Since the paper by Jansen et al (1978), it is a well-known fact that serializing languages divide into two major groups: those which have Take-serial constructions and those which don’t. Haitian creole has Take-serial constructions, as exemplified in (l):

1. (1) Jan pran kabrit ale nan mache

2. John take goat go in market

3. ‘John brought the goat in the market.’

Among the languages which have Take-serial constructions, languages further divide into two groups: those which have instrumental Take constructions and those which do not. An example of an instrumental Take-serial construction is provided in (2). In these constructions, the subject of the second verb is interpreted as the instrument of the complex predicate formed by the series of verbs.

Empirical and theoretical claims about the markedness of place features and associated context effects are evaluated against the facts of acquisition. The primary focus is on the segmental inventories and substitution patterns of young children with phonological delays (ages 3;0-8;6). Results are reported from a large scale cross-sectional archival study of 211 children. Additionally, two especially challenging case studies are singled out for consideration. A typological account of the cross-sectional variation is formulated in optimality theoretic terms and requires permutable rankings of place-referring constraints. Consideration is also given to the different statistical trends along with a comparison of developing and fully developed languages.

The most common mutation system of Welsh, soft mutation, affects among other elements the object of a finite verb. This is often known as direct object mutation (DOM). Objects have accusative Case in many languages. Hence, it is natural to consider the possibility that DOM is a manifestation of accusative Case, and this has been proposed by a number of people. There is evidence, however, that this idea is both too strong and too weak. It predicts soft mutation where it does not in fact occur, and there are a number of instances of soft mutation which appear to form a natural class with DOM but cannot plausibly be analyzed as a manifestation of accusative Case. A widely discussed alternative to a Case-based view of DOM is one in which DOM is triggered by a preceding phrase of some kind. This approach looks quite promising. However, it does not fit readily into the Principles and Parameters framework. It seems, then, that DOM poses a major challenge for this framework.

This study examines the L2 acquisition and LI attrition of preterite versus imperfect aspectual distinctions in Spanish among English-speaking L2 learners and long-term Spanish-speaking immigrants. Results from an acceptability judgment task and a truth value judgment task demonstrate significantly lower levels of target performance by both groups when compared to the control participants. The L2 learners outperform the native speakers undergoing attrition in some aspectual contexts, while in others both experimental groups show similar difficulties. To the extent that L2 learners and adult immigrants demonstrate comparable difficulties, L2 learners’ deficits cannot be directly related to impairment reasons. LI transfer of the semantic properties of tense heads offers a better explanation for the difficulties L2 learners often show in the aspectual domain.

Because of a too liberal, often inadequate and/or arbitrary use of the term field, especially in semantics, modern semantic theory needs more than ever before a new field notion and a new field terminology. An attempt will be made to define a field notion based on what others have said about fields in semantics. With regard to terminology, I shall use the term axiological field, which appears in several of my earlier writings as well. “Axiology” is to be defined as a functional and structural approach to meaning which stands to semantics as phonology stands to phonetics. It is about values (“axiology”, a term coined by André Martinet, literally means ‘science of values’) as opposed to meanings, with values being to meanings what phonemes are to uttered sounds.

This article investigates variable future-time expression among native speakers of Hexagonal French who participated in informal conversations. The quantitative analysis is the first to examine the inflectional future, periphrastic future, and present indicative as separate forms within a single statistical model of French oral production. Results indicate that temporal distance and presence/absence of a temporal expression predict use of these verb forms. The second phase of the analysis focused on the use of the present indicative in future-time contexts. The examination of each instance of the present indicative shows that an immediate lexical temporal indicator is not necessary for this form to convey futurity and that future-time reference is often established at the discourse level and occasionally through apparent shared knowledge between the interlocutors. This investigation suggests the value of including the present indicative in the analysis of future-time reference in Hexagonal French in order to fully capture variation.

This article reports on between-individual and within-individual variation in consonant cluster reduction strategies (where C1C2 is realised as C( or C2) among young children. The empirical base of the study is a Dutch database with over 9,000 instances of C1 and C2 realisations of 23 word-initial consonant clusters from 45 children aged between two and three years old. The study finds that within-child variation is very limited, whereas between-child variation occurs. It is also shown that there are typological implications; that is, realising C2 in cluster y, implies realising C2 in cluster y, but not vice versa. The data provide support for the position that variation can be accounted for by a finer grained notion of sonority where the sonority distance between the two consonants in a cluster plays a crucial role in establishing prosodic constituency.

