This article presents an analysis of Polish transitive clause order from the perspective of two competing word order principles, namely the form-driven principle of syntactic weight proposed by Hawkins and the pragmatically based Topic > Comment principle.

Eskimo languages are commonly characterized as displaying rather ‘free’ word order as compared to the major western European languages. Nevertheless, there is in West Greenlandic at least a clearly dominant, pragmatically neutral ordering pattern. Deviation from this – when possible at all – results in specifiable contextual marking (the factors involved will be discussed and illustrated in section 2). In fact, the degree of ‘freedom’ involved may vary considerably from dialect to dialect (and from language to language), also through time and according to register/medium. Specifically I shall be claiming that no Eskimo dialect is of the purely pragmatically based word order type (lacking a syntactic ‘basic order’) which Mithun claims is typical for polysynthetic languages with inflected verbs that can stand as independent sentences (Mithun, 1987: 323). Unlike the type of language that Mithun describes, which includes (Iroquoian) Cayuga and (‘Penutian’) Coos, for example, I shall argue that West Greenlandic (WG), a highly polysynthetic language, behaves more like Slavic languages in this respect, though the ‘neutral’ pattern there is of course SVO rather than SOV. Much as described for Czech and Russian by the Prague School functionalists, word order in WG seems to reflect the common ‘functional sentence perspective’ whereby – ignoring postposed ‘afterthought/clarificatory’ material – early position in the sentence is associated with given material of low communicative dynamism, whereas later position is associated with new or important material of high communicative dynamism (see Firbas, 1974). This is the reverse of the situation described by Mithun.

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.

Like so many others before it, this exposition is of the meaning of the English modal auxiliaries, which are found in utterances conveying modal meanings such as ability, possibility and permission. However, unlike the majority of its predecessors, the present rendering admits to being about more than semantics. With the five central modal auxiliaries, can, may, must, will and shall, the modals for short, as a point of departure, a framework will be formulated to shed light on some central aspects of the immense cotext and context sensitivity involved in the meaning of utterances of sentences containing a modal auxiliary.

The evolution of phonological theory over the past fifteen years or so mirrors in important respects that of syntactic theory. The common evolutionary characteristic is the emergence of modularity. As is frequently noted following Chomsky (1986: ch. 3), in syntax, rich systems of rules have been supplanted by a relatively small number of discrete sub-theories, such as the theories of thematic relations, Case, Binding, Government, and the theory of empty categories. Characteristically, each sub-theory regulates one specific aspect of syntactic structure, at one or more levels of representation, for example the distribution of overt noun phrases at S-structure. The emergence of the sub-theories reflects a natural shift in investigative focus. Just as studying the facts of language from a systematic and formal perspective led to the discovery of generalizations of fact, originally expressed as ‘rules’, so the study of the rules themselves led to the discovery of higher-order generalizations, expressed by the various conditions or principles that make up the contemporary sub-theories. Although Chomsky (1986:70ff.) lists several important contributors to the development of the new perspective, in the mind of most syntacticians, a watershed event in this evolution was Chomsky's own ‘Conditions on transformations’ (1973). To the extent that this development of syntactic theory is a natural one towards deeper understanding, a comparable one is expected in phonological theory. Although the ‘modularity’ of phonology is less frequently noted and identification of a single watershed event is perhaps more difficult, there are clearly several ‘modules’ or sub-theories that have emerged in post-SPE history – three in particular.

J. D. McCawley: A note on auxiliary verbs and language acquisition. Journal of Lingustics28.2, 445?–451

In example (1), page 446, the label was incorrectly printed as ‘V’. It should have been ‘V′’. We apologize for any confusion this may have caused.