The English (present) perfect (e.g. I have gone) has been extensively studied in the theoretical literature on tense and aspect. The pluperfect (I had gone) has by contrast received relatively little attention, and the relationship between the present perfect and the pluperfect has been virtually ignored. Descriptive grammars of English also tend to say little about the latter two issues, beyond distinguishing cases such as (1)–(6), where the pluperfect seems to be the ‘past of the perfect’, from instances like (7)–(11), where the pluperfect is the ‘past of the past’ (cf. Thomson & Martinet, 1969: 112–13; Berland-Delépine, 1971: 95–6; Guitard, 1966: 206–7; Palmer, 1974: 54):

The analysis of verb-particle constructions, or verb-preposition constructions, as I will call them, has-given rise to much debate in the linguistic literature over a long period of time. Traditionally, a bipartite classification of these structures has been assumed consisting of a class of ‘phrasal verbs’, such as those in (1) and (2), and a class of ‘prepositional verbs’, such as those in (3):

(1) I switched the light off.

(2) I looked the information up.

(3) Look at the prospectus: it clearly states that your admission depends on your examination results.

In the literature on English tense usage, expressions of futurity such as

(1) (a) I will/shall leave next week.

(b) I'm going to leave next week.

have already received a lot of attention, especially so in the pedagogical descriptive tradition of English linguistics (cf. Close, 1977; Haegeman, 1981, 1983; Leech, 1971; Quirk et al., 1985; Palmer, 1974, 1979; Wekker, 1976, etc.). Although these accounts are attractive, they raise further questions because most of them do not propose to deal with the problem against a formal theoretical background. As a consequence, the rules formulated to describe the use of shall/will or be going to in (1) tend to be intuitive and often do not really allow any decisive choice to be made in many instances of usage. On the other hand, Reichenbach type analyses of tense interpretation are usually mainly concerned with the general problem of tense representation and treat both examples in (1) as illustrations of future tense without detailed discussion of the contrasts between them.

Lexical Phonologists have made a number of claims that are directly relevant to the study of sound change in progress, two of which I wish to examine here. First, phonetically gradient patterns of variation are alleged to be controlled by rules which operate outside the lexicon. Second, phonological rules applying within the lexicon may only refer to feature values that are already marked in underlying representations. This paper sets out to test these claims against empirical data of the sort that have been reported in the sociolinguistic literature. While the first claim appears to be in tune with some informal analyses already offered by sociolinguists, the second is contradicted by at least some of the evidence.

Frisian is well known for the fact that it has a very rich inventory of vowels and diphthongs. In addition to nine short vowels and their long counterparts, it also has schwa, five falling diphthongs which end in a high vowel, and six centralizing diphthongs, some of which alternate with what traditionally are called rising diphthongs (cf. Zantema, 1984), the so-called breaking.

This paper will be concerned with the analysis of sentences like those in (1), which I think are all uncontroversial examples of the construction that is generally called ‘gapping’.

It is an unquestioned assumption of all recent discussions of semantic presupposition that a presuppositional semantics admitting of truth-value gaps depends upon and therefore implies a semantic ambiguity of natural language negation (SAN). Such theories have been criticized and defended on that basis. This essay invites the reader to contemplate the idea that this picture of things is fundamentally mistaken.

Welsh differs from English in a number of ways. The most obvious point is that it is a VSO language, but it also has distinctive agreement phenomena and clitics. For this reason, it is natural to ask of any theory of syntax that has been developed primarily on the basis of English: how can it handle Welsh? Welsh has had fairly extensive attention within the Government-Binding theory (see, for example, Harlow, 1981; Sproat, 1985; Sadler, 1988, and Hendrick, 1988). It has also had some attention within Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG) (see Harlow, 1983; Borsley, 1983; 1988a). In this paper, I will consider how some of the central features of Welsh can be accommodated within Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). This is a framework developed over the last few years by Carl Pollard, Ivan Sag and others, which seeks to combine the insights of GPSG, categorial grammar and certain other theories (see Pollard, 1985, 1988; Sag & Pollard, 1987, and Pollard & Sag, 1988). In fact, I will be mainly concerned with the version of HPSG developed in Borsley (1986, 1987, 1988 b), but I will also have something to say about standard HPSG.

I have argued elsewhere (Hengeveld, 1987b) that for a proper treatment of modality the clause model used in Functional Grammar (Dik, 1978, 1980) should be adapted in such a way that a number of different layers can be distinguished. My main argument there was that predications, used in Functional Grammar to represent linguistic expressions, have two different functions: a DESCRIPTIVE function and a CONTENT function. A predication not only gives a description of the external situation the speaker refers to within his speech act, it also represents the prepositional content or message unit processed within that speech act. Subjective and evidential modalities, which express a propositional attitude, should take a predication in its contentrepresenting function in their scope, whereas objective modalities, i.e. those modalities that are concerned with the actuality status of a State of Affairs (SoA), should take a predication in its SoA-designating function in their scope. A clause model should therefore be able to distinguish between these two functions of predications.

