In this paper we report on our attempt to teach the polyglot savant Christopher (‘C’ hereinafter) British Sign Language (BSL). BSL presents C with a novel challenge in the use of hand-eye coordination, while at the same time offering him the linguistic ingredients he is obsessed with. Despite his deficits in key areas of intellectual ability, communication skills and visuo-spatial cognition, C has developed a working knowledge of BSL through processes of circumvention, adaptation and invention. As a form of control, we taught BSL to a comparator group of talented second-language learners. We do not discuss this comparison in depth here (see Morgan et al. in preparation) but refer to some of the test scores as a guide to how normal a sign learner C is.

Results from formal tests of C's linguistic knowledge, and observational study of his developing communicative ability in BSL, are analysed and described. These results illuminate the structure and use of BSL, highlighting the important role of visuo-spatial cognition in its acquisition and manipulation.

Our findings support the assumption that the organisation of knowledge of language is largely modality independent, whereas the exploitation of specific grammatical devices is language and modality dependent. C has attained a certain level of linguistic competence in BSL, and his performance in the language is largely in conformity with his previously established mixed profile of abilities and disabilities.

Many languages have two types of adversative sentence conjunctions (e.g. Spanish, German). These are normally referred to as PA and SN conjunctions. However, while PA conjunctions can be used as discourse markers (DMs) in dialogal discourse, SN conjunctions such as those found in Spanish and German cannot be used in dialogues. Thus the PA/SN distinction does not extend fully to the dialogal realm. Using data from another Spanish DM, I argue that the PA/SN distinction can be extended beyond the monologal realm of sentence conjunction to the realm of adversative discourse markers employed in dialogal discourse. The findings have implications for the question of functional equivalence across different types of discourse.

We examine a class of English reflexive pronouns that we call middle-distance reflexives. We show that while not occurring in direct argument positions, middle-distance reflexives can either be syntactically bound or be interpreted according to pragmatic and discourse conditions, suggesting that syntactic reflexives in American English extend beyond direct argument positions. We will also discuss uses of reflexives in British English and Chinese in comparison with those in American English. While these languages demonstrate variations in the distribution of syntactic reflexives and discourse reflexives, the relevant facts indicate that syntactic binding in natural languages may not necessarily be obligatory, and the licensing condition for syntactic reflexives and discourse reflexives is not exclusively disjunctive. Allowing the options of both syntactic binding and discourse coreference for establishing the relation between reflexives and their antecedents is a more general aspect of reflexives, which is consistent with the view proposed in Pollard & Xue 2001.

Culicover & Jackendoff (1997) argue that ‘left-subordinating’ and-constructions (e.g. You drink one more can of beer and I'm leaving) should be differently represented in the dimensions of syntax and semantics, being coordinate in the former, and subordinate in the latter. Here we expand on their point by showing that their case is not an isolated one, but that there are many other instances of coordination-subordination mismatches. We will show that these facts make sense within a theory of grammar such as Autolexical Grammar (Sadock 1991) in which the autonomy of different components of grammar is assumed. Given such a view it is possible to postulate primitive notions of coordination and subordination that apply equally well to various components of grammar and thus predict the possibility of coordination-subordination mismatches.

Only a small number of the world's languages have any kind of recorded history over more than a few generations, and in no case do records go back more than a few thousand years. From some perspectives, this doesn't matter. There are plenty of grammars to write and plenty of changes to describe accurately and then to explain in these recorded histories. Explanations for structural changes may be grounded in grammatical theory, and careful examination of historical changes, where the goal is explanation for how and why they happened, sometimes leads to innovations in grammatical theory, illuminating the nature of grammatical categories or the conditions for movement operations, for example. That has been the focus of some work on language change and data from changes have been used to argue for claims not only about grammatical theory but also about language acquisition, that children learn only from simple structures (DEGREE-0 COMPLEX) and that acquisition is cue-based (Lightfoot 1991, 1999). That is not to say, of course, that these propositions could not have been based on other kinds of data, but the fact is that they were based on analyses of historical change. From analyses of historical changes, we have learned things about the nature of the language faculty and about how it develops in children, unhampered by the limited inventory of changes.

T. Alexopoulou & D. Kolliakou: On linkhood, topicalization and clitic left dislocation

F. Cornish: ‘Downstream’ effects on the predicate in a Functional Grammar clause derivation

N. Duffield, L. White, J. Bruhn de Garavito, S. Montrul & P. Prévost: Clitic placement in L2 French: evidence from sentence matching

N. Sobin: The Comp-trace effect, the adverb effect and minimal CP

A. Spencer: Gender as an inflectional category

I. Toivonen: A directed motion construction in Swedish

N. Whitman: A categorial treatment to bare-NP adverbs

Z. Bao: Review article on MATTHEW Y. CHEN, Tone sandhi: patterns across Chinese dialects

A. Carnie & N. Mendoza-Denton: Functional is/n't formalism: an interactive review of Darnell et al. (1999) (M. DARNELL, E. MORAVCSIK, F. J. NEWMEYER, M. NOONAN & K. WHEATLEY (eds.), Functionalism and formalism in linguistics, vol. I: General papers & vol. II: Case studies

R. Freidin: Remarks on basic syntax. Review article on P. CULICOVER, Principles and parameters: an introduction to syntactic theory; J. MCCAWLEY, The syntactic phenomena of English; A. RADFORD, Syntactic theory and the structure of English: a Minimalist approach; and I. ROBERTS, Comparative syntax

T. Langendoen: Review article on M. ARONOFF & J. REES-MILLER, The handbook of linguistics

S. S. Mufwene: Colonization, globalization and the plight of ‘weak’ languages: a rejoinder to Nettle & Romaine's Vanishing voices. Review article on D. NETTLE & S. ROMAINE, Vanishing voices: the extinction of the world's languages