This paper reconsiders Chomsky's Adjunction Condition and suggests some modification of the theory of barriers to solve problems arising mainly from the improper definition of the blocking category and the barrier. It is argued that in S-structure, there is no adjunction in movement except extraposition and topicalization. First, it is suggested…

Presents a critical review of linguistic research on the temporal structure of sentences, with particular reference to the progressive aspect of the English verb. All works reviewed analyze the temporal meaning of these forms using the concepts of "Interval Semantics" and the methods of logical analysis. (MES)

Outlines a system that modifies, and expands on, PTQ ("The Proper Treatment of Quantification in English" by R. Montague), in order to include an analysis of the present and past tenses, and of the perfect and progressive aspects. Also analyzes temporal adverbs and their interactions with tense and aspect. (MES)

Examines the "situation-problem-solution-evaluation" structure, as well as other organizational structures useful in report writing. Discusses briefly the limitations and applications of information structures. (HTH)

Discusses Providence Island Sign Language (PSL), an autochthonous and relatively immature language of about 20 speakers. It is a nascent and evolving language whose description can produce rich results for linguistic theory. Such a description will also be an explanation of the phylogeny of a linguistic system. (Author/PJM)

The construction "won't" is ambiguous: it can be a prediction by the speaker based on his assumptions, or it may be a report of what the expressed subject of "won't" said. "I talked to them and they won't come" could mean "I predict they won't come" or "they refused to come." (PJM)

Modal verbs in Chinese are characterized in terms of internal and external modality; the former defines a state a noun is in or a quality a noun has while the latter defines a circumstantial factor that affects an event. Modal verbs and their compounds are contrasted in Mandarin and Amoy dialects. (Author/PJM)

Discusses different kinds of discourse analysis and notes that they vary in their focus, claims, and techniques. Argues that the philosophical foundations of critical discourse analysis are open to serious question and that it relies on a naive sociological model involving an overambition undermining sound research. (72 references) (Author/CK)

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…

Discusses how determination of lexical items with Sub-Saharan origin in songs of voodoo rites of candomble and umbanda in southern and northeastern Brazil is complicated by factors like existence of phonological correspondence without accompanying semantic correspondence, difficulty of determining meaning of word in a given text, and high…

Focuses on gender-related variation in the ellipsis of the nominative particle "ga" and the topic market "wa" in Japanese. (Author/VWL)

Discusses statistical word indexing for Japanese information-retrieval systems and proposes a new method that uses statistics about characters to evaluate a bi-gram's likelihood of being a word boundary. Describes a new segmentation strategy that extracts some overlapping segments and results in higher retrieval effectiveness. (Author/LRW)

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…

Shows that there are at least two types of gapping in natural languages: canonical gapping and LPD. Argues that Chinese has some gapping sentences that result from ATB movement from V to "v." Data from Chinese affirm Johnson's (1994) theory of gapping that gapping occurs in those languages only with verb movement. (Author/VWL)