Volume 41, Issue 3-4

L anguage competence has sometimes been used as an idealized notion which somehow embodies the collective knowledge of a speech community in the person of an ideal speaker-hearer. However, the basic notion is the competence of an individual in a language. If the language in question is not the native language, it is taken for granted that the person may be proficient in the language to some degree. The standard is then generally set by native competence. However, native competence is itself a matter of degree. Consequently, objective criteria are required by which one may assess the competence of a person in one or more languages by a common standard. This presupposes a notion of linguistic competence which has empirical import. The paper tries to articulate a concept of linguistic competence which can be converted into language tests. A test was devised on this basis and administered to groups of native and non-native speakers of German. The results of the experiment suggest that there is no difference in principle between native and foreign language competence, whether on theoretical or empirical grounds.

This paper examines the restriction on argument fronting in English adverbial clauses, as in * While this paper I was revising last week, I suddenly thought of another analysis , this in contrast with the fact that Clitic Left Dislocation (CLLD) patterns are allowed in the Romance analogues. An analysis is elaborated which explores the hypothesis that adverbial clauses are derived by movement of an operator to their left periphery. Intervention effects are thus predicted in English because the movement of the operator interacts with the movement of the fronted argument. No such intervention effects will arise with Romance CLLD as the latter is independently known not to give rise to the same intervention effects. Some cross-linguistic consequences of the proposal are explored.

The aim of this paper is to compare the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic characteristics of two left-detachment constructions in French, introduced respectively by quant à and en fait de . Although both have been described as topic-marking constructions, they appear to differ substantially in each of the following parameters: the characteristics of the detached constituent, its relation to the matrix clause, and its embedding possibilities. Most of these differences can be accounted for by the fact that the detached constituent in the en fait de construction is non-referential and therefore cannot fully acquire topic status, unlike the detached nominal in the quant à construction, which is a prototypical topic-marking construction. More specifically, the quant à and en fait de constructions are shown to differ crucially in terms of two semantic attributes of topichood: addressation and frame-setting.

It has often been claimed that certain verb-subject configurations can convey a specificational meaning, but it has not been previously shown that they can also have the same syntactico-semantic and discourse properties as other types of sentences which mainly have a specificational meaning, such as clefts and pseudoclefts. In this article I examine Verb – Object – Subject (VOS) word order in Romance, and show that it shares the syntactic and semantic properties of specificational sentences. I also provide a description of the discourse functions of VOS in French, Spanish and Italian, and conclude that these differ significantly in each of the three languages. I argue that such differences follow naturally from the specificational nature of VOS clauses, and reflect the different functional types of specificational sentences attested cross-linguistically.

The structure and discourse correlates of left-dislocations are discussed and compared with those that have been identified in Present Day English. Significant factors in Old English are shown to be the animacy and quantificational status of the dislocated nominal; complexity is an additional factor. Several functions considered important in Present Day English such as reintroduction of a referent after a long gap, contrast, and licensing of topic continuity are not characteristic of Old English left-dislocations. Suggestions are made about how work on contemporary English left-dislocations and on comparative studies of information structure might be informed by the characteristics of Old English left-dislocations.

Annalisa Baicchi, Cristiano Broccias & Andrea Sansò, eds. 2005. Modelling thought and constructing meaning. Cognitive models in interaction . (Materiali Linguistici – Università di Pavia 50). Milano: FrancoAngeli. Pp. 252. ISBN 8846468899. (A d F oolen ) Giuliano Bernini & Marcia L. Schwartz, eds. 2006. Pragmatic organization of discourse in the languages of Europe . (Empirical Approaches to Language Typology / EUROTYP 20–8). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Pp. xxiv + 632. ISBN 9783110157536. (H. W ind C owles & M aria P olinsky ) Olga Borik. 2006. Aspect and reference time . (Oxford Studies in Theoretical Linguistics 13). Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. Pp. xii + 226. ISBN 0199291284 (hb); ISBN 0199291292 (pb). (R oumyana S labakova ) Renaat Declerck. 2006. The grammar of the English verb phrase . Vol. 1: The grammar of the English tense system. A comprehensive analysis , in cooperation with Susan Reed & Bert Cappelle. (Topics in English Linguistics 60–1). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Pp. 846. ISBN 9783110185898. (P eter C. C ollins ) Tasaku Tsunoda & Taro Kageyama, eds. 2006. Voice and grammatical relations. In honor of Masayoshi Shibatani . (Typological Studies in Language 65). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Pp. xviii + 342. ISBN 9027229767. (A ndrea S ansò ) Debra Ziegeler. 2006. Interfaces with English aspect: Diachronic and empirical studies . (Studies in Language Companion Series 82). Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Pp. xv + 325. ISBN 9027230927. (E rik S mitterberg )