Volume 50, Issue 4

Most work on linking and intrusive /r/ is conducted within the context of theoretical model building. This paper contributes some empirical data on the phenomenon by conducting the first large-scale acoustic analysis on the production of linking and intrusive /r/ in spontaneous speech. We analyze linking and intrusive /r/ in the speech of New Zealanders born between 1900 and 1935 — a period during which New Zealand English had recently become reliably nonrhotic, and the system of linking and intrusive /r/ was newly emergent. The acoustic analysis shows that the more often a speaker tends to produce linking /r/, the lower the /r/ F3 tends to be. That is, across speakers, there is a robust correlation between the frequency of use of /r/, and the degree of constriction used. Consideration of the distributional patterns of words reveals that words which more often tend to occur before vowels are more likely to be produced with /r/ in linking environments. This suggests that the pattern of contexts in which we experience a word is stored in a way that affects the word's subsequent production. Moreover, the F3 of the /r/s appearing in these words which tend to be pre-vocalic are significantly lower. There is thus a relationship between frequency of use and degree, both when considered across speakers and across words.

In 1966, Paul Postal claimed that it is impossible to find grammatical sentences in which there is partial overlap between subject and object, i.e., in sentences like I like us . This observation lead, in direct scholarly descent, to the infamous Binding Principle B (Chomsky 1981). In this article we argue against Postal's original observation, as we claim that sentences with partial argument overlap are perfectly possible in English and sundry languages, although such expressions are conversationally constrained. The real-world situations that are described in such utterances are unusual, and thus the constructions are used infrequently, leading to uncertainty on the part of the speaker whether such expressions are well-formed or not. In the process of grammaticalization of pronouns into person-marking inflection this dispreference appears to turn into real impossibility.

From the seminal work by Aronoff (1994), the study of inflectional classes has become of interest in morphological theory. Most of our current knowledge of verb inflectional classes, also known as “conjugation classes”, remains circumscribed to European languages. On the other hand, the Oto-Manguean languages of Mexico have recently awoken interest because of their puzzling internal diversity and morphological abundance, but much of their morphological complexities remain poorly understood because of the lack of comprehensive materials. To increase our understanding of such classes, in this article I present an analysis of the three conjugation classes of Tilapa Otomi, an Otomian language close to extinction which belongs to the Oto-Pamean branch of Oto-Manguean. In the article, I also provide an example of how the canonicity of conjugation classes can be ranked following the approach advocated by Corbett (2009). The results of such an evaluation show that while two of the three classes of Tilapa Otomi are canonical to a certain extent, a third one is a very poor example of an inflectional class for the purposes of typological comparison.

The role of grammatical systems in profiling particular conceptual categories is used as a key in exploring questions concerning language specificity during the conceptualization phase in language production. This study focuses on the extent to which crosslinguistic differences in the concepts profiled by grammatical means in the domain of temporality ( grammatical aspect ) affect event conceptualization and distribution of attention when talking about motion events. The analyses, which cover native speakers of Standard Arabic, Czech, Dutch, English, German, Russian and Spanish, not only involve linguistic evidence, but also data from an eye tracking experiment and a memory test. The findings show that direction of attention to particular parts of motion events varies to some extent with the existence of grammaticized means to express imperfective/progressive aspect . Speakers of languages that do not have grammaticized aspect of this type are more likely to take a holistic view when talking about motion events and attend to as well as refer to endpoints of motion events, in contrast to speakers of aspect languages.

The received view on the distribution of polarity items is that positive polarity items (PPIs) such as something are found in positive contexts; they are anti-licensed by negative contexts, which license negative polarity items (NPIs) such as anything. PPI some can however be found under the scope of clause-mate negation. Such a paradoxical use has been analyzed by Szabolcsi (2004) as a special case of licensing: two negative polarity licensors are required by the internal constitution of some. Some is however shown to occur under the scope of a single clause-mate negative. Single and dual negative environments are argued to depend on the same determinism. This determinism is shown to be activated propositions in the sense of Dryer (1996). Propositions accessible to the hearer characterize the contexts where some and other PPIs come under the scope of clause-mate negation in English and other languages, as demonstrated by the transferable diagnostics proposed. The reason for this correlation is that activation brings the whole proposition into the focus of negation, which does not interact directly with the PPI to produce infelicitous interpretations. A simple and general pragmatic determinism accounts for the marked character of the sequences, that allows a clear distinction to be maintained between licensed NPIs and anti-licensed PPIs.