We use the variationist method to elucidate the expression of future time in English, examining multiple grammaticalization in the same domain ("will" and "going to"). Usage patterns show that the choice of form is not determined by invariant semantic readings such as proximity, certainty, willingness, or intention. Rather, particular instances of…

What is the mechanism by which a linguistic change advances across successive generations of speakers? We explore this question by using the model of incrementation provided in Labov 2001 and analyzing six current changes in English. Extending Labov's focus on recent and vigorous phonological changes, we target ongoing morphosyntactic(-semantic)…

Discusses alternatives to a number of assumptions fundamental to established linguistic theory which lead to a coherent view of linguistic structure that treats grammar as a symbolic phenomenon and emphasizes importance of analyzability to grammatical structure. Outlines descriptive framework called Space Grammar and its approach to semantic…

Presents an integrated theory of the syntactic and semantic representation of complements where the unexpressed subjects of the embedded verb-phrase complement are subject to certain interpretation restrictions. It is argued that the grammar of English controlled complements can be derived from the interaction of semantically based principles of…

Argues that English intonational structure and surface syntactic structure are one and can be captured in a single unified grammar. The interpretations that the grammar provides for such constituents corresponds to the entities and open propositions of intonational meaning that have been described as "theme" and "rheme,""given" and "new," and…

Critiques Aoun and Li's (1993) syntactic analysis of quantifier-scope interpretations in English, Chinese, and Japanese, showing serious theoretical problems with their results and proposing a quantifier-scope analysis that avoids those problems. The proposed expert system considers several important considerations and arrives at a composite…

English has two classes of modal deference expressions that may be superordinate to performative verbs. Verbs representing the illocutionary force of a sentence are sometimes embedded in modal constructions whose function is auxiliary to the central illocutionary act. This phenomenon is discussed in this paper. (CK)

Presents a discourse-functional account of English inversion, based on an examination of a large corpus of naturally occurring tokens. It is argued that inversion serves an information-packaging function and that felicitous inversion depends on the relative discourse-familiarity of the information represented by the preposed and postposed…

Simplification in structure and confluence between the local-language structure and the prestige-language structure are usually predicted in language death as in pidginization. For a dying Scottish Gaelic dialect, speakers were tested in the two most excessively complex morphological structures the dialect offers. (Author/NCR)

Collitz lecture delivered at the meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Columbus, Ohio, July 1970. (DS)

Through corpus analysis and experimentation, this article demonstrates that both grammatical complexity (heaviness) and discourse status (newness) simultaneously and independently influence word order in two English constructions. Argues that heavy and new constituents facilitate the processes of planning and production. (Author/VWL)

Presents two questionnaire experiments that investigated the processing complexity of a variety of nested constructions in Japanese. The results are discussed in terms of the syntactic-prediction locality theory. (Author/VWL)

This article discusses the syntactic behavior of the word "that," usually classified as a relative pronoun but seen here as a conjunction. Data from standard and non-standard English, Yoruba, and Persian are used. (CLK)