Using a particular sentence type--an exclamative construction referred to as "Nominal Extraposition" (NE)--this article outlines a formal model in which grammatical description includes the description of use conditions on form-meaning pairs. The article suggests that the relationship between NE and like exclamatives can be represented in an…

Deals with certain problems inherent in deriving anaphoric pronouns from bound variables. Syntactic rules applied to determine anaphora relations cannot be applied if anaphoric pronouns and their antecedents have identical underlying forms. An approach to anaphora which preserves some advantages of the bound-variable theory without the problems is…

An analysis of the derivation of "why" and other interrogative adverbs shows that they do not involve the movement of NP's, and therefore do not present counter-examples to the NP Ecology Constraint. (Author/HP)

Shorter version of this paper read at the First California Linguistics Conference, Berkeley, May 1971. (VM)

This paper offers a functional explanation for the existence and for the special properties of movement rules in natural languages. The hypothesis is advanced that raising, lowering, and fronting rules all serve the function of increasing the prominence of objective content in surface structure. (CK)

The assumption that the active/passive relation is structural in nature and therefore best expressed by a transformation is debated. The relation can be captured in the lexicon without a passive transformation. An interpretive rule is proposed to handle the problem. Passives are shown as generated by phrase structure rules. (SC)

A review of analyses of conditionals (in the philosophical literature) and of topics (primarily in linguistics) reveals that their definitions are very similar. This paper justifies the method of basing semantic analysis of a construction on a cross-linguistic examination of its superficial form. (Author/NCR)

Supports the theory that phonic units cannot be delimited without reference to conceptual units, and that there must be a mutual dependence of sound and meaning in language. (DS)

Mirror images in constituent order are found in a wide range of parallel clause types in Japanese and English. Three detailed explanations for linear orderings are provided. (Author/HP)

The principal nominal deictic affixes of Bella Coola, a Salishan language of British Columbia, are examined. (Author/RM)

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…

Shows that the German "perfekt" has a uniform temporal meaning that results systematically from the interaction of its three components--finiteness marking, auxiliary, and past participle--and that the two readings are the consequence of a structural ambiguity. This analysis also predicts the properties of other participle constructions, in…

Examines parallelisms between surface structure and logical structure and why those parallelisms do not extend farther than they do. If syntactic deep structures are identified with logical structures, an appropriate cyclic principle guarantees that cyclic rules will apply so that large-scale parallelisms exist between surface syntactic structures…