Many working syntacticians or phonologists do not care about what all linguists tend to call philosophical issues, such as “What kind of object is a language?” They are happy to leave the ontological basis of their work unanalyzed. It is possible to accept this situation. We may choose to inquire directly and separately in what way pieces of external evidence from Acquisition, Borrowing, Change, and Damage may have an impact on ideas considered seriously by working linguists. However, the moment we decide to group the ABCD of these four domains together under the E of Externality, thus trying to organize them into an area of inquiry, this decision leads naturally to a more general type of question. Unless we grapple with such a question, our ABCD list begins to look like the well-known Borges quotation from a fictitious Chinese encyclopaedia stating that animals are divided into:

Cette étude veut être un complément d’information à nos travaux déjà effectués sur le parler des Franco-Canadiens de la Saskatchewan. En août 1970, poursuivant notre série d’enquêtes phonétiques, nous avons visité les villages de Willow-Bunch et de Bellegarde dans le sud-est de cette province, dans le but d’examiner quelques aspects phonétiques du français parlé dans ces deux centres actifs de la minorité francophone de la région.

In this article, a number of broad questions related to the acquisition of consonant clusters in a second language are investigated. Drawing on the structural relations and phonological principles of Government Phonology, it is argued that the behaviour of second language learners can be accounted for by a top-down, left-to-right phonological parser. Appealing to a model of cognitive architecture, it is demonstrated that one can account for the different behaviours of speakers of languages that share the trait of lacking tautosyllabic clusters (Korean and Finnish) when learning a language which allows such clusters (English). Properties of the LI segmental inventory and a licensing strength scale are proposed to explain why Finnish learners have less trouble than Korean learners when acquiring English clusters.

This article compares the results of measurements of objective language data with the subjective judgments of linguistically naïve individuals. The comparison is based upon recordings of speech orientated towards the standard language. The data surveyed are from the West Middle German city of Mainz and the northern Low German city of Neumünster. In both cases, recordings of council meetings, in which members of a defined social group are acting in an authentic situation, were evaluated. The data were first measured using a technique designed to quantify the phonetic divergence from the standard language. Subsequently, the recordings were played to various groups of non-specialists from different regions in both the Low German and Middle German dialect areas. Participants were asked to assess the speech of the councillors on a seven-step rating scale. The results show a high similarity between the intersubjective measurement of linguistic items and the metalinguistic judgments of the listeners.

Rule reordering as a principle of phonological change has come under heavy criticism in the recent past. A number of articles, e.g. Iverson (1973), Picard (1974), Hogg (1976), Dinnsen and Koutsoudas (1976), have been devoted to this question, endeavouring to show in one way or another that the reordering of phonological rules does not constitute a type of linguistic change. Some of the better known cases of alleged reordering have been examined, and many of these have been judged to be deficient for two main reasons: implausibility, due to the unjustified degree of abstractness involved, and inaccuracy, due to the omission or misinterpretation of crucial data. Generally, at the very least, a reasonable and plausible alternative solution has been put forth in each case.

This article investigates the spread of the le/la/les-forms in the diachrony of French on the basis of large-scale corpora. It focuses on the issue of their “mixed” distribution viz. the observation that during a long period of time the le/la/les-forms in French do not pattern as either (anaphoric) demonstratives from which they originate (Late Latin ille), nor as (uniqueness-based) definites, which they end up becoming in Modern French. We model the phenomenon as a competition between two grammars which ascribe different Logical Forms to the l-forms and test model predictions in contexts which differ with respect to whether they satisfy the relevant conditions for either demonstrative or definite semantics. We also suggest that this change was part of a larger change involving the spread of presupposition triggers within noun phrases. We show that our model correctly predicts the relative rates of determiner spread in various contexts.

Theories of phonology claim variously that phonological elements are either innate or emergent, and either substance-full or substance-free. A hitherto underdeveloped source of evidence for choosing between the four possible combinations of these claims lies in showing precisely how a child can acquire phonological elements. This article presents computer simulations that showcase a learning algorithm with which the learner creates phonological elements from a large number of sound–meaning pairs. In the course of language acquisition, phonological features gradually emerge both bottom-up and top-down, that is, both from the phonetic input (i.e., sound) and from the semantic or morphological input (i.e., structured meaning). In our computer simulations, the child's phonological features end up with emerged links to sounds (phonetic substance) as well as with emerged links to meanings (semantic substance), without containing either phonetic or semantic substance. These simulations therefore show that emergent substance-free phonological features are learnable. In the absence of learning algorithms for linking innate features to the language-specific variable phonetic reality, as well as the absence of learning algorithms for substance-full emergence, these results provide a new type of support for theories of phonology in which features are emergent and substance-free.

