Languages can differ in fundamental ways with respect to the syntax of sentences with a "missing" direct object. Whereas Japanese and Korean permit null direct objects that are licensed under general discourse conditions (the recoverability of the referent from context) without regard for choice of verb, object ellipsis in English obeys lexical…

We examine the inflectional productions of seven Catalan, seven Galician, and seven Spanish speaking agrammatic subjects in an elicitation and a sentence repetition task and consider them in the light of the Tree Pruning Hypothesis (TPH). The results show relatively spared subject person/number agreement with the verb and impaired tense marking…

The clause in Southeastern Tepehuan consists of a predicate, its associated arguments, and other modifying elements. This paper seeks to show the various types of semantic and surface clauses and the relation between them. The semantic clause consists of various semantic components, both nuclear and peripheral, semantic prosodies, and certain…

Tutelo is a Siouan language that was once spoken in Virginia and the Carolinas. Before it died out, a few scholars collected enough data on the language to elicit the main features and characteristics of the language. This paper looks at the noun in Tutelo. Specific focus is on the shape of the root, the marking of gender and number, the…

Argues that what have been called rising diphthongs in Frisian can be shown to be glide-vowel sequences of which the glide forms part of the syllable onset tather than being part of the nucleus. This argument is supported by an analysis of the phenomena of breaking. (Author/VWL)

Presents evidence that argument structure is not a semantic but a syntactic level of representation. Evidence is based on the distinction between primary and secondary objects found in languages such as Chichewa. Concludes that because argument structure must express the distinction between primary and secondary objects, it follows that argument…

This paper explores the intra-clausal relations of minimal locutionary and illocutionary force in Southeastern Tepehuan. It surveys the semantic and syntactic sentence types with primary reference to grammatical relations. The semantic propositional structures, along with their modal parameters and other semantic prosodies are discussed in Section…

Virtually all scholars working on Numic languages have called [r] a spirant or listed it, without comment, as resulting from spirantization. However, Central Numic shows that [r] results from an early rule of tap formation applying to /t/, with subsequent application of spirantization then affecting other stops. When this analysis is extended to…

In this article, characteristics of Japanese causative constructions are reviewed and discussed based on an article by Masayoshi Shibatani (1976), who has worked extensively with the Japanese causative. First, the nature and definitions of the causative are discussed. Then, the types of Japanese causative are presented; finally, a categorization…

This paper completes a description of Proto-Algic morphology begun by the author with a description of the verb (Proulx, 1985) and of pronouns (Proulx, 1991) by focusing on Proto-Algic noun structure and inflection. In Proto-Algic, a primary noun stem ends in a derivational final, a secondary one in a nominalizer. Both usually resemble…

Gemination in Pulaar, a dialect of Fula, does not always follow typically known gemination processes and previous attempts to analyze Pulaar gemination processes have been unsatisfactory. The proposed analyses fail to account for numerous exceptions and do not provide a comprehensive analysis of all gemination processes in Pulaar. In this paper,…

Discusses the question of whether there are languages with fewer than two vowels. This article proposes to show that the problem lies in the way the number of vowels a language has is counted. (includes references) (JL)

Shows that the high-ranking syllable contact constraint is the driving force behind the well-known nasalization and lateralization phenomena in Korean. Develops an optimality-theoretic analysis of Korean nasalization and lateralization in which SyllCon is an undominated constraint. (Author/VWL)

This study investigates the phenomenon of "Locative Inversion" in Cantonese. The term "Locative Inversion" indicates that the locative phrase (LP) syntactic process in Cantonese and the appears at the sentence-initial position and its logical subject occurs postverbally. It is demonstrated that this Locative Inversion is a…

The structures of quantifier phrases in Thai are studied in the X-Syntax framework. Syntactic and semantic arguments are provided to prove that this model remedies the deficiency of traditional and early transformational grammar as it provides insightful analyses based on distinctions between intermediate level nodes that display internal…