Volume 46, Issue 5

This article addresses the question of the syntactic functional relations between English auxiliaries and the verbal elements that follow them. There are two basic types of analysis: either the auxiliary is the head and the VP is the complement, or the “main verb” is the head and the auxiliary is a feature-bearing modifier. It is argued here that there is no single correct analysis for all English auxiliaries: some ( do, have, will/shall, would ) are feature-bearers while others are argument-taking predicates.

In an accusative with infinitive sentence like I have seen faith accomplish miracles , the accusative faith is assigned a thematic role by the embedded verb accomplish , and not by the main verb seen . This kind of sentence has been analyzed as involving either “raising to object” or a “small clause”. The present article presents reasons to prefer the former approach, and especially the understanding of raising to object as structure sharing, as in Lexical Functional Grammar. A main point to be made is that accusative with infinitive sentences in Norwegian do not always involve raising. The accusative with infinitive is syntactically and semantically ambiguous: it is assigned either no thematic role or it is assigned a thematic role by the main verb. When the accusative is assigned a thematic role, the accusative with infinitive is an equi (i.e., control) sentence. Several syntactic arguments are presented showing that some accusative with infinitive sentences are equi sentences and some are raising sentences. However, it is also demonstrated that all accusative with infinitive sentences share important syntactic properties. This supports the argument that syntactic theory must allow equi and raising sentences to be syntactically very similar. The theory of control and complementation of Lexical Functional Grammar is shown to give the correct predictions.

This article discusses Romance data corroborating a multifarious account of evidentiality in which different dimensions connected to the source of information are distinguished. It will be demonstrated that the diverse distributional patterns of lexical items as opposed to grammatical forms in the domains of inferential and reportative evidentiality can hardly be accounted for unless a distinction is made between the source of evidence, intended as the locus where the information is acquired (internal or external source with respect to the speaker), and the mode of knowing, i.e., the process leading to the acquisition of the information (directly visual, indirectly through inferences, reports).

This article examines informal conversations showing codeswitching and convergence in the speech of bilingual or trilingual adolescents in the Danish-German border region. Discussion emphasizes the types of convergence that often happen in the verb phrase. Semantic changes in surface level elements of one language under the influence of abstract level semantics in another language are most frequent. Earlier studies on language contact have often concentrated their discussions on such changes. In contrast, this article focuses on changes that have been less often recognized as even possible, changes at the levels of predicate-argument structure. For example, a main verb in German occurs in a string of morphemes all, or almost all, from German, but the thematic roles (i.e., how the roles are realized on the surface) or other aspects of sub-categorization that this verb determines are based on the abstract structure of Danish. Thus, this article demonstrates that predicate-argument structure is less rigid when languages are in contact than generally assumed.

The West-Limburgian dialect of Hasselt has a word accent distinction comparable to the distinction between accent 1 and accent 2 in Swedish and Norwegian. To understand how Hasselt speakers interpret the accentual contrast, a reading task was carried out in which words differing by accent class only were embedded in different prosodic contexts. The results suggest that Hasselt speakers, like speakers of the more eastern dialects of Venlo, Roermond, and Cologne, mark accent 2 by lexical tone, while accent 1 remains lexically toneless. Hasselt speakers differ, however, both in the realization and the distribution of the accentual contrast. These differences are attributed to variation in tonal association. While the eastern speakers associate tones to sonorant moras, Hasselt speakers associate tones to syllables.