The central claim of this paper is that Vantage Theory is able to provide a much-needed explanatory account of the seemingly unrelated differences between lexical and morphological antonyms of dimensional adjectives in Slavic languages. In a case study, I compare two antonyms of the Russian adjective "vysokij" "high", a morphologically unrelated…

How do people define ethnicity and its membership? Primordialists argue that people group themselves using "primal" or permanent characteristics like physical similarity or a common language, religion, or history. Social mobilizationists, however, see ethnicity as more situational social phenomena, as an informal organization whereby…

Discusses allomorphic relationships, easily stated phonologically, but obscured when not stated as morpholexical rules. Rules belonging to the phonological component sometimes must be regarded as lexical redundancy rules that capture generalizations about morphological selection. (CB)

An examination of the syntactic consequences of a notionalist grammar assumption supports the differentiation of major word classes in terms of combinations of notional features and predication or nominality components. (35 references) (Author/CB)

This article discusses Aronoff's (1976) theory of the lexicon and states that the theory must be modified to describe a more richly inflected language, such as French. A more comprehensive theory of the lexicon is then outlined. (NCR)

Analyzes the near-complementary distribution of the German palatal fricative [c] and velar fricative [x] as a counterexample to Structural Preservation because the rule of Fricative Assimilation (FA) introduces the nondistinctive feature [back] lexically. The analysis presented derives both [x] and [c] from the archiphoneme /X/ via FA and a…

Africanisms are characteristics occurring frequently in African languages but rarely elsewhere. This paper reviews Africanisms presented by Greenberg and Larochette and submits a number of others with sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic relevance. Items are grouped according to phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon. (CK)

An analysis of a corpus of 252 specialized terms relating to the field of videotex, 144 in French and 108 in English, is presented in this document. The methods by which these terms are formed in both languages is examined, focusing on whether the terms have a linguistic basis in the French language or are borrowed from English. The differences…

A lexical representational analysis of Classical Arabic is proposed that captures a generalization that McCarthy's (1979, 1981) autosegmental analysis misses, namely that idiosyncratic characteristics of the derivational binyanim in Arabic are lexical, not morphological. This analysis captures that generalization by treating all the idiosyncracies…

Discusses the estrangement between etymology and modern linguistics, and concludes that a reconciliation between spatio-temporal linguistics and etymology must occur, because without it, both disciplines are doomed to inanition. (Author/AM)

Deals with how phonological changes occur and why. Presented as a response to "how" is the idea of lexical diffusion with focus on the temporal and lexical dimensions of sound changes. Evidence has been gathered from various languages to support this theory. Actuation is presented as occurring for physiological and perceptual reasons. (SC)

A dialect of Rato-Romansh spoken in a Swiss town is examined in the context of lexical phonology. The structure of this dialect's lexicon consists of two levels defined by stress assignment, not cyclically in this case but at the end of each level. Other considerations that have been advanced as bases for level division within the lexicon, such as…

This article hypothesizes that causative constructions among the languages of the world share some fundamental characteristics, even though they have different ordering restrictions and varying degrees of fusion. (Author/NCR)

Explains the differences between constituency and dependency theories for structural linguistics. Reasons are provided for why the former has been indirectly responsible for the neglect of lexical acquisition in language acquisition research and for proposing a notation based on dependency theory for describing learners' segmentation of initially…

The morphological and lexical bases of Dravidian complementation are explored by proposing a series of rules that govern the distribution of finite predicates in the Dravidian sentence. The distribution of two verbs, "a-" ("become") and "en-" ("say"), is shown to be correlated with the distribution of finite predicates. These predicates are…