In this paper, we propose that there is a speech-act structure in the nominal spine, just as there is in the clausal spine. Its function is to encode what we do when we utter a nominal: that is, we name, describe, or track individuals. Thus, speech-act structure establishes a link between the discourse referent and the speech-act situation. The evidence we discuss comes from nominals that lack this speech-act structure, namely impersonal pronouns. We argue that impersonal pronouns have in common that they lack nominal speech-act structure but are not otherwise a natural class: they vary in syntactic structure. Thus, we propose a novel formal typology of impersonal pronouns.

Nancy Dorian's foundational work on the loss of Gaelic in the East Sutherland communities continues to provide important insights into the nature of the process of language change in situations of obsolescence. In this article I look at a subset of Dorian's data from the perspective of current syntactic theory, and argue that the connected loss of such apparently different constructions as objects of non-finite verbs, inalienable possessive structures, and a range of passives, and the concomitant restructuring of the grammar, all follow from the interaction between a reduction in agreement features on a functional head and the broad syntactic ecology of the language. This approach makes sense of why these apparently disparate constructions all undergo the particular kinds of change that are seen, changes which are mysterious from the perspective that an obsolescing language should alter to become more like the dominant language (in this case English) which is replacing it.

This article presents research showing that second language (L2) learners do not have deficient representations and they are capable of acquiring structures that are absent from their first language (L1). The Redeployment Hypothesis—which claims that L2 phonologies include novel representations created via redeployment of L1 phonological components—is consistent with data from several domains, including acquisition of phonological features, syllable structure, moraic structure, and metrical structure. Moreover, it is shown that input prominence plays a role in L2 acquisition, and that language learners are sensitive to robust phonetic cues. Finally, studies done on interlingual homographs and homophones argue for non-selective access to the bilingual lexicon, suggesting that the language processing capacity is always engaged.

Many contemporary linguists describe their data in terms of a system of rules which state that one string of symbols is to be rewritten as another string of symbols, perhaps with the condition that this only occur when the symbols occur in a particular context. When the linguist wants to use the grammar to produce a particular utterance, he starts with an initial symbol and, one at a time in linear sequence, applies or attempts to apply the rules to the string of symbols he is building up. After applying all of the rules, or perhaps a subset of them, he may have to reapply the rules of a subset of them again and again until no further changes can be made to the string. If at the end of this process the string consists solely of terminal symbols, he has produced a grammatical utterance. Basically such systems consist of symbols and a few operations on these symbols, including match, copy, concatenate, and replace. This system grew out of a union of the item-and-process approach to linguistics with automata theory, an area of mathematics related to the understanding of computers.

This article is mostly devoted to a critical review of the main analyses of root infinitives. Confronting these analyses to acquisition data from French, it is shown that an analysis in terms of a “null auxiliary” is more compatible with the data than the alternative hypotheses. However, an analysis in terms of a null or deleted auxiliary raises some difficult questions with respect to the existence and the nature of null elements in child language. Rather than appealing to null or deleted elements, it seems more appropriate to assume that children utterances do not include an auxiliary or a modal and that the corresponding node is simply not projected. An analysis along these lines is developed in the last section of the article.

In the linguistic literature much is made, both implicitly and explicitly, of metalinguistic abilities but little is seen on the role of individual differences. The role of individual differences in ambiguity detection and resolution is discussed here as an example of the range of individual variation in shared abilities of the metalinguistic type.

It is not the case that all reader/hearers of the language possess the same linguistic abilities with respect to metalinguistic tasks. From a theoretical point of view, linguists have typically assumed it was the case and necessarily so for postulating an ideal competence grammar. But in doing so we have often come to assume that such basic metatheory considerations show up reliably and uniformly even in performance tasks. There is a large and growing body of evidence to remind us that this is not so. Certainly, it holds true neither in the areas of paraphrase nor in ambiguity detection and resolution, two of the more basic metatheoretical premises, and it may not be so in other areas of language either. Very simply, apparently shared linguistic abilities operate on the same type of a graded continuum scale that cognitive abilities of a more general sort do. Having benefited from the postulation of abstract mental structures for ideal speaker/hearers, we are once again recognizing the importance of individual differences in defining the nature of psycholinguistic tasks, as well as the nature of language abilities.

