This is the second of a series of three papers that, taken together, will give an essentially complete account of inflection in standard German. In this paper we present that part of the account that covers nouns, one that captures all the regularities, subregularities and irregularities that are involved, but with a focus on the subregularities. Inflected forms are defined in terms of their syllable structure, as proposed in Cahill (1990a, b, 1993). The analysis is formulated as a DATR theory – a set of lexical axioms – from which all the relevant facts follow as theorems. DATR is a widely used formal lexical knowledge representation language developed for use in computational linguistics.

I investigate a diverse set of Czech words of unclear prosodic status. The analysis reveals that while it is possible to make a clear distinction between proclitics and nonclitics, certain nonclitics are disposed to occasional clitic-like behavior. I propose to capture this fact by distinguishing between inherent clisis vs. derived clisis, the latter being sensitive to certain semantic, pragmatic, and prosodic conditions. This approach allows us to address the striking similarities in certain behaviors between clitics and nonclitics without ignoring their equally important differences.

The hypothesis of an Altaic language family, comprising the Turkic, Mongolic, Tungusic, Korean and, in most recent versions, Japanese languages continues to be a viable linguistic proposal, despite various published claims that it is no longer accepted. A strong body of research continues to appear, developing and refining the hypothesis, along with publications that argue against a demonstrated relationship among these languages. This paper shows that many of the arguments against a genetic relationship fail to address the criteria demanded in modern historical linguistics, while many of the responses from proponents of the Altaic theory have failed to address the criticisms raised. We hope that arguments focusing on the real issues of phonological correspondences and morphological systems will shed greater light on the relationship among these languages.

The Dutch dialect of Venlo has a lexical tone opposition comparable to the distinction between Accent I and Accent II in Scandinavian. The two word tone patterns are realised in a variety of different ways, depending on the intonation contour, on whether the word has a focus tone, and on whether it occurs finally or nonfinally in the intonational phrase (IP). Twelve such contexts are identified, and an autosegmental-metrical analysis is presented of the contours for the word tones in each of these. The analysis is instructive because of its clear illustration of the distinction between the phonological underlying representation and the phonological surface representation, as well as of the distinction between the latter representation and the phonetic realisation. In addition, because of the complexity of its tonal phonology, the dialect is of considerable typological interest for the study of word prosody and intonation.

Ray Jackendoff, The architecture of the language faculty. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. Pp. xiv+262.

In The architecture of the language faculty Jackendoff responds to the Minimalist Program (MP) of Chomsky (1995). There are three major themes: the conceptual foundations of MP and its historical antecedents; the interfaces between syntactic structure, phonetic structure and conceptual structure, and the nature of the lexicon. The basic approach is that of Jackendoff (1983, 1990), with roots going back at least as far as Jackendoff 1975. In the first chapter Jackendoff sets out the more or less standard views about universal grammar and subjects them to a critical analysis. Chapters 2–4 focus on the various ‘interfaces’ between levels of representation, and on how the interface relations are reified in individual lexical entries. Chapters 5–7 explore the properties of various types of lexical entries and the relations between them. Chapter 8 concludes with a speculative essay on the relation between language and thought.

This book is a rich compilation of observations, analyses, suggestions, perspectives, speculations and proposals. One could easily write a review at least as long as the book, developing and responding to the many ideas that it contains. Since space here is limited, I will concentrate on the main conceptual and foundational issues that are addressed by the book. In many ways, Jackendoff's work points to significant departures from classical perspectives on the organization of grammar. I will focus some attention on those areas where even more radical steps might be worth pursuing.

Frederick J. Newmeyer, Generative linguistics: a historical perspective. London: Routledge, 1996. Pp. x+218.

In this book (henceforth, GL), Newmeyer has collected 11 of his articles (including two co-authored ones), two of them previously unpublished, on the history of generative grammar, supplemented by reprints of two sections of Newmeyer 1986.