Volume 30, Issue 2

The status of the expression a gente (lit. the people) in European Portuguese is the topic of this paper. We revisit its classical analysis, treating it as a pronoun, and the explanation for the patterns of agreement it may trigger on the inflected verb. In particular, the paper addresses Taylor's (2009) argument against the pronominal status of a gente , and argues that it can be analyzed as a regular DP. We compare a gente with other pronouns, showing that there are more robust regularities than those described in Taylor's arguments, but adopt part of his analysis to accommodate the variable status of agreement patterns under a phase-based approach.

In this article, we discuss non-local doubling in Greek and Turkish, a hitherto unanalysed aspect of these languages, and its implications for the interfaces. In non-local doubling, the reduplicated item is not located next to its base but at some other position in the clause depending on language-specific constraints. Interestingly, the attested type of doubling is not purely sensitive to syntactic nodes as in other languages (e.g. Dutch, Afrikaans), since we show that it targets a prosodic constituent. We argue that both Greek and Turkish employ an empty emphatic morpheme which has a two-legged exponence: One exponent is some phonological phrase in a clause and the other is its clone, placed farther than its source at the right periphery of the clause. We further discuss the variation between Greek and Turkish in terms of the prosodic structure of the two languages, showing that the differences lie in (i) the prosodic status of the copied element, (ii) the relative degree of free word order, and (iii) the properties of the right periphery (postverbal/postsentential). We thus propose that doubling is a general mechanism found across languages, and it is not only morphological or syntactic units, but also prosodic ones that can serve as input to this ubiquitous process.

This paper presents an overview of phonological relationships that are “intermediate” between contrast and allophony. As has been observed for many years, such intermediate relationships occur widely in the world's languages, yet they are often simply relegated to being exceptional cases or ignored in linguistic analyses. While there is a set of criteria that can be used to define relationships, these criteria may conflict with one another or be inadequate in certain cases. Thus, relationships may be intermediate for a number of reasons, including issues with: the concept of predictability of distribution; the existence of foreign or specialized strata of a language; variability and gradience; frequency; theory-internal classifications; and phonetic factors. Each of these is discussed in turn, with examples from the literature. In addition to this basic typology of intermediate phonological relationships, the paper also lays out a number of different kinds of approaches that have been taken to accommodate intermediate relationships in the phonological grammar and summarizes the issues to be resolved in future work.

This paper reports on two experiments concerning the prosodic realization and perception of various sentences with three or four coordinated names in German. The expression of prosodic boundaries, as evidenced by pitch and duration, is shown to signal the depth of syntactic embedding of the conjuncts and also the branching direction of the co-ordination structure. The results of the production experiment inspire a model of syntax-prosody mapping, which assumes that the strength of a prosodic boundary after a given constituent is a function of a) the syntactic relation to the following constituent and b) the depth of its syntactic embedding. Comparison reveals that the proposed model provides better predictions than other current approaches to prosodic boundary strength. The perception experiment indicates that listeners recognize recursively embedded coordination structures on the basis of the prosodic form of the sentence. We argue for a recursive representation of prosodic constituent structure at the level of the phonological phrase and above.

This study proposes a unified account of consonant gemination in external sandhi in Italian, also known as Raddoppiamento phenomena. As opposed to the common interpretation of Raddoppiamento as being driven by well-formedness conditions on Italian rhymes, it argues that gemination in sandhi ought to be analysed as a fortition process driven by positional factors. Not only does this account unify all of the Italian Raddoppiamento phenomena (backwards Raddoppiamento , synchronic and idiosyncratic Raddoppiamento Sintattico ) but it provides a picture of the phenomena that is consistent from a theoretical, diachronic, geographic, cross-linguistic and synchronic point of view.

Several phonologists have argued in recent years against constituent structure in phonology with a variety of arguments, claiming instead that all phonological relations are linear. Restricting itself to syllable structure, this paper claims, first, that the linearists necessarily disregard the conceptual evidence which we have in favour of constituency and headedness in phonology. Further it shows that the primary empirical pieces of evidence in favour of linearism are not valid, and that several other empirical arguments can be adduced against it. Finally, it is argued that by taking the linearist arguments seriously before rejecting them, we have improved our understanding of the nature of the syllable.