In this study, we target the speech act of direction-giving using variationist sociolinguistic methods within a corpus of vernacular speech from six Ontario communities. Not only do we find social and geographical correlates to linguistic choices in direction-giving, but we also establish the influence of the physical layout of the community/place in question. Direction-giving in the urban center of Toronto (Southern Ontario) contrasts with five Northern Ontario communities. Northerners use more relative directions, while Torontonians use more cardinal directions, landmarks, and proper street names – for example, Go east on Bloor to the Manulife Centre. We also find that specific lexical choices (e.g., Take a right vs. Make a right) distinguish direction-givers in Northern Ontario from those in Toronto. These differences identify direction-giving as an ideal site for sociolinguistic and dialectological investigation and corroborate previous findings documenting regional variation in Canadian English.

The goal of this article is to offer a formal account of region prepositions in French. We define region prepositions as prepositions that denote non-oriented locations and resist modification with measure phrases (e.g., au nez de in #dix metres au nez de l'avion ‘ten meters from (in front of) the tip of the airplane’). We show that region prepositions may involve items that include inflected markers or items involving “bare” markers (au bord de ‘at the edge of’ vs. à droite de ‘to the right of’). We analyze the relation between structure and semantic type to show that this distribution stems from the morpho-syntactic properties of their “internal location nouns” (e.g., nez, bord, droite, sommet). We offer a feature-driven analysis of these prepositions that hinges on a Lexical Syntax account and can capture all of the relevant data in a unified perspective. We conclude by discussing some theoretical consequences for accounts of spatial prepositions.

This article provides an analysis of verum marking in the Tsimshianic language Gitksan. Original fieldwork data are provided to show that Gitksan verum is very similar in its distribution and discourse effects to English verum, but displays two interesting differences. First, Gitksan verum is not marked by focal stress, but by a dedicated particle (k'ap). Second, Gitksan verum does not require givenness of the core propositional material. I argue that when applied to a proposition p, k'ap is (a) disallowed discourse-initially or in answer to a wh-question; (b) felicitous when responding to a prior assertion or implication of ¬p; and (c) felicitous in other contexts only if there is prior controversy in the discourse about the truth of p. I show that the semantic contribution of the Gitksan verum particle can be captured by a discourse management analysis: verum(p) is licensed only when the speaker believes that some interlocutor is committed to ¬p.

The clitic morpheme de in Mandarin Chinese has various uses. Typically, it is cliticized to a phrase whether the phrase is nominal or adjectival; it can also occur between two noun phrases when there is no relation of semantic modification. The constructions that involve the latter use of de, known as fake modification constructions, have been theoretically characterized many a time. In the existing characterizations, the morpheme is treated either as a mysteriously inserted lexical item, a modification marker, or a genitive morpheme. The existing accounts suffer from a variety of theoretical and empirical problems. Evidence is presented that in some other constructions and in fake modification constructions, de, while having no lexical semantic content of its own, occupies a position that is otherwise occupied by a two-place predicate. Based on this observation, a partially unitary theoretical account of fake modification constructions is formulated from a parsing perspective in the framework of Dynamic Syntax. In this account, four de-morphemes in fake modification constructions are recognized with different syntactic distributions; however, they all contribute a semantically underspecified predicate that is updated by syntactically constrained or context-based inference.