In Italian certain prepositions (Ps) can appear morphologically combined with articles, inflecting for number and gender. We will dub this the inflected form of the P for the moment, without prejudice as to the analysis of this form:

(1) Sta nella terza camera ‘It's in the third bedroom’ is in/the (fern sg) third bedroom

(2) C' è abbastanza carta sulle scrivanie there is enough paper on/the (fern pi) desks ‘There's enough paper on the desks’

(3) Ci va col vicino there goes with'the (masc sg) neighbour ‘He's going there with his neighbour’

(4) L' ho dato ai ragazzi ‘I gave it to the boys’ it I–have given to/the (masc pi) boys

The inflected form of the P has desinences similar to those found on the articles and the demonstrative adjective quel(lo). These forms are given overleaf in Table I (where only one inflected P is shown, but the forms for the other inflected Ps vary for number and gender in the same way).

Sign language lexicons include iconic items, where phonological form is somewhat representative of sense. As experiences of individuals change, the mapping from form to meaning may become inappropriate (as when technological or environmental changes occur) or may be considered incongruous with perceptions of reality (as when culture shifts). Many misalignments of form and sense are tolerated, with the result that a sign's original iconicity is lost. Other misalignments are obliterated; signers make sublexical changes or entire lexical substitutions. We call these (sub)lexical changes ‘corrections’. We argue that misalignments that are regrettable are more likely to be corrected, where regrettable misalignments are those that are not true to realities/experiences of profound importance to deaf individuals.

While the focus here is on American Sign Language, corrections should be apparent in any sign language and might occur in those spoken languages with a high frequency of nonarbitrary relationships between form and sense. (Sign language, variation, taboo terms, euphemism, iconicity, identity)*

Resultatives in English and Dutch have developed special degree readings. These readings stem from a reinterpretation of the resultative predicate as indicating a high degree rather than an actual result. For example, when a parent says I love you to death, one need not call the cops, since the sentence is not about love turning lethal, but merely indicative of a high degree of affection. Such cases have often been noted in the literature as idiomatic, but this view ignores the fact that these are not isolated cases but productive constructions that can be used with a variety of verbs. We explore various resultative constructions in English and Dutch, and give a classification of the subtypes involved as well as their diachronic development from ordinary to degree interpretation. We link these subtypes to lexical semantic classes of verbs. Both English and Dutch show a steady growth in the lexical and structural diversity of degree resultatives throughout the early modern and contemporary periods (1600-2000). We focus in our paper on the period 1800-2000, for which we did an extensive corpus study using the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and Delpher (a collection of digitized Dutch newspapers, journals, magazines, and other resources). One of our findings is that, similar to other types of expressive language, such as degree modification and emphatic negation, taboo expressions play a role in degree resultatives; in fact, their role is excessive. We outline a number of the commonalities among the semantic domains of expressive language used in resultatives.

Listeners often have the intuition that the speech of broadcast news reporters somehow ‘sounds different’; previous literature supports this observation and has described some distinctive aspects of newscaster register. This article presents two studies further describing the characteristic properties and functions of American English newscaster speech, focusing specifically on prosody. In the first, we investigate the production of newscaster speech. We describe the measurable differences in pitch, speed, intensity, and melodic features between newscaster and conversational speech, and connect those traits to perceptions of authority, credibility, charisma, and related characteristics. In the second, we investigate the perception of newscaster speech. Our experiments demonstrate that listeners can distinguish newscaster from conversational speech given only prosodic information, and that they use a subset of the newscasters’ distinguishing features to do so. (News, prosody, discourse registers, speech perception, credibility, authority)*

We argue for the existence of a state constitutional legal right to language. Our purpose here is to develop a legal framework for protecting the civil rights of the deaf child, with the ultimate goal of calling for legislation that requires all levels of government to fund programs for deaf children and their families to learn a fully accessible language: a sign language. While our discussion regards the United States, the argument we make is based on human rights and the nature of law itself, and can likely be adapted to any country.

We begin with an introduction to the biological facts surrounding language acquisition and how these facts impact the deaf child, where lack of language has devastating effects on individuals and negative effects on society in general.

The two English constructions exemplified in Let's get the hell out of here (type G) and They beat the hell out of him (type B) differ both syntactically and semantically, but in both the taboo expression has the force of an intensifier. History (through a corpus investigation) reveals that the B-construction started as a literal exorcism (beat the devil out of someone), where the hell substituted for the devil, and semantic bleaching ultimately made the literal sense give way to simple emphasis, with any taboo term jumping in. The G-construction may have developed simultaneously, always as an intensifier – or, perhaps, later, on analogy with B. Our analysis suggests that the use of taboo terms as intensifiers spread from wh-constructions to these constructions and, finally, to degree intensifier constructions. These two uses of taboo terms as intensifiers are best characterized in terms of constructions and thus offer evidence against theories lacking any notion of constructions as basic building blocks. Further, they give us information about language change: a pragmatically unified but semantically disparate class of expressions (namely, taboo terms) can extend its distribution in parallel.

The contrast between subordination and co-ordination, from both a syntactic viewpoint and a semantic viewpoint, is assumed by most formal theories of grammar today, so much so that generally only avowed a-formalists or anti-formalists seriously entertain the possibility that any other type of relationship may exist between clauses. Yet paratactic constructions persist in nagging us, undermining precisely that contrast, sometimes competing with co-ordination, sometimes with subordination, for the same semantic niche in language. In this article we focus on one such case in English, that of complex sentences containing the degree-adverbs so or such in which one clause serves to indicate an extent to which the predicate modified by so/such holds and the other clause expresses a result. As we argue below, there are two types of complex sentences with this general characterization, one of which is of the paratactic kind and is exemplified in (I):

(I) I fainted, the sun was so hot.

English exhibits PP, AP and NP resultative secondary predicates (SPs). Italian freely exhibits PP resultatives and, less commonly, AP resultatives. This difference follows from two facts. First, resultatives, being arguments of the V except in constructions involving ‘fake’ objects (see section 4), may appear only in positions that non-predicative arguments of the V of their same category can appear in (a correlation stated in (155) below). Since English allows PP, AP and NP non-predicative arguments in the position immediately following the direct object, all three categories can also appear as resultatives in the same position. But since Italian allows only the first two types of non-predicative arguments in this position, only PP and AP resultatives can appear there. Second, Italian sentences with AP resultatives are subject to a rule of semantic interpretation by which the primary predicate must be interpreted as focusing on the endpoint of the activity it denotes (as stated in (110) below). English sentences with AP resultatives are only slightly sensitive to this interpretation rule. As a result, AP resultatives are appropriate in fewer situations in Italian. That AP resultatives are sensitive to this rule of interpretation is consistent with the fact that AP arguments of verb that appear in post-object position are marked in a number of ways.

Chomsky's (1981) i-within-i condition (also written as i/i) blocks co-indexation of a phrase with one of its proper subconstituents:

(I) *[…a1…]i

We argue here that the i-within-i condition as stated in (I) and used in current work is both empirically inadequate and theoretically incoherent.2 Many of the data that the i-within-i condition has been taken to account for should, instead, be accounted for by a range of unrelated constraints. However, a condition on the interpretation of the reference of free pronominals and anaphors - which we state as a definition of circular chains - is, in fact, motivated and will adequately account for the data involving referential circularity that have previously been accounted for with the i-within-i condition.