The purpose of this paper is to present a complete syntactic analysis of the reflexives of English. Most of the work in this area, particularly work in the Government-Binding theory, has focused on one type of reflexive, what has come to be called the “anaphor” reflexive. Thus Koster (1984), in describing reflexives (among other things), postulates a number of essential properties characteristic of a core dependency relation between constituents. This relation, labelled “R”, is illustrated in (1). Its properties are listed in (2).

The difference between the two mechanisms for wh-question binding (i.e., sucessive cyclic movement and pronominal binding) is characterized, inter alia, by the presence of island constraints (subjacency effects) in movement but not pronominal constructions. Using experimental data from child and adult speakers of Akan (pronominal binding) and Serbo-Croatian (movement and pronominal binding), it is argued that: 1) Previous experiments on English-speaking children’s knowledge of the block on extraction from within adjuncts do not positively support early use of a movement grammar in English; 2) Apparent sensitivity to movement constraints may arise as a consequence of processing preferences; 3) The evidence to date is nonetheless compatible with movement as the default hypothesis for wh-binding; 4) The parsing preference for non-island locations for a wh-word may have utility for the learner, helping to correct overly permissive grammars.

Inuit dialects with palatalization all distinguish between “strong i” and “weak i”: instances of surface [i] that cause palatalization and those that do not, respectively. All dialects that have completely lost this contrast also lack palatalization. Why are there no /i, a, u/ dialects in which all instances of surface [i] trigger palatalization? We propose that this typological gap can be explained using a contrastivist analysis whereby only contrastive features can be phonologically active, palatalization is triggered by [coronal], and contrastive features are assigned in an order placing [low] and [labial] ahead of [coronal]. In a three-vowel inventory only [low] and [labial] are contrastive, while in the four-vowel inventory [coronal] must also be contrastive to distinguish strong and weak i. It follows from these assumptions that [i] can trigger palatalization only if it is in contrast with a fourth vowel.

This article proposes that two linguistic systems (that is, two languages or registers) with different degrees of morphosyntactic integration of ideophones may apply the same restrictions on ideophones in different ways. In Study 1, the author shows quantitatively that the sentence-type restrictions reported for ideophones in several languages also constrain Japanese ideophones, but to a lesser extent. In Study 2, the author argues that two previously identified restrictions on Japanese ideophonic verbs appear to apply only partially to ideophonic verbs in baby talk and highly playful discourse. It is concluded that the strength of these restrictions is negatively correlated with the overall degree of morphosyntactic integration of ideophones in the language or register.

Dans un article stimulant dans cette revue, Walker (1978) cherche à établir le statut phonologique des alternances du type (1) en ancien français, qui remontent à une ancienne règle phonétique d’épenthèse introduisant une occlusive à l’intérieur des suites constituées d’une des consonnes /m n ɲ l ʎ s z/ suivie d’une liquide—suites qui résultent en général de la syncope d’une voyelle atone, et dont on note les effets dans les mots (2), par exemple.

This article reexamines the puzzling issue of where subjects, lexical and null,are located in Spanish and offers a novel explanation for the incompatibility ofpreverbal lexical subjects with fronted focussed constituents. Both SpecIP andthe left periphery appear to be potential landing sites for subjects, accordingto discourse-pragmatic factors. Assuming that pro is a clitic,it is argued that the aforementioned incompatibility can be captured by a simplerule: SpecIP must be empty for focus fronting to occur. This is the case withpro, which adjoins to Infl, or with postverbal subjectssince they remain in SpecVP. From this analysis it follows that: 1) the subjectfield in Spanish is less articulated than is generally assumed, 2) thedifferences between Spanish and other null subject languages with respect to theavailability of preverbal subjets can be reduced to this rule and a differentordering of focus and topic phrases, and 3) it is unnecessary to posit twodifferent topic positions.

The prospects of a cognitive neuroscience of syntax are considered with respect to functional neuroanatomy of two seemingly independent systems: Working Memory and syntactic representation and processing. It is proposed that these two systems are more closely related than previously supposed. In particular, it is claimed that a sentence with anaphoric dependencies involves several Working Memories, each entrusted with a different linguistic function. Components of Working Memory reside in the Left Inferior Frontal Gyrus, which is associated with Broca’s region. When lesioned, this area manifests comprehension disruptions in the ability to analyze intra-sentential dependencies, suggesting that Working Memory spans over syntactic computations. The unification of considerations regarding Working Memory with a purely syntactic approach to Broca’s regions leads to the conclusion that mechanisms that compute transformations—and no other syntactic relations—reside in this area.

Years ago, Piaget (1926:121) reported the fact that children, in their spoken language, show little concern for identifying the appropriate antecedents of their pronouns. In the texts he presented, they would typically introduce one or more antecedents followed by a series of pronouns. Such examples show a simple rule of linear order whereby a pronoun needs to refer to an antecedent somewhere preceding it. Further, this rule appeared to characterize the productive language of older children in the years five to ten, when much of the structure of language has already been acquired.

