We demonstrate the logical necessity of assuming innate knowledge for language acquisition using toy grammars. The implications are applied to reconceptualizing the Subset Principle in terms of features, rather than, say, segments. Both syntactic and phonological issues are discussed, but the focus is on the acquisition of phonological inventories. We point out that our logical arguments converge with recent empirical results.

Jackendoff (1997), whose analysis of idioms is based, in part, on work by Nunberg, Sag & Wasow (1994), discusses VP idioms and addresses the question of mobility. Both works identify fixed idioms, such as kick the bucket, and mobile idioms, such as spill the beans and take advantage of. Fixed idioms are ones whose NP objects are impervious to syntactic operations, as illustrated by the unacceptability, in their idiomatic sense, of sentences like *The bucket was kicked by Bill; while mobile idioms occur in sentences like The beans were spilled by Fred and Advantage was taken of Bill. Jackendoff correlates the mobility of VP idioms with a property that he refers to as metaphorical semantic composition. However, he observes that this property is not a sufficient condition for mobility.

I will argue that the property of metaphorical semantic composition be replaced by a property of thematic composition, and that this property is a sufficient condition for mobility. A closer inspection of mobile idioms that have thematic composition reveals that they fall into two subtypes: expressions that have a property of ‘transparency of interpretation’, and ones that do not have this property. I refer to members of the first subtype as METAPHORS. I will demonstrate that there are no idiosyncratic constraints on their syntactic mobility, and will conclude that they need not be encoded in lexical entries as phrasal idioms. In these respects, they are distinct from members of the second subtype, whose degree of mobility is more limited, and which must be encoded in lexical entries as phrasal idioms. Finally, I will address the question of the necessity of thematic composition for mobility. Throughout the paper, I will assume that phrasal idioms are appropriately encoded in lexical entries of the types proposed by Jackendoff for fixed and mobile expressions.

Inflectional affixes are sensitive to morphological properties of the stems of the verbs they attach to. Therefore it is reasonable to assume that the inflectional material is combined with both the verbal stem of simplex verbs and the verbal stem of particle verbs. It has been argued that this leads to a bracketing paradox in the case of particle verbs since the semantic contribution of the inflectional information scopes over the complete particle verb. I will discuss nominalizations and adjective derivation, which are also problematic because of various bracketing paradoxes. I will suggest a solution to these paradoxes that assumes that inflectional and derivational prefixes and suffixes always attach to a form of a stem that already contains the information about a possible particle, but without containing a phonological realization of the particle. As is motivated by syntactic properties of particle verbs, the particle is treated as a dependent of the verb. The particle is combined with its head after inflection and derivation. With such an approach no special mechanisms for the analysis of particle verbs are necessary.

Addressing current generative concerns over the Left Periphery of clause structure, this paper proposes a categorial distinction, based on the choice of value for the feature [±FINITE], between two functional heads, C° and Top°, which project into CP and TopP, respectively. The choice is responsible for a principled distinction between structural (TopP) and rhetorical (CP) topicalization. Primary data are Det-clefts, Hv-clefts and so-called sikke-expressions in Danish. The latter are peripheral to the core of Danish grammar, but are nevertheless – or perhaps therefore – a mine of evidence for the distinction argued for. Criterial evidence is a conjunction of three diagnostics: lack of V2 word order, so-called ‘pleonastic’ complementizers and the syntactic behaviour of expletive der. It is argued that normal (left) movement principles cannot account for the sharing of information between the Specifier and the Complement of Top°. Instead, two possibilities for interpretation are tentatively explored, involving various kinds of Right Periphery phenomena. Since the Specifier and the Complement of Top° each provides the structural basis for independent, clause-like utterances, TopPs are seen as clear cases of BREAKSTRUCTURES.

SETTING: The University of Arizona's idyllic desert campus. As in many colleges across the United States, ‘formalist’ linguistics is implicitly understood to be at cross-purposes with ‘functionalist’ linguistics. The Linguistics Department's only course on non-minimalist syntax is famously nicknamed ‘Bad Guys’. Although the linguistics department forms a unified front, malcontent quietly simmers across campus as functionalist sociolinguists, discourse analysts, grammaticalization specialists and linguistic anthropologists outnumber formalists, though they roam within their own language-department fiefdoms. Politeness and cooperation reign among senior faculty linguists, who have realized that antagonism only hurts students and programs in all the language sciences. The junior faculty are more brash: they work hard, publish a lot, and speak loudly to get tenure as respected form/functionalists. They socialize together and joke about each other's positions, but don't talk very much serious shoptalk. Until now …