This article presents an analysis and review of Ljiljana Progovac's "Negative and Positive Polarity: A Binding Approach" (1994). It concludes that by pushing a syntactic analysis of polarity to, if not beyond, its limits, Progovac has focused attention on the work that remains for any approach to polarity to resolve. Contains 59…

Compares two analyses of a verb phrase deletion in a particular English sentence with a third analysis and shows that the analysis that takes the word "would" in the sentence as a proform has significant advantages over the analysis that posits a deletion site after "would." (SED)

Explores markedness of languages and language change in relation to their roles in the consistency of language. Concludes typology provides no explanations in itself, but rather through data which need explanations and form a testing ground for linguistic theories. (Author/BK)

This paper presents evidence that English may be a completely caseless language, like Chinese, contrary to the widely held view that distinct pronoun forms and the genitive "'s" involve morphological case. It argues that "I" and "me" are both personal pronouns whereas "my,""mine," and "'s" are possessive pronouns. Contains 31 references. (MDM)

This study examined the referential properties of a class of complex pronouns labelled M-Pronouns, exemplified by Old English "himself," French "lui-meme," and English "his own." It is shown that M-Pronouns exhibit some properties commonly taken as characterizing reflexive anaphors, and that they also occur as…

A discussion of possessives, determiners, and modifiers covers the following topics: nonuniformity of nouns, distributional differences between demonstratives and definitive articles, and German possessives and the determiner-modifier continuum. (Contains eight references.) (LB)

This paper examines the syntax of imperative sentences in languages in which imperative verbs have distinctive morphology. Imperative verbs with distinctive morphology either have a distinctive syntax (Modern Greek, Spanish) or distribute like other verbs (Serbo-Croatian, Ancient Greek). The contrast follows from properties of the root…

Surveys trends in linguistic thought over the past 50 years, with particular reference to structuralism and generative grammar. (AM)

This article presents evidence supporting the syntactic nature of adjunct extraction in English and other languages, including the coextensiveness of adjunct and argument extraction and their parallelism with respect to strong/weak crossover effects. Also discussed is the challenge that binding domain effects pose for accounts of adjunct…

This article presents a comprehensive view of German syllable structure based on phonetic and psycholinguistic experimental results supplemented by phonological arguments. It supports a theory of syllable structure based on the arrangement of segments according to the Sonority Sequencing Principle augmented by language-specific constraints.…

Short case studies show that certain inflectional categories, particularly morphological case, cannot be treated as functional heads projecting a phrase of their own. Examples are drawn from Hungarian, Finnish and Finno-Volgaic, Erzya Mordvin, Icelandic, and Turkish. (Contains 27 references.) (LB)