This paper examines early inflectional morphology related to the tense-aspect system of Proto-Indo-European. It will be argued that historical linguistics can shed light on the long-standing debate over the emergence of tense-aspect morphology in language acquisition. The dispute over this issue is well-known; it has been pursued mostly by scholars following various general linguistic approaches, from typology to acquisition, but also by historical linguists and Indo-Europeanists, who have long debated about the precedence of aspect or tense from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. However, so far Indo-Europeanists have rarely confronted their results in a successful way with recent research in other fields such as acquisition or neurolinguistics. The aim of this paper is to put forward evidence from the reconstruction of the Proto-Indo-European verbal system concerning the prominent role of root lexical aspect features in the emergence of grammatical marking of tense in the proto-language. More precisely, by means of a comparison between the residual archaic verbal forms of the injunctive in Vedic Sanskrit and the corresponding augmentless preterites in Homeric Greek, it will be argued that the [±telic] lexical feature of the inherited verbal root is responsible for a non-random distribution of past tense inflected forms in an earlier verbal paradigm.

This paper provides a Distributed Morphology analysis of the paradoxical interaction of the two cases of verbal suppletion in Korean, and argues that the two suppletion types are characterized by two different types of morphological operations. The two roots found with short-form negation and honorification suggest different morphological structures: [[Neg-V] Hon] for al- ‘know’, molu- ‘not.know’, a-si- ‘know-hon’, molu-si- (not *an(i) a-si-) ‘neg know-hon’; and [Neg [V-Hon]] for iss- ‘exist’, eps- ‘not.exist’, kyey-si- ‘exist-hon’, an(i) kyey-si- (not *eps-(u)-si-) ‘neg exist-hon’. Predicate repetition constructions support the [[Neg-V] Hon] structure. In this structure, however, the negative suppletion (analyzed as fusion of negation and the root) is blocked by the honorific suffix structurally more peripheral to the root. C-command is the only requirement for context allomorphy in Distributed Morphology (Halle & Marantz 1993). Since the [+hon] feature c-commands the root, the root can show honorific suppletive allomorphy in the first cycle with negation intervening between the root and [+hon]. Negation fusion occurs in the second cycle after vocabulary insertion of the root. Fusion, then, should refer to vocabulary items, not abstract features, and will be interleaved with vocabulary insertion. If the output of the root is /kyey/ due to the honorific feature, negative suppletion will not apply and the correct form an(i) kyey-si- will be derived. Therefore, both of the distinct morphological operations for suppletion, i.e., fusion and contextual allomorphy, are necessary. The revised formulation of fusion shows that certain morphological operations follow vocabulary insertion. This derivational approach to the suppletion interaction provides support for separation of phonological and nonphonological features and for late insertion of phonological features.

This paper investigates the intonational phrasing of three types of parenthetical insertions – non-restrictive relative clauses (NRRCs), full sentences, and comment clauses (CCs) – in actual spoken language. It draws on a large set of data from a corpus of spoken British English. Its aim is twofold: first, it evaluates the correctness of previous claims about the intonational phrasing of parentheticals, specifically the assumption that parentheticals are phrased in a separate intonation domain; second, it discusses the implications of the intonational phrasing of parentheticals for prosodic theory. The results of the data analysis are as follows. First, the longer types of interpolations but not CCs are by default phrased separately. Second, both the temporal and the tonal structure of the host may be affected by the parenthetical. Third, CCs lend themselves more readily to the restructuring of intonational phrases such that they are phrased in one domain together with material from the host. Fourth, the prosodic results cannot be explained in syntactic accounts which do not allow for a syntactic relation between parenthetical and host. Fifth, the interface constraints on intonational phrasing apply to parentheticals. Sixth, the intonational phrasing of parentheticals supports the assumption of a post-syntactic, phonological component of the grammar at which restructuring applies.

