Volume 61, Issue 5

We consider two asymmetries reported in the literature on word prosodic systems: the tendency to allow more prosodic contrast in nouns than in verbs and the tendency to avoid stress on functional material. We focus on the interaction between these two tendencies and propose a formal mechanism to handle this interaction couched in Optimality Theory. In a case study on a group of standard Serbo-Croatian varieties that have predictable stress in verbs but contrastive stress in nouns, we develop an analysis of predictable and morphologically conditioned stress assignment. Our analysis features a family of constraints militating against stress on non-lexical material on three different levels: stress on inflection proper ( *Infl-Stress- 1 ), stress on non-lexical material in the locality domain of inflection ( *Infl-Stress- 2 ), and stress on non-lexical material altogether ( *Infl-Stress- 3 ). Analyzing a class of prosodically exceptional denominal and borrowed verbs, we show that lexical-category effects exist between and within categories: denominal verbs allow exceptional preservation of nominal stress, which leads to additional prosodic contrast in this class of verbs. Finally, we explore the option of subsuming exceptionally contrast-preserving borrowed verbs under denominal verbs, offering arguments in favor of the hotly debated view from the literature that verbs are universally borrowed as denominal .

The current article argues that the multiple nominative constructions of the Japanese type do not exist in Standard Arabic. Based on evidence from binding, A′-interception and Case, the article shows that the so-called ‘broad subject’ is a clitic left-dislocated element base generated in the A′-domain. The article thus follows the spirit of the analysis proposed by Landau (e.g., Landau, Idan. 2009. Against broad subjects in Hebrew. Lingua 119(1). 89–101), who denies the existence of broad subjects in Hebrew, concluding that broad subjects do not exist in Semitic languages at all.

Language aptitude is known to be a strong predictor of success in late second-language (L2) learning in instructional settings but is generally assumed to be irrelevant for native language (L1) acquisition. We investigated the relationship between language aptitude and L1 grammatical proficiency in the two studies reported here. Language aptitude was measured by means of a newly-developed test of grammatical sensitivity (Studies 1 and 2) and the Language Analysis subtest of the Pimsleur Language Aptitude Battery (Study 1), whereas grammatical proficiency was assessed by a grammaticality judgment task in Study 1 and a picture selection task in Study 2. The results of the two studies reveal a robust relationship between language aptitude and L1 grammatical proficiency that is remarkably consistent across different measures for both variables and appears to hold across the board for a variety of grammatical structures. These results fit well with the proposal that explicit learning may play an important role not only in adult L2 learning but also in L1 acquisition and raises questions about the validity of arguments for a fundamental difference between L1 and L2 acquisition based on the premise that only the latter is related to aptitude.

This article argues that the [+distal] feature of demonstrative that is also present in complementizer that , and has not bleached away. In particular, we argue that complementizer that is referential: it refers to an element in the Shared Discourse Space (an extension of the Common Ground) that can be seen as distal. This allows us to explain (i) that direct speech patterns with [−distal] ( Sue said this /# that: “It is raining” ) while indirect speech patterns with [+distal] ( Sue said * this / that it is raining ); (ii) the use of that in exclamatives ( That bio industry is still allowed! ); and (iii) that optional that is more frequently used when there is some sort of context between Speaker and Addressee. This last phenomenon has parallels in Romance complementizers derived from Latin quod , which can likewise be seen as [+distal]. We propose that [+distal] is a marker of Addressee involvement , which can account for all these phenomena, and can be extended to demonstrative uses of that . In exophoric contexts, [+distal] additionally marks actual distance . The interpretation of Addressee involvement and actual distance depends on context; we propose that it is derived from the interaction between the syntactic DP/CP domain and the pragmatic exophoric/endophoric distinction.

This article analyzes quantitatively the effect of five linguistic features on the position of the object in Early Middle English. Four of them have long been explored in the literature: object type, object length, clause type and type of verbal cluster (±auxiliary). The fifth feature, lability, has so far been given less attention. Lability is the possibility that a given verb alternates between an unaccusative and transitive frame without morphological coding. This makes lability an instance of morphological syncretism. This study tests the hypothesis that, for disambiguation purposes, labile transitive verbs show a more consistent word order (VO in this case) than non-labile transitives. If confirmed, the hypothesis would point to a non-trivial connection between the increase of labile verbs and the move towards a fixed word order in Early Middle English. Such a connection has gone unnoticed in the existing literature, which, as far as the influence of morphological syncretism on word order is concerned, has focused almost exclusively on the effect of the loss of case marking. A total of 961 transitive clauses with labile and non-labile verbs were tagged for the above-mentioned five variables. Their effect on the choice between VO and OV is measured using statistical analysis. The conclusion is that verb lability is a significant predictor of VO in the period under scrutiny, with labile verbs thus spearheading the shift towards a stable word order pattern (VO) in English. The correlation between verb lability and word order rigidification demonstrated for Early Middle English in this article may be relevant for studies on word order from multiple perspectives: language-specific, typological, synchronic and diachronic.

The present study focuses on German word-initial consonant clusters and asks whether feature-based phonotactic preferences correlate with patterns of type and token frequencies in present-day usage. The corpus-based analyses are based on a comprehensive list of such clusters, representing current usage, and on a number of feature-based phonotactic preferences. Correlating the variables by means of a correlation analysis and a regression analysis leads to a number of observations relevant to the general topic of featural-segmental structures versus usage. First, out of eighteen correlations between (raw and logarithmic) type and token frequencies, and preferred feature patterns, only one significant correlation was found. Second, a regression analysis led to similar results: out of thirteen variables tested, only two contribute to logarithmic type and token frequencies. Only a limited set of cluster properties investigated in the present paper constitutes a relevant predictor of frequency measures. The study thus demonstrates, in accordance with other recent evidence, that preferred phonetic/phonological structures and their usage frequency constitute two separate domains for which distributions may not have to coincide.

Determiner spreading, the phenomenon whereby adnominal modifiers carry an ‘additional’ determiner, has been studied extensively for a variety of languages, most notably Greek, Semitic, and Scandinavian languages. Interestingly, the same phenomenon occurs in the Bantu language Rukiga. We show how the Rukiga augment is parallel to the Greek determiner in the context of modification, and how it triggers a restrictive reading when present on a larger class of modifiers than familiar so far: relative clauses, adjectives, possessives, and certain quantifiers. Considering its morphosyntactic and interpretational properties, we propose that the variation in the presence versus absence of the augment on modifiers is due to different underlying structures, applying an analysis of determiner spreading in terms of a reduced relative clause structure.