Recent research has identified characteristic differences between the phonetic structures of names and of ordinary nouns, with particularly distinctive patterns being exhibited by feminine personal names. No explanation has yet been found. This paper suggests that the solution lies not in the English sound system, as has previously been assumed, but in differences between the linguistic origins of the various types of material.

Optional OV order in Later Middle English (LME) has given rise to conflicting theoretical accounts. Earlier analyses postulating movement to AgrOP or alternative base orders are found to be inadequate to deal with the occurrence of OV in non-literary LME; in a large database of 15th century private familial correspondence, residual OV order is found to have been productive only with negated objects. Multiple subject constructions with there expletives showed the same restriction. These phenomena are accounted for by postulating overt Neg Movement (Haegeman 1995) as a permitted option in LME. In this framework, it is argued that LME showed a mixed typology having both Neg movement and a null Neg operator. LME had three ways of satisfying the NEG Criterion (Haegeman 1995): Merge not in Spec NegP, coindex [OP]i … [XP(Neg)]i, and Move XP(Neg) to Spec NegP. Modern English has only the first two. The distribution in this period of negative concord with not is shown to support our analysis.

Syllables display symmetrical and asymmetrical properties in two Yoruba dialects. In the asymmetrical dialect, only a vowel with an onset participates in syllable-conditioned processes; an onsetless vowel is syllabically inert. In the symmetrical dialect, a vowel, with or without an onset, participates in syllable processes. It is argued that onsetless vowels are not syllabified in the asymmetrical dialect. Since there is no phonological contrast between syllables with onsets and those without onsets in the symmetrical dialect, all vowels are parsed into syllables exhaustively. Using ideas from Optimality Theory, attested interdialectal variation is shown to follow from different rankings of the same syllable and faithfulness constraints.

Morphemes are sometimes expressed by elements that are less than full segments, and, in a given language, the position of these elements in a word may vary. A recent analysis of these ‘mobile morphemes’ claims that their distribution is best explained in an optimality-theoretic framework that incorporates a set of featural alignment constraints (Akinlabi 1996). This paper argues that featural alignment plays no role in the realization of ‘mobile morphemes’. Instead, it recognizes a set of licensing constraints that explicitly identifies where featural exponents of such morphemes may appear in a word. Crucially, these licensing constraints, unlike featural alignment, are not morpheme-specific and therefore enjoy cross-linguistic support. Analyses of Chaha labialization, Terena nasalization, High tone realization in the Edoid associative construction and Southern Sami vowel lowering in terms of licensing are shown to be superior to the alignment-theoretic ones on both descriptive and explanatory grounds.

Juan Uriagereka,Rhyme and reason. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998. Pp. xliii+669.

In this wide-ranging and ambitious volume, Juan Uriagereka sets as his goal both a conceptual and a technical explication of Chomsky's Minimalist Program as well as the siting of it within the broader context of scientific inquiry into the nature of human beings and the natural world. Reintroducing an old rhetorical device into modern scientific discourse, the book is framed as a series of dialogues over six days between a Chomskyan linguist and a sceptical interlocutor called ‘The Other’, a ‘hard’ scientist whose knowledge encompasses not only contemporary physics and biology, but also mathematics and philosophy.

The temptation to frame a review using the same rhetorical device is considerable. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that Uriagereka has attempted to create a book about everything for anyone, and has attempted to do so in a way that is unusual, clever and interesting. That he is largely successful in this enterprise is truly remarkable. On the other hand, there is also the lingering feeling that it is fractionally too clever, and fractionally too ambitious, with the result that what could have easily been a classic of modern scientific writing does not quite fulfill its potential.

Pavol štekauer,A theory of conversion in English. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1996. Pp. 155.

When, in 1891, Henry Sweet (1891–98, I: 38–40) used the term CONVERSION for the process that today is also known as ZERO-DERIVATION, he was probably not aware of the debate that the description of this process would still raise one century later.

štekauer's book bears witness to a renewed interest in conversion. Such an interest partly stems from the fact that it is a simple (or, at least, apparently so), extremely productive process, but also because it remains a challenge to descriptive linguistics. How conversion operates, what its limits are, how converted units should be categorised in the study of morphology and lexis, and even what its real nature is are still open questions despite the attention given to this issue ever since Sweet's grammar.

This book meets some of these questions in the framework of an onomasiological theory, which will be briefly discussed below. The book consists of nine chapters, a section for notes and another for references. The introduction (chapter 1, pp. 11–13) justifies the work and outlines the structure of the book. The remaining eight chapters deal with the description of conversion in the literature (chapter 2, pp. 15–22), its interpretation as zero-derivation (chapter 3, pp. 23–43), the onomasiological theory and conversion (chapter 4, pp. 45–53), phonological variation (chapter 5, pp. 55–95), the use and semantic range of converted units (chapter 6, pp. 97–113), proper nouns and conversion (chapter 7, pp. 115–126), directionality (chapter 8, pp. 127–133), and the productivity of conversion (chapter 9, pp. 135–141).