Current thinking on inflection classes views them as organized networks rather than random assemblages of allomorphs (a view that reaches back to the 1980s, with such notions as Wurzel's paradigm structure conditions and Carstairs's paradigm economy). But we still find systems which appear to lack any visible implicative structure. A particularly striking example comes from Võro (a variety of South Estonian). Its system of verbal inflectional suffixes is formally simple but distributionally complex: although there are never more than three allomorphs in competition, nearly two dozen inflectional patterns emerge through rampant cross-classification of the allomorphs. Allomorph choice in one part of the paradigm thus fails to constrain allomorph choice in the rest, so it looks as if the paradigms would have to be memorized en masse. The key to these patterns lies outside the system of suffixation itself, in the more conventional formal complexity of stem alternations and their paradigmatic patterning. The computationally implemented analysis presented here provides a model of inflection in which the implicational network of phonological, morphophonological and morphological conditions on formal realization are unified in a single representation.

In this paper, we propose a unified account of the semantics of the English present progressive in the form of a semantic network, basing ourselves on the theoretical principles and analytical tools offered by the theory of Cognitive Grammar, as laid out by Langacker (1987, 1991). The core meaning of the English present progressive, we claim, is to indicate epistemic contingency in the speaker's immediate reality. It thus contrasts with the simple present, which is associated with situations that are construed as structurally belonging to reality. On the basis of a study of the Santa Barbara Corpus of spoken American English, an inventory has been made of the more specific uses of the present progressive, temporal as well as modal. It is shown that each of these uses can be derived from this basic meaning of contingency in immediate reality via a set of conceptual branching principles, in interaction with elements in the context.

One challenge to lexical (or, more specifically, morphological) integrity – and more generally to compositionality of meaning – is bracketing paradox. Sized inalienable possession (SIP) in Japanese (e.g. ko-kubi ‘small-neck’ in [VP [NPko-kubi-o] kasigeru] ‘small-neck-acc tilt’) is an instance of bracketing paradox where morphological bracketing (such as above) and semantic bracketing (below) conflict with each other. Specifically, a prefix like ko- above acts as an adverbial modifier for a VP, not as a nominal modifier (i.e. [VP slightly (ko) [VP neck tilt]] ‘tilt one's neck slightly’). It is proposed that: (a) syntactically, an SIP expression and its ‘host’ verb are collocationally dependent, and (b) Semantically, either argument or adjunct SIP expressions are Montagovian functors. They take (or act upon) a predicate meaning as an argument to give rise to an appropriate interpretation. This has the effect of confining the unusual adverbial modification within SIP expressions. Without additional stipulations, the current proposal solves hitherto unnoticed empirical problems faced by previous syntactic accounts. In doing so, it avoids employing mechanisms contradicting morphological integrity, namely LF movement of a bound morpheme or co-indexing a word-internal element. Thus, at least in the domain of SIP, the current approach enables us to remain faithful to morphological integrity. A broader issue touched upon here is how compositional semantics is accomplished when it is superficially violated as above. This paper shows that strict adherence to iconicity between syntax and semantics is by no means a necessity for compositional semantics.

Through an investigation of morphologically defective pronominal object paradigms in a number of northern Italian dialects, this article offers a reflection on the relation between the development and the loss of linguistic items based on the reconstruction of the possible diachronic path that has led to the current situation. The paper sets out to achieve two objectives. First, it presents a detailed description of the peculiarities of the object clitic paradigm in the northern Italian dialects and places them within the wider Romance context. Secondly, it discusses and evaluates the way the processes of emergence and loss of linguistic items relate to one another, with specific reference to what appears to be a more general hierarchy operative in languages, the Referential Hierarchy (Silverstein 1976, Comrie 1981, and many others).

This article investigates soft labial conspiracy in Kurpian, a dialect of Polish that has not been discussed in the generative literature to date. The conspiracy involves four processes: decomposition, simplification, depalatalization, and vowel retraction. These processes are united by the goal to eliminate palatalized labials from the surface representation. The article argues against bidirectional IDENT constraints and for the tenet of Derivational/Stratal OT that analysis must proceed in steps. The evidence comes from the nature of decomposition and from the fact that depalatalization constitutes a Duke-of-York derivation.