Volume 24, Issue 1

In German the complementary distribution of [i] and [j] motivate a process of glide formation according to which /i/ surfaces as [j] when situated to the left of a vowel. The present study examines German words in which a prevocalic /i/ occurs after two consonants and demonstrates that the process is blocked from applying if the two consonants show a sonority rise. These data can be accounted for most elegantly in an Optimality Theoretic approach in which the constraint O nset is dominated by a local conjunction involving the S yllable C ontact L aw (SCL) and constraints militating against an onset consisting of a sonorant plus [j]. An additional set of examples shows that glide formation applies after two obstruents but is blocked after two nasals. It will be argued that the contrast between these two types of plateaus requires no added stipulation, but instead falls out from the same ranking.

It is often assumed that idiomatic constructions basically involve non-compositional meanings (Katz and Postal 1963; Fraser 1970; Chomsky 1980, among others) or special syntax-semantics correspondences (cf. Jackendoff 1990, 1997a, b, 2002). However, we agree with those linguists who claim that there are aspects of idioms that are compositional (Marantz 1996, 1997; Nunberg, Sag, and Wasow 1994). In this article, on the one hand, assuming Hale and Keyser's (2002) configurational theory of argument structure, we show that a class of idiomatic constructions which can be found in both “satellite-framed languages” like English and “verb-framed languages” like Catalan and Spanish (Talmy 1985, 1991, 2000) involves different applications of a lexical syntactic process of conflation. Unlike Jackendoff (1990, 1997a), we argue that the relevant crosslinguistic variation must be expressed in l(exical)-syntactic terms rather than via correspondence rules. On the other hand, assuming Marantz's (1996, 1997) division of labor between the computational system and the encyclopedia, we show the relevance of syntactic argument structures in structuring the compositional meaning of an idiomatic construction, and that of distinguishing between syntactically transparent compositional meanings and syntactically non-transparent non-compositional ones.

Romanian constructions in which a sentential adverb precedes a ‘that’ clause raise questions about the status of the adverb, the status of the selected clause, and the structure of the left periphery that allows for such a word order. The proposal is that certain pragmatic features ensuring the evidential reading on the adverb (i.e., features of speech acts in Speas & Tenny 2003) become visible to the syntactic computation. Accordingly, the structure of the left periphery extends further than ForceP (Rizzi 1997), as it also maps out the discourse set-up at the pragmatics-syntax interface.