This paper is structured in the following way: first, certain alternations involving consonantal insertion will be examined in order to motivate a synchronic epenthesis rule for Old French (OF) phonology. After details of this rule and some of its relationships with other rules are fixed, an interesting set of historical changes involving restructuring, analogy, and rule ordering will be investigated in an effort to clarify several complicated interactions between phonological and morphological factors in the evolution of the OF verb system.

The central hypothesis of this article is that Welsh direct object mutation—the only instance of mutation in the Celtic languages not triggered by a specific lexical item—is the PF-realisation of AgrO’s accusative Case as the floating lenition-triggering phonological feature L (cf. Lieber 1983 and Zwicky 1984). The analysis proposed in this article is an empirically adquate analysis of initial consonant mutation in Welsh, which fully integrates direct object mutation with other cases of mutation, relates mutation to phonosyntactic processes found in other languages, notably Southern Italian /u/-propagation (Rizzi and Savoia 1991) and French liaison (Manzini 1983), and fits naturally into a non-checking-theoreticconception of Parametric Variation of the sort outlined in Roberts and Roussou (1997a).

This paper analyzes the ergative-antipassive alternation in Inuktitut using a variationist sociolinguistic approach. This alternation is not a typical linguistic variable, as these constructions are traditionally believed to have different syntactic functions. However, the nature of those functions remains controversial (e.g., Bittner 1987, Manga 1996), and they are undergoing changes in some dialects (e.g., Johns 2001, Carrier 2012), with the antipassive being increasingly used in place of the ergative. Thus, a variationist sociolinguistic approach is employed here to identify the significant functions of these constructions, and to find the specific context where they overlap and the language change is taking place. The study examines data collected in Resolute Bay, Nunavut, which presents a case of new-dialect formation due to the High Arctic relocation. The analysis reveals the functions of these constructions, describes the source of fading ergativity for the dialects considered in this study, and supports Trudgill's (2004) theory on new-dialect formation.

The process of vowel nasalization in Portuguese has been a fascinating topic for investigation since the earliest days of Romance philology, and much energy has been expended to determine the origin, development, and contemporary manifestations of the Portuguese nasal vowels. Despite the large amount of scholarly activity devoted to the nasal vowels, however, surprisingly little attention had traditionally been paid to the manner in which they are recognized and produced by native speakers, other than a few traditional phonemic analyses. More recently, aspects of the Portuguese nasal vowel system have been investigated within the framework of generative phonology, with a view toward motivating a series of highly abstract structures underlying the forms of modern Portuguese; as a consequence, more attention was paid to the various details of the vowel nasalization process. The present paper is offered as an addition to the synchronic studies of Portuguese vowel nasalization, since the nasalization process presents several unique peculiarities which warrant a more detailed investigation. The object of this report is to bring up for discussion several aspects of vowel nasalization in Portuguese which have either been neglected in the literature, or which have received incomplete or conflicting descriptions. Other than an introduction to the general problem OI the Portuguese nasal vowels, no attempt will be made at reanalyzing areas which have been adequately covered in other studies, even when the opinions of the present writer differ radically from those of other investigators.

This article proposes that Late Archaic Chinese object relative clauses were reduced relative clauses consisting of a TP dominated by DP. They contained a functional morpheme suo, which attracted an operator to the edge of the vP before moving to T in order to provide T with an [N] feature that could be selected by D. The embedded subject moved to the specifier of the nominalized T, where it valued genitive case with D under Agree. The reduced nature of SUO relative clauses accounts for the fact that a unique strategy was required for relativization on VP-internal positions, as opposed to subject position, since the lack of a CP layer denied the clause a uniform landing site for operators originating internal and external to vP. This analysis also accounts for the loss of the relativization asymmetry by correlating it with the loss of nominalizing morphology such as genitive case.

Few topics in the phonological literature have inspired the amount of attention that has been lavished on the notorious “mute-e” of contemporary French. Perhaps the most perplexing difficulty for phonologists is how (or even whether) to include schwa in phonological representations. Solution of the representation problem, moreover, is necessary for a proper identification of the conditions under which schwa is deleted, maintained or inserted, and for an analysis of alternations linking schwa and other vowels. Many different solutions to the representation problem have been suggested: schwa as a distinct vowel; schwa as absent from the phonemic inventory (hence from underlying representations) and inserted as a “lubrifiant”; or (in the current non-linear literature), schwa as an empty nucleus; schwa as an unlinked vowel.