In this paper I present evidence from Cherokee (Iroquoian, Southern Iroquoian) which refutes accounts of the distinction between process and result nominals based on the presence or absence of AspectP in the nominal’s functional structure. I argue that Cherokee has result nominals which contain aspect morphology, directly contradicting the proposal of Alexiadou (2001) that such nominals must lack an AspectP, and suggest that some other mechanism must be at play to account for the syntactic and semantic differences between result and process nominals.

This chapter briefly describes traditional approaches to the grammatical structure of Navajo, and is intended to provide definitions and examples of important and basic terms and concepts used (and perhaps argued against) in the rest of the papers in this volume. Readers who are unfamiliar with the Navajo language, or with the linguistic literature about Navajo, are encouraged to read this chapter before delving into the subsequent articles in this volume.

This paper analyses the phenomenon of Suspended Affixation (SA) which refers to a situation in coordinated constructions when affixes on the final conjunct have scope over all the non-final conjuncts. The main goal of this paper is to look at the structure of SA for Noun Compound Coordination and to find out how pl and poss suffixes behave regarding suspension. Previous studies have shown that in N and NP coordination poss cannot be suspended leaving pl on the non-final conjunct. This study tests the suspendability of poss in the context of Noun Compound coordination. Since SA seems to represent gradient judgment data two acceptability judgment studies were conducted to find out the (un)grammaticality of Noun Compound constructions. The results show that pl and poss suffixes cannot be suspended for independent reasons. The suspendability of poss does not depend on the presence/absence of pl in the structure due to its structural position. This article proposes an analysis of SA in N and NP coordination which represents a combination of two approaches on SA already proposed in literature and is based on the idea of Parallel Merge proposed by Citko (2005). SA in N and NP coordination is considered to be a coordination of fully inflected conjuncts where the inflections are parallel-merged with two conjuncts (final and non-final). I show that due to the structure of Noun Compound coordination constructions, pl and poss cannot be parallel-merged because of a minimality condition: a non-final conjunct has to be a Minimal Morphological Word.

This study investigates the influence of frequency on the production of bimorphemic words, and considers which frequency measure is most apt to explain the differences. Previous studies have reported that frequent words are produced faster and more casually than infrequent ones, and that medial segments will have shorter durations. The present study examines the relation between frequency and the duration of medial segments in English derived words by conducting a production experiment with 6 native speakers of American English using 74 English '-ment' derivatives, and pits word frequency, base frequency, and relative frequency (wordfreq/basefreq) against one another as predictors. The results show that models incorporating any of the three frequency measures strongly predict medial segment duration (R-squared = 0.56, with the differences in R-squared between them on the order of 1%. Among the three frequency measures, whole word frequency explained the most variance, across all consonant types. The duration of segments in highly frequent words tends to be shorter than that in relatively infrequent words. Overall, this study confirms that speakers are sensitive to the extralinguistic information associated with the words such as frequency, and in this case, traditional frequency measures (whole word and base frequencies) are better predictors than relative frequency.

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 study examined differences between the written, national language varieties of the United States and Great Britain, specifically in texts regarding the topic of Law. The few previous studies that have dealt with differences between the dialects of the United States and Great Britain have focused on shallow-level features, such as lexis, subject-verb agreement, and even orthography. In contrast, this study uses the computational tool, Coh-Metrix, to distinguish British from American discourse features within one highly similar genre, Anglo-American legal cases. We conducted a discriminant function analysis along five indices of cohesion on a specially constructed corpus to show those differences in over 400 American and English/Welsh legal cases. Our results suggest substantial differences between the language varieties, casting doubt on previous generalizations about British and American writing that predict that the national varieties would vary more by genre than by language variety. Our results also offer guidance to materials developers of legal English for international purposes (such as in the E.U.) and drafters of international legal documents for producing effective and appropriate materials.

A prototype of an automated tool to construct a propositional textbase, AutoProp, is described and qualitatively assessed. The tool is specifically designed to propositionalize texts for experimental studies that collect and analyze participants’ recall of text. The procedure for creating the propositionalized text is explained, followed by a descriptive analysis of the tool’s propositions as compared to 29 hand-coded propositions. In initial testing, all of AutoProp’s propositions differed from the hand-coded propositions at a superficial level; however, no differences deemed uncorrectable were encountered. Based on the success of these initial results, we conclude that AutoProp is a viable tool worthy of continued examination and development. Limitations of the tool, along with future developmental plans and requirements addressing these limitations are also discussed.

One of the most widely-discussed issues in Arabic syntax concerns the position of the subject. In this work, we investigate the processing of verb-initial and subject-initial structures in spoken Saudi Arabic in order to shed light on this debate. We examine the processing times associated with these constructions and argue that processing considerations provide evidence for a particular conception of Arabic syntax according to which VSO order is derived with the subject remaining in VP and verb raising over the subject, while SVO order is derived with the subject raising out of VP to Spec, TP, or to a higher Inflectional Phrase, and the verb raising to a position lower than the subject.

Ultrasound imaging experiments were conducted to study vowel-to-vowel coarticulation patterns involving the environment of vowel assimilation in Korean. Results showed that anticipatory coarticulatory effects occur and that vowel assimilation is truly phonological and that the degree of coarticulation is stronger in assimilated words than in non-assimilated words. These results imply that phonological rules might directly influence coarticulation in a phonology-phonetics unified grammar.

This article presents a syntactic account of the spray/load alternation in Japanese (e.g., nuru ‘smear’, tsumeru ‘pack’, etc.,). Fukui, Miyagawa and Tenny (1985) claim that the alternation verbs show the double object structure under a single VP node; namely both the Material (i.e., something that is painted) and the Location (i.e., somewhere that is painted) participants are co-sisters of the verb. When the Material participant is affected, it will be realized as the direct object of the verb. On the other hand, when the Location is (completely) affected, it will be realized as the direct object of the verb. I build an account on their intuition that the Material and the Location elements are thematically connected with the lexical verb within the binary branching hypothesis (Kayne 1994, among others); thus, they are arguments of VP. But this structure is valid only for the ni-variant where the Material is the single sister of VP. In the structure of the de-variant, the Location is a single sister of VP but the Material element is a PP, merging above VP. Under this view, the two syntactic alternants are available because they are derived from different numeration arrays. The present analysis minimizes the burden on the syntax by eliminating the affectedness condition for determining argument distribution of spray/load verbs in Japanese.