The definite article in many European languages has its origin in a demonstrative or a pronoun. The development into a definite article is a typical case of grammaticalization. In this article I will demonstrate that this kind of grammaticalization, like all kinds of grammaticalization, can be explained as a case of reduction through reanalysis at acquisition. In addition to the prenominal definite article shared with other Germanic languages, the Scandinavian languages also have a postposed definite article. In Old Norse the postnominal definite article is a clitic merged as a head in D, while in its modern descendent Norwegian it is an inflectional suffix checking a grammatical feature in the Infl domain, expressing definiteness within the DP according to general principles of agreement. Thus, so-called ‘double definiteness’ (den gamle hesten ‘the old horse.def’) has become possible as an agreement phenomenon. In Old Norse, the clitic cannot trigger definiteness agreement. This change from a clitic to an inflectional suffix is obviously a case of grammaticalization, but it has wider implications than just the change of morphosyntactic status. ON is shown to have had two projections in the D domain (þau in stóru skip ‘those the large ships’). Later the independent definite article inn was lost and replaced by the demonstrative þann>den. As a result (or cause?) its projection was lost, and the postposed article was left without a free-word counterpart. This, combined with phonological reduction and semantic bleaching, reduced it to an inflectional suffix.

Non-sentential utterances (NSUs), utterances that lack an overt verbal (more generally predicative) constituent, are common in adult speech. This paper presents the results of a corpus study of the emergence of certain classes of NSUs in child language, based primarily on data from the Manchester Corpus from CHILDES. Our principal finding is the late short query effect: the main classes of non-sentential queries (NSQs) are acquired much later than non-sentential answers (NSAs). At a stage when the child has productive use of sentential queries, and has mastered elliptical declaratives and the polar lexemes ‘yes’ and ‘no’, non-sentential questions are virtually absent. This happens despite the fact that such questions are common in the speech of the child's caregivers and that the contexts are ones which should facilitate the production of such NSUs. We argue that these results are intrinsically problematic for analyses of NSUs in terms of a single, generalized mechanism of phonological reduction, as standard in generative grammar. We show how to model this effect within an approach of dialogue-oriented constructionism, wherein NSUs are grammatical words or constructions whose main predicate is a contextual parameter resolved in a manner akin to indexical terms, the relevant aspect of context being the discourse topic. We sketch an explanation for the order of acquisition of NSUs, based on a notion which combines accessibility of contextual parameters and complexity of content construction.

This paper examines the relationship between headedness and language processing and considers two strategies that potentially ease language comprehension and production. Both strategies allow a language to minimize the number of arguments in a given clause, either by reducing the number of overtly expressed arguments or by reducing the number of structurally required arguments. The first strategy consists of minimizing the number of overtly expressed arguments by using more pro-drop for two-place predicates (Pro-drop bias). According to the second strategy, a language gives preference to one-place predicates over two-place predicates, thus minimizing the number of structural arguments (Intransitive bias). In order to investigate these strategies, we conducted a series of comparative corpus studies of SVO and SOV languages. Study 1 examined written texts of various genres and children's utterances in English and Japanese, while Study 2 examined narrative stories in English, Spanish, Japanese, and Turkish. The results for these studies showed that pro-drop was uniformly more common with two-place predicates than with one-place predicates, regardless of the OV/VO distinction. Thus the Pro-drop bias emerges as a universal economy principle for making utterances shorter. On the other hand, SOV languages showed a much stronger Intransitive bias than SVO languages. This finding suggests that SOV word order with all the constituents explicitly expressed is potentially harder to process; the dominance of one-place predicates is therefore a compensatory strategy in order to reduce the number of preverbal arguments. The overall pattern of results suggests that human languages utilize both general (Pro-drop bias) and headedness-order-specific (Intransitive bias) strategies to facilitate processing. The results on headedness-order-specific strategies are consistent with other researchers' findings on differential processing in head-final and non-head-final languages, for example, Yamashita & Chang's (2001) ‘long-before-short’ parameterization.