In this paper we argue that a number of unexplained and stipulative properties of the grammar (such as the Generalized Extended Projection Principle, Binary Branching, Labeling) find a functional explanation, if we view them as correlates of a general desire for the grammar to maximize trees in such a way that they result in a Fibonacci-like sequence of maximal categories.

This paper aims to spell out the post-syntactic operations involved in the placement of second-position subject clitics in Alsea, an extinct language of the central Oregon coast. It assumes that the subject clitic is a syntactic head that is moved to a complementizer position in syntax, but is linearized in a post-syntactic morphological component in PF; operations in morphology account for the deviation of the subject clitic from its syntactic output position. Based on Buckley (1994), this paper proposes a two-stage post-syntactic derivation to account for the subject clitic distribution in Alsea: (i) concatenation, in which the subject clitic adjoins to an adjacent head of the same type to satisfy its suffixal requirement, (ii) prosodic readjustment, whereby a clitic whose morphological host is non-overt, leans rightward to procliticize to the first prosodic constituent.

The Japanese causative verb exhibits the effects of blocking, whereby a causative verb (V-sase) is blocked from taking on lexical meaning if there is a competing lexical causative verb (Miyagawa (1980, 1984)). Given that the causative verb is most reasonably viewed as being formed in syntax, the blocking effect leads to the conclusion that the lexical causatives also are formed in syntax, contrary to the traditional view. A similar blocking effect is observed with English causatives formed with make, and this, together with what we can observe in Japanese, suggest that blocking is best viewed as one that arises in the process of deriving the causative verb (e.g., Embick and Marantz (2008)), and not as a result of a filter on the output of the generative component (e.g., Kiparsky (2005)).

This paper seeks to evaluate and quantify the acoustic cues utilized in the production and perception of intonational meanings in English. Although much previous work has started from observed contours and looked for their meaning based on the context where they were found (Ward and Hirschberg 1985, Gussenhoven 1984, Crystal 1969), the opposite approach is taken here. Arbitrary contours generated in a systematic way (detailed below) were presented to study participants, who were then asked to rate these items on a series of semantic scales (scales with antonyms on either end). The items were word-contour pairs consisting of one of four words in combination with one of twenty-seven contours. Contours were created on a grid which had three time points and three pitch levels. The words were chosen to have a variety of types of semantic/dictionary meanings. Participants’ ratings were used to determine the emotive meaning of the contours, and thus the degree to which the contours interrelate. As defined by Osgood (1957), the emotive meaning of an utterance or word does not relate directly to its dictionary meaning, but instead relates to the location of that utterance or word in the semantic space. By looking at what items cluster together in semantic space and comparing the acoustic and lexical/semantic characteristics of these items it is possible to understand which dimensions play a role in the assignment of meaning to intonational contours. Results show that the judgments on the semantic scales are influenced by both the intonational contours and the lexical items. Multivariate Analysis of Variance tests were performed to determine what acoustic characteristics contributed the most to the formation of clusters of items. It was found that the presence versus absence of High pitch points in the contour as well as the word used to convey the contour were the most influential factors for the participants. The approach taken here is able to uncover new shades of intonational meaning, as well as pinpoint the acoustic cues used to assess these meanings.

The two extant approaches to reduplication in Distributed Morphology (DM) are: (i) the readjustment approach, where reduplication is claimed to result from a readjustment operation on some stem triggered by a (typically null) affix; and (ii) the affixation approach, where reduplication is claimed to result from the insertion of a special type of Vocabulary Item (i.e. a reduplicative affix–“reduplicant” or “Red”) which gets inserted into a syntactic node in order to discharge some morphosyntactic feature(s), but which receives its own phonological content from some other stem (i.e. its “base”) in the output. This paper argues from phonologically-conditioned allomorphy pertaining to base-dependence, as in the case of durative reduplication in Tawala, that the latter approach best accounts for a necessary distinction between “reduplicants” and “bases” as different types of morphemes which display different phonological effects, including “the emergence of the unmarked” effects, in many languages. I also defend a blended model of DM which incorporates a constraint-based Correspondence Theoretic vision of Phonological Form. In this model the syntax builds morphological structure as per standard DM assumptions, which in turn leads to local and cyclic restrictions on allomorph selection, as argued in Embick (2010). I argue contra Embick (2010), however, that the phonology must be an essential part of the grammar in order to account for surface form-oriented (or “output-centered”) prosodic morphology such as reduplication and mora affixation. In this model, the output of Morphological Structure serves as an input into PF, which I construe as Optimality Theoretic tableaux as in Correspondence Theory, thus accounting for surface-oriented phonological copying effects like base-dependence.

Quantified numeral subjects in Russian may famously trigger plural or singular verb agreement. Generative accounts (Pesetsky (1982), Franks (1995), Bošković (2006)) tie the variation to Case and the DP/QP distinction. Corpus-based accounts (Revzin (1978), Corbett (2000), Robblee (1993)), in addition to precedence and definiteness/specificity, note a strong correlation between agreement choice and the animacy of a QNP subject. In this paper, I attempt to reconcile the original generalizations in both linguistic traditions by proposing an account whereby (i) the animacy condition on agreement is an argument structure effect (ii) the connection between Nom case and agreement with QNP subjects is captured by Case as accessibility condition for agreement (Marantz (1991), Bobaljik (2008), Baker (2010) Baker and Vinokurova (2011) but contra Chomsky (2000), (2001)) (iii) definiteness/specificity effects with agreement follow from Diesing’s (1992) Mapping Hypothesis and a locality condition on semantic agreement.

In the present study, a corpus of more than 18,000 online dating ads (downloaded from Craigslist.com, ~ 1.4 million words) is used to investigate differences in language use between men and women in the online dating context. Few studies have investigated gender differences in written texts, Newman, Groom et al. (2008), Mulac and Lundell (1994) and Koppel, Argamon et al. (2002) being the notable exceptions. These papers, however, differ remarkably in methodology and results. In the dataset studied here, regression analysis reveals marked differences the use of linguistic features such as emoticons or abbreviations. Writer gender and addressee gender emerge as predictors of variation.

This paper presents the results of an experiment designed to access native speakers’ underlying grammatical knowledge concerning the passivizability of English Verb-Object (VO) idioms. Although it has long been noted that some VO idioms retain their idiomatic meaning in the passive while others do not (Katz & Postal 1964, et seq.), the source of this variation is unclear, and native speaker intuitions on a large number of idioms are not as clear cut as previous accounts might suggest. Taking as a starting point Folli and Harley’s (2007) hypothesis that there is a structural distinction between passivizable and nonpassivizable idioms, the current study tests one prediction of this hypothesis, namely that there should be a categorical distinction between the two types of idioms in the grammars of native speakers. The experimental results contradict this hypothesis, as evidenced by a normal distribution of response times to passive idioms. However, it is hypothesized that this online task is not appropriate to access the fine-tuned syntactico-semantic judgments underlying native speaker intuitions of idiom passivizability, due to the fact that the methodology employed here—a self-paced reading task—does not yield the expected results even for canonically passivizable and nonpassivizable idioms.

Morphological evidence in causative/inchoative pairs in Turkish is analyzed to determine the derivational relationship between the transitive and intransitive members of the pairs. Three patterns are found: 1. The transitive member is derived from the intransitive; 2. The intransitive is derived from the transitive; 3. Both members are independently derived from a common base. For a complete explanation of the data, it is proposed that the verbalizing head little v decomposes into a verbalizer (little v proper) and a discrete ‘flavor’ morpheme (CAUSE, BECOME, etc.).