It has long been observed that, although proper names are mainly used to identify individuals uniquely in our universe of discourse, and therefore have a clearly referential function, they are also used connotatively, when, for example, they stand as a shorthand for whatever characteristics a specific individual may at one time have been associated with. These two uses can be illustrated in the following sentences:

(1) Judas was Jesus Christ's disciple who betrayed Him.

(2) Every great man nowadays has his disciples, but it is always Judas who writes the biography (Jespersen, 1965: 66).

In this article I will discuss the syntactic properties of participial adjuncts in Eastern Bengali. From a GB-point of view, these constructions are quite interesting, because they can contain a nominative which is apparently not assigned by AGR, and because they show a quite intricate pattern of possibilities for coreference and disjoint reference, with some seemingly arbitrary differences among the three types of adjuncts. In Section 2, I shall present the empirical data for these constructions. In Section 3 I will discuss the relevant general syntactic principles of Eastern Bengali, specifically those responsible for Case-assignment, word-order, pro-drop (including ergative verbs) and binding properties. In Section 4, I will show that the characteristics of the participial constructions, including the apparently haphazard binding properties, follow from the general syntactic principles of Eastern Bengali, if we assume one simple statement for each type of adjunct. No further construction-specific stipulations need be made. To the extent that the analysis I propose can be upheld, it will constitute indirect support for the GB-mechanisms that are crucially involved in it. Apart from various principles of configurationality and binding, I will make use of the idea that there is no abstract AGR, in these cases at least, and also of the analysis of pro-drop as a silent clitic phenomenon, proposed in Safir (1985). It is of course a fact that the principles of grammar I appeal to still need to be investigated more carefully, and may have to be modified on the basis of data not yet taken into account or accurately analyzed. However, as they stand, the relevant principles of GB-theory appear to be able to account for the Eastern Bengali facts I discuss here. Apart from these more theoretical concerns, this paper naturally has an important descriptive component too, which I hope will make it also interesting to linguists working in a different theoretical framework and may stimulate linguists specifically concerned with Bengali to explore further the intricascies of this area of Bengali grammer.

With a few honourable exceptions, phonologists have, until recently, generally assumed the phonological component to be organized along completely different lines from the other components of the grammar. Phonological phenomena were mainly viewed as accidental, language specific, and unprincipled. Whereas some theoretical parallels between syntax and phonology have been drawn (cf. the role of the cycle in both domains and the extensive literature on ordering), there have been few attempts to see if principles of Universal Grammar could be found in phonology as well as in syntax and semantics. Increasingly, however, phonology is now being regarded as a system of principles along with parameters defining the class of human phonological Systems. In such a framework there are no rules of the sort: A → B/C→D. Phonological phenomena result from principles and parameters governing phonological representations and structures present in a particular language. Along these lines, recent work in phonology has suggested that Phonological Form (PF), like the other components of the grammar, is subject to certain fundamental principles. For example, it was proposed by Andersen and Jones in the early 1970s (and pursued by Ewen, Durand and others) that the relations of dependency that determine how syntactic constituents are organized, also determine how segments are grouped together in a given structure. For their part Lowenstamm & Kaye (1982) proposed that a theory of government could account for certain phonological processes such as vowel shortening in closed syllables. Stephen Anderson (1982) and Levin (1985) have proposed that X-bar principles govern the representation of syllables. Specifically, they have proposed that the Rhyme and the syllable as a whole are projections of the syllabic head, the Nucleus.

There is a widespread current assumption that the semantic relations underlying linguistic constructions reflect the way human beings ineluctably, and hence universally, perceive events and situations. This assumption will be questioned in this paper. To make the point, a linguistic construction purportedly expressing the instrumental case will be examined. It will be convenient here to juxtapose my treatment of this construction with the one proposed by case grammarians, and by Fillmore in particular. However, the discussion has implications for semantic relations in any linguistic theory, whether they appear there as semantic roles, thematic relations, theta roles, or whatever. These implications will be discussed in the final section.

Culicover (1976:152) states that ‘the imperative is an idiosyncratic construction in most languages’. One of the aims of this article is to show that as far as this construction in the English language is concerned, this is an overstatement if we give careful consideration to the structural properties of this construction in a restrictive framework such as Government-Binding theory. Given the proposals in current generative grammar concerning the relations between COMP, INFL, V and their corresponding projections, it is worth investigating what the syntactic representation of the imperative may look like.