Old French (OF) determiners (D), which are optional, show a three-way split between definite (def), indefinite(indf), and expletive(expl) D. We develop a nano-syntactic analysis of these three paradigms, according to which the nominal spine is associated with a series of functional heads that include Number, Gender, D, and Kase. We test the predictions of the formal analysis with a quantitative analysis of corpus data from two 12th century Anglo-Norman texts – Le voyage de saint Brendan (B) and Lais de Marie de France (MdF) – which indicates that over a 60-year span, there are changes in the distribution of D. This presents itself in three ways. First, a decline in expletive D in MdF correlates with an increase in the use of D with masculine (m) non-count nouns (nNON-CT) Second, while B lacks an overt indefinite plural (pl) D, MdF has one in the form of des. Third, with count nouns(nCT), while feminine (f) nouns favour the absence of determiners in B, there is no gender effect in MdF. While the first two changes are predicted by the formal analysis, the third is not. More broadly, the results of our quantitative study provide a more nuanced picture of the factors that govern the distribution of D in OF: they confirm that – relative to conditioning the absence of D (D-drop) – definiteness, grammatical function, and number are stable factors, gender is not a stable factor, and word order does not play a significant role.

The application of linguistics to legal issues—what some have labelled “forensic linguistics”—has become increasingly common, varied and consequential (see Brackenridge 1981 for a brief overview). Recently, we three served as language experts in Toronto’s first bilingual jury trial (Regina vs. Lapointe and Sicotte, 1981). Since each of us was assigned a different linguistic problem and since our roles were partially adversary ones (two of us worked for the defence and the other for the prosecution), we were able to draw upon a variety of linguistic concepts and analyses as well as to assess their effectiveness when applied to legal issues. The present paper reports not only on the nature of our involvement but, more importantly, on our joint perception of disturbing language-related problems in the legal process and of equally disturbing inadequacies in the responses that linguistics can currently offer to many of these problems.

This paper provides a novel Optimality Theoretic analysis of the 19th century French secret language Largonji. While Largonji is a reversal game, we show that it is a type not previously described, in which the first onset that is not an /l/ reverses, even if it is not at an edge. Thus, traditional approaches to reversal games, such as cross-anchoring, do not work for Largonji. However, our account does not require direct reference to onsets. Instead, it is based on preservation of moraic structure, combined with alignment of a Largonji-specific prefix. Though suprasegmental faithfulness has been noted previously in language games, the present account implements it in Optimality Theory for the first time. Further, in analyzing the Largonji affix as a prefix that is sometimes realized as an infix, we suggest that Largonji provides additional evidence that language games can reflect cross-linguistic patterns not present in the base language.

The postulation of diachronic universals derives from certain conclusions reached in the investigation of synchronic universals, i.e., that there are natural (universal) phonological subsystems in languages or dialects, and that there are natural (universal) structural relationships between the elements in these subsystems. In essence, a hypothesis about a particular diachronic universal is a claim that a shared natural state in various languages or dialects is the product of the same diachronic process (a sound change, series of linked sound changes, etc.). A counterproposal to this hypothesis would specify that there are multiple diachronic routes which can link two parallel states in the history of two or more innovating languages or dialects. If the latter view is correct, and I believe that it is, then the theory of diachronic universals will require refinement if it is to retain theoretical value.

Progress in linguistic theory during the past 20 years has made it increasingly clear that language acquisition must be viewed as an essentially deductive process in which the child analyzes the input data s/he is exposed to on the basis of an innately specified set of restrictive principles — technically known as Universal Grammar — which narrowly constrain the kinds of hypotheses a child will consider vis-à-vis a given set of data (cf. Chomsky 1980, 1981, 1986; Hornstein and Lightfoot 1981; White 1982; Felix 1987). As a consequence, there is a growing interest in the question of how exactly principles of Universal Grammar interact with the child’s linguistic experience during the course of language acquisition (see e.g., Pinker 1984; Hyams 1986; Lust 1986b; Roeper and Williams 1987 among others for some more recent proposals). It appears that there are currently at least two competing views about the nature of this interaction. One of these views which I shall call “perceptionism” holds that the task of Universal Grammar (UG) is essentially restricted to constraining the types of intermediate grammars that the child will construct, while the developmental process itself is essentially data-driven, i.e., driven by the child’s (changing) perception of the external evidence. The other view which may be termed “maturationism” claims that UG is both responsible for the types of (intermediate) grammars that in principle may emerge and at the same time for the specific nature of the developmental process. Under the maturationist view language acquisition is therefore seen as a process that is driven primarily by internal, i.e., biologically determined maturational mechanisms.