This article provides an analysis of participial constructions in English, within the feature-checking approach to inflectional morphology. It argues for a unified treatment of the perfect, passive and adjectival uses of the past participle, involving a monosemous inflectional head checking a monosemous affix. There are two classes of constructions with -ing, each of which is given a unified treatment. The analysis requires the assumption that head-adjoined structures can be generated directly, rather than arising only as a result of movement. It also demonstrates that inflectional and derivational affixation are inherently different processes. An affix may in principle be attached by either process, with each process resulting in a different output structure. With these two provisos, it is possible to maintain both Johns’ (1992) One Form/One Meaning Principle and the more restrictive Strong Monosemy Principle proposed here.

The nominalization of several French idioms constructed with the verb mettre contrasts with that of derived nominais such as la destruction de Rome par les barbares. This contrast is mainly due to the quasi mandatory shift of the internal arguments of NPs such as la mise en oeuvre de X ‘the implementation of X’ which corresponds to mettre X en oeuvre ‘to implement X’. A standard morphological treatment of the nominalization of mettre cannot account for the “parasitic gap” associated with this shift. A treatment in terms of “derivational syntax” appears to be more adequate, in that it attributes to the verbal suppletion the preservation of the categorial identity and the semantic unity of the lexical entry shared by the NP and the VP. A major theoretical consequence of this analysis is that it challenges the generally agreed upon claims that X-bar structures are necessarily endocentric and that lexical entries always constitute atomic categories.

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.

The aim of this article is to present a unified analysis of Romance past participle agreement. Data from 19 standard and non-standard Romance varieties are considered. It is shown that in order to account for the variation found across the various Romance varieties, past participle agreement should not be considered as following simply from another module of the grammar, such as Case Theory, coindexation or the theory of functional categories, but should rather be considered from the point of view of a general theory of grammatical agreement. It is also shown that past participle agreement must be treated as an example of nominal-modifier agreement rather than as an example of verb-argument agreement.

The main goal of this article is to provide a more global approach to the question of cooccurrence restrictions which hold among classes of segments in Hamito-Semitic languages. It is demonstrated that the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) combined with the directionality conventions is not sufficient to predict all of the observed cooccurrence restrictions found in the Classical Arabic verb root and that it is necessary to postulate two other constraints that interact with the OCP. By establishing a parallel between the facts observed in Classical Arabic and the labial dissimilations in two other Hamito-Semitic languages, Akkadian and Imdlawn Tashlhiyt Berber, it is argued that, at the Proto-Hamito-Semitic stage, the OCP hierarchically dominated the Multiple Association Constraint operative at the level of articulator nodes, but that this hierarchy is no longer synchronically manifested in languages like Arabic and Hebrew. The existence of a constraint that imposes a minimal sonority distance on rising sonority contours is also postulated to account for an asymmetry indicating a tendency to prefer certain sequences of segments over the reverse order.

In this article, it is argued that perfective aspect in Serbo-Croatian is licensed in the syntax. Licensing of Aspect requires the presence of a hierarchically higher category. In compound tenses, perfective aspect is licensed by a governing auxiliary in Infl while, in the present tense forms, it may only be licensed by an overt complementizer in Comp. A Comp-Aspect Agreement mechanism is proposed based on the requirement for licensing in the present tense forms. This agreement also obtains between a covert complementizer and perfective aspect in imperative constructions (perfective imperatives move to an empty Comp position to satisfy the Aspect licensing requirement) and between an overt complementizer and the auxiliaries in compound tenses (auxiliaries move to an empty Comp to satisfy the Tense licensing requirement). Although Tense may be licensed by any governor in root sentences, the presence of an overt complementizer, which is a hierarchically higher category, takes precedence for licensing in embedded sentences.

