Band 48, Heft 3

This paper addresses restrictions on the formation of verb phrases containing modal auxiliaries in present-day English. It will be argued and demonstrated below that well-known data about the English modals can be interpreted and understood as a matter of inflectional morphology. In particular, the possibility that non-indicative mood is an inherent feature of the English modals is a concept that remains to be investigated. It appears that an analysis focusing on non-indicative mood may indeed open up new explanatory perspectives on modal auxiliary syntax in present-day English. The proposal to be presented below is that we should investigate the morphology of non-indicative mood as an interesting concept for the explanation of the morphosyntactic restrictions. It may account for not only the English-internal facts, but also for certain cross-linguistic syntactic differences between English and other Germanic languages in the area of modal auxiliary syntax.

Since at least Kruszewski (1881) it has been taken as an important task to sort out the alternations that involve morphology from those that are purely phonological. This dichotomy is largely followed by Natural Phonology (NP, cf. Donegan and Stampe 2009 for example), and by Generative Phonotactics (Singh 1987). Both these approaches insist on a strict delimitation (not a gradient one) between phonological and morphological phenomena. In this paper, I will first re-examine the problem of domain delimitation (Singh 1991) within NP by bringing in a more systematic use of the criterion of semioticity, which is not as often cited (but see Dressler 1980; Zwicky 1982; Ford and Singh 1983) but deserves attention. In order to do this, it will help to look at a case that is universally deemed to be clear: Final Devoicing in German. Because the delimitation of phonology from morphology is essential both for synchrony and diachrony (to classify alternations and to understand their transitions from one module to the other), I will then turn to diachrony for additional support for the criterion of semioticity as well as spell out how it can help us understand the phenomenon of morphologization.

The present paper examines the construal of the verb myśleć ‘think’ in Polish from the perspective of Cognitive Grammar and Functional Linguistics. Cognitive corpus-driven and quantitative methodology (e.g., Glynn and Fischer 2010) is applied to reveal the formal and semantic correlations obtaining between a set of unprefixed and prefixed verb forms of myśleć ‘think’, instantiating and profiling various aspects of the category in question. The quantitative configurational method (Geeraerts et al. 1994) reveals the “behavioral profiles” (Gries 2006) of the verb, based on the “usage features” (Glynn 2009) associated with it. The notion of subjective and objective construal, as developed by Langacker (1990, 2006), is further elaborated on by more functional dimensions of perspective-taking, as put forward by Nuyts (2001), Verhagen (2008) and Traugott (1995, 2010).

This paper examines the production of English monophthong vowels by a group of Iranian learners of English based on an instrumental analysis of the vowels. Data in two speaking contexts were elicited from a group of learners between the ages of 16 and 17. To examine vowel quality, the first and second formant frequencies of the vowels were measured. These values and the duration of the vowels were compared to investigate the extent to which vowel contrast was maintained. The findings suggest that the learners tend not to contrast vowels (in terms of quality) when there is only one category of a similar vowel in Persian (e.g. English /i:/–/ɪ/ and /ʊ/–/u:/) whereas quality rather than length contrast is maintained for /e/–/æ/, both of which occur in Persian.

To test situation aspect (lexical aspect, aktionsart), especially telicity, and/or to classify situations into Vendlerian classes (states, activities, accomplishments, and achievements), aspectual literature has been standardly relying on Dowty’s (1979) diagnostic tests. These are of three kinds – lexical co-occurrence, grammatical co-occurrence and logical entailment tests. This paper points out problems associated with implementing the tests. It argues that Dowty’s tests can give false results, mainly due to two factors. First, some of the tests are based on volition rather than aspectual features. Second, upon reviewing the various workings of the phenomenon of aspect shift and coercion, I show how it can affect the results of Dowty’s tests. Coupled with the fact that some of the tests are not applicable to some Vendlerian classes and with the problem of varying judgments among native speakers, Dowty’s tests for Vendler classes are far from being watertight. Awareness of these problems is imperative when testing situation aspect.

This brief paper constitutes a critical evaluation of the silent PP-hypothesis of Hornstein and Polinsky (2010), a key element in their accounting for the bleeding of the Minimal Link Condition in a movement-based account of Subject Control across an object. It appears that while their evidence for the presence of the silent PP in constructions with the verb promise in English is well motivated, such an assumption cannot be adopted for Polish, a language where the indirect object of subject control verbs and control shift verbs is not found within a PP and can even appear in a structural case (Accusative). Thus from the perspective of comparative studies the inadequacy of the silent PP-hypothesis is a considerable problem for the movement-based approach to control. Yet, as a brief survey of other current solutions to the MLC problem with promise shows, no alternative proposal is free from serious limitations of its own.