Volume 46, Issue 1

This article shows how syllabic and metrical constraints interact differently in two dialects of Bunun, despite their similarity in that both dialects exhibit modifications of vowel clusters in response to the O nset constraint. In Isbukun Bunun, foot forms are constrained both syllabically and moraically. Stress shifts from the unmarked penultimate syllable to final position under duress to satisfy both O nset and the requirement that heavy syllables must not stand in a prosodically weak position. In contrast, in Takituduh Bunun, metrical wellformedness is considered more important, so the preferred disyllabic foot forms are maintained at the cost of creating onsetless syllables. The analysis is formalized within Optimality Theory by ranking syllabic and metrical constraints differently in the two dialects. OT is advantageous in analyzing the data for two additional reasons: 1) the correlation between stress assignment in nonsuffixed and suffixed words in Isbukun can be directly captured by an output constraint, and 2) the metrical influence on syllabification in Takituduh can be readily handled by allowing syllabic and metrical constraints to interact in the same hierarchy. An implication of the Isbukun data for the properties of surface glides is that pre-peak glides can be moraic or not, depending on whether they follow a tautosyllabic consonant.

The present article reports on an investigation of one child's acquisition of the multiple senses of the preposition with from 2;0–4;0. Two competing claims regarding children's early representation and subsequent acquisition of with were investigated. The “multiple meanings” hypothesis predicts that children form individual form-meaning pairings for with as separate lexical entries. The “monosemy approach” (McKercher 2001) claims that children apply a unitary meaning by abstracting core features early in acquisition. The child's (“Brian”) speech and his input were coded according to eight distinguishable senses of with. The results showed that Brian first acquired the senses that were most frequent in the input (accompaniment, attribute, and instrument). Less common senses took much longer to emerge. A detailed analysis of the input showed that a variety of clues are available that potentially enable the child to distinguish among high frequency senses. The acquisition data suggested that the child initially applied a restricted one-to-one form-meaning mapping for with , which is argued to reflect the spatial properties of the preposition. On the basis of these results it is argued that neither the monosemy nor the multiple meanings approach can fully explain the data, but that the results are best explained by a combination of word learning principles and children's ability to categorize the contextual properties of each sense's use in the ambient language.

Previous research in the sentence comprehension literature has established that people expend resources keeping track of partially processed phrase structures during the process of comprehending sentences. An open question in this literature has been what units of syntactic expectation cost the human parser utilizes. Two viable options from the literature are (1) incomplete syntactic dependencies; and (2) predicted syntactic heads. This article provides a self-paced reading experiment from Japanese — a head-final language — that tests the incomplete dependency hypothesis. The materials in the current experiment manipulate the number of dependents of an upcoming verb, by manipulating (1) the presence/absence of a locative postpositional phrase modifier of the verb and (2) the presence/absence of a dative argument of the verb. The results failed to show any support for the incomplete dependency hypothesis, but were completely consistent with the predictions of the predicted head hypothesis. Taken with the results from the literature, these results offer support for the predicted head hypothesis.

This article uses instrumental data from natural speech to examine the phenomenon of pause placement within the verbal word in Dalabon, a polysynthetic Australian language of Arnhem Land. Though the phenomenon is incipient and in two sample texts occurs in only around 4% of verbs, there are clear possibilities for interrupting the grammatical word by pause after the pronominal prefix and some associated material at the left edge, though these within-word pauses are significantly shorter, on average, than those between words. Within-word pause placement is not random, but is restricted to certain affix boundaries; it requires that the paused-after material be at least dimoraic, and that the remaining material in the verbal word be at least disyllabic. Bininj Gun-wok, another polysynthetic language closely related to Dalabon, does not allow pauses to interrupt the verbal word, and the Dalabon development appears to be tied up with certain morphological innovations that have increased the proportion of closed syllables in the pronominal prefix zone of the verb. Though only incipient and not yet phonologized, pause placement in Dalabon verbs suggests a phonology-driven route by which polysynthetic languages may ultimately become less morphologically complex by fracturing into smaller units.

This article examines the use of the present perfect (PP) in Australian English using a corpus of stories told during radio chat-show programs and news reports. We find that the PP is used (i) as a narrative tense in spoken texts both with and without narrative present (NarPres); (ii) in sequences of clauses expressing temporal progression; and (iii) with some definite temporal adverbials denoting past time. Such uses are either unusual or unacceptable in other English varieties. A systematic comparison of contexts where NarPres and narrative PP are used in oral narratives reveals that the PP replaces the NarPres predominantly with verbs denoting events. Usage in news reports, where the narrative interpretation is not possible, suggests that a temporal ambiguity exists in the current interpretation of PP sentences. Analysis of lexical aspect shows that the majority of verbs used in the narrative PP are both durative and contain a process part, a fact that helps explain the sense of vividness achieved. At the discourse level, use of the PP enables the speaker to present situations as tightly connected. Such extensions in usage show a possible path for change for a category that is known to be historically unstable in its meaning

Susan Edwards: Fluent Aphasia . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xii + 230 pp. ISBN 978-0-521-79107-6. (Julie Ann Christiansen) Elena Filimonova, editor: Clusivity: Typology and Case Studies of the Inclusive–Exclusive Distinction. Typological Studies in Language. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: Benjamins, 2005. 436 pp. (François Jacquesson) Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola, Marjatta Palander, and Esa Pentillä, editors. Dialects Across Borders . Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2005. 291 pp. ISBN 90-272-4787-0. (Gunther De Vogelaer)

The editors of Linguistics would like to express thanks to the following colleagues who, though not members of the consulting editorial board, have nonetheless given generously of their time in evaluating manuscripts submitted for volume 45 of the journal.