This article examines the absence of obviation with volition verbs in Older French (e.g., je veux que je soye batu). It is shown that the analyses which propose that obviation depends on the anaphoric character of Tense or on the presence of a lexical complementizer cannot explain the absence of obviation in Older French. The analysis proposed in this article relies on the semantic selection of verbs. It is argued that in Older French, volition verbs (i.e., non-factive emotive verbs) select a [definite event], realized on the head of MP, which licenses an operator in Comp; as a result, the binding domain of the embedded subject is closed and the subjects can be coreferent. The presence of this operator, which can be reanalyzed as the head of CP, also accounts for the fact that both moods, indicative and subjunctive, can be found in the complements of volition verbs. It is also proposed that the changes which affect the complements of volition verbs in Classical French (presence of obviation and absence of indicative mood) are triggered by the fact that volition verbs ceased to select the category [definite event].

This article proposes a solution to two unresolved issues regarding the V2 structure in the history of French: to which type of V2 languages — symmetrical or asymmetrical—does Old French belong, and why did V2 later disappear? It appears that Old French is not homogeneous with respect to V2: it is symmetric up to the 12th century and then goes through a period of grammatical competition between the two types of V2 structure. This indicates a syntactic change in progress, from a symmetrical to an asymmetrical structure. But French never completed this transition and lost V2 after the period of competition, contrary to Continental Scandinavian which underwent the same change. This contrast follows from the fact that Old French failed to meet the learnability conditions of the asymmetrical V2 structure. This analysis thus raises the issue of the relation between syntactic change and learnability.

This article investigates the nature of argumenthood and adjuncthood, through an examination of the behaviour of the internal arguments of two classes of motion verbs in English. A highly modular view is put forth, in which three separate distinctions influencing argument-like or adjunct- like behaviour must be recognized: aspectual versus thematic licensing, structural versus inherent case assignment, and referentiality versus non-referentiality. Of these three, only referentiality is a graded rather than a binary distinction. The distinction between aspectual and thematic licensing is developed and elucidated. A picture emerges in which aspectual structure may itself be thematically licensed by a verb, and this aspectual structure may have its own arguments, which are then indirectly licensed by the verb. Cognate objects and Romance measure phrases are also discussed in light of these theoretical conclusions.

The introduction of empty nuclear positions in syllable structure goes back to the early 80s. Since then, empty nuclei have been proposed in phonological analyses to account for vocalic epenthesis (vowel/Ø alternation). The analysis of Gen put forth in this article argues for empty nuclei although no vowel/Ø alternation can be observed in the language. Nevertheless, on the basis of the tonal patterns of Gen, it is shown that empty positions must be part of the underlying representation of syllables in the language. Another aspect of the study deals with consonant clusters. Thus far, all analyses supporting empty positions within a cluster have also referred to the absence of cooccurrence restrictions among the consonants surrounding the empty vowel. This paper provides new insights since, in Gen, the consonant clusters in which empty nuclei are proposed are typical of those observed in branching onset languages (like French, Italian and English) or in languages having light diphthongs. We argue that all attested consonant clusters in Gen are heterosyllabic.

The aim of this paper is to analyze the various lexical and syntactic properties of the reduplicated adverbial form benben in Quebec French. It can be observed that this form differs syntactically from its Standard French synonyms beaucoup and très. Benben can indeed appear with various lexical categories: nouns, adjectives, adverbs, transitive and intransitive verbs. Moreover, in many contexts, its use is sensitive to the presence of verbal negation, rather than to that of constituent negation. In comparison with other Quebec French quantifiers, benben is very flexible. It can be used in both negative and positive contexts and, as an adverbial form, it can appear in various positions in the sentence.

Many, if not all, languages possess syntactic constructions in which covert arguments, often referred to as “implicit arguments”, are required. While the implicit arguments in Western languages have received considerable attention, the study of the same topic in non-Western languages such as Japanese has been neglected. In this article, the nature of the implicit arguments of the potential and resultative constructions in Japanese is investigated. A detailed examination reveals that the implicit AGENTs in these two constructions differ in terms of the specificity of their reference, which in turn suggests that the representations of the two types of implicit arguments reflect this difference. It is argued that the implicit AGENT of the potential construction should be analyzed as proarb while that of the resultative construction is realized as pro.