impact on language development according to activity types like mealtimes, book reading, and free play. Nevertheless, few studies have sought to quantify activity types in naturalistic datasets including less-studied languages and cultures. Our research questions are the following: we ask whether regularities emerge in the distribution of activity types across languages and recordings, and whether activities have an impact on mothers' linguistic productions. We analyse input for two children per language, at three developmental levels. We distinguish three activity types: solitary, social and maintenance activities, and measure mothers' linguistic productions within each type. Video-recorded activities differ across families and developmental levels. Linguistic features of child-directed speech (CDS) also vary across activities – notably for measures of diversity and complexity – which points to complex interactions between activity and language.

This article reports on a small study investigating whether teaching second language learners the long-distance (LD) properties of the Japanese reflexive zibun ‘self leads to acquisition of its subject-oriented status. The study involved low intermediate level learners of Japanese who were instructed on zibun over a four-week period. The focus of the instruction was that the reflexive zibun can take long-distance antecedents. At the same time, subjects were never taught that the antecedent must be a subject. Subjects were tested using a truth-value judgment task. Results show that the learners initially rejected LD binding; they showed a significant increase in acceptance of LD antecedents after the teaching intervention. Analyses of individual learners show that about half of them successfully acquired the relevant properties of zibun. With one exception, learners did not generalize from their instruction to assume that “anything goes” as far as antecedents for zibun are concerned. Rather, they acquired grammars of reflexive binding that fall within the range permitted by Universal Grammar.

In Kahn (1976), one finds a syllable-based reanalysis of certain well-known phonological rules of English. Prominent among these are aspiration and flapping. Given that the belated recognition of the syllable by generative phonologists has generally yielded very interesting and positive results, this reinterpretation of the facts must be seen as a welcome development in that respect.

On the other hand, however, Kahn’s decision to base his syllable-oriented generalizations on the concept of ambisyllabicity must be seriously questioned since the phonological evidence for such a phenomenon is so tenuous, and also because this concept is virtually unfalsifiable as it is not known to have any physical-acoustic or articulatory-correlates whatsoever.

Also, over and above Kahn’s recourse to such an unsubstantiated mechanism, there is the additional problem that the two rules he proposes simply do not correctly account for all the data. A later attempt by Kiparsky (1979) to replace Kahn’s ambisyllabic treatment of these two rules by a metrical analysis involving the foot runs into exactly the same kind of trouble.

The purpose of this article is to describe and analyze the reduction of unstressed vowels in Coratino, a language spoken in the Apulia region of Italy. Its vowel inventory includes seven vowels: /i, e, ε, a, ɔ, o, u/. All but /a/ are reduced to a schwa when they surface in unstressed positions. Furthermore, back and front vowels are not reduced in unstressed positions when they are adjacent to a labial consonant, or adjacent to a velar followed by a palatal. These vowels also remain non-reduced in word-initial position. Therefore, there are three contexts in which these vowels are not reduced (in stressed positions, adjacent to a consonant, and in word-initial positions). This article aims to reduce this disjunction.

This article examines the placement of weak pronominal objects in Goidelic Celtic. These elements appear in a far-right position in the clause, in spite of their prosodic lightness. Previous analyses have put this phenomenon down to either a language and construction specific rule, or to a side effect of clausal organisation. The article examines the most articulated current version of the latter option, shows how it suffers from serious empirical and conceptual problems and develops in its place an approach in which the pronouns remain internal to the verb phrase with their precise position determined by prosodic factors. This collapses the surprising behaviour of weak pronouns in Goidelic with that of weak pronouns in Germanic. The apparent differences in the positioning of pronouns between the two language families derive from independent aspects of clausal architecture. The new approach uses a much less articulated clausal structure but an enriched view of the syntax-prosody interface.

Canadian Raising, which makes allophonic variants of the low diphthongs /ai/ and /au/, is evaluated with respect to its diachronic, geographic, and synchronic status. Its origins have been established by documentary evidence from 1934. However, comparative dialect evidence from the Linguistic Atlas of the United States and Canada pushes the origins back to the second half of the 19th century. Raising of /ai/ in the northern United States turns out to be different from Canadian Raising, though they overlap. Sociolinguistic studies of (aw)-Fronting in 1980 showed a tendency for fronted onsets to be unraised. Though this was statistically insignificant, any strengthening would threaten the existence of Canadian Raising. Subsequent research shows that the tendency was accidental.

The aim of this article is to argue that the similarities and differences in the interpretation of n-words (personne, rien, etc.) in two closely related dialects of French can be explained by considerations linked to lexical properties as well as to properties of contrastive stress in Universal Grammar. The minor lexical differences in the two systems are related to the fact that only in Standard French is a single negation reading ruled out when an adverbial negative marker bearing [+neg, −T, −Asp] features, i.e., pas, appears in the scope of an unstressed n-word. A general principle is proposed to account for the fact that a contrastively focused n-word always blocks the local relation which seems necessary for a negative concord reading. It is observed that the presence of an intervening quantifier between the negative quantifier and the n-word always induces a Double Negation reading.