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The study of adjectival diathesis alternations lags behind the study of verbal diathesis and nominalization. This paper aims to diminish the gap by applying to the adjectival domain theoretical tools with proven success elsewhere. We focus on evaluative adjectives, which display a systematic alternation between a basic variant (John was rude) and a derived one (That was rude of John). The alternation brings about a cluster of syntactic and semantic changes - in the semantic type of the predicate, its valency and the mode of argument projection. We argue that the adjectival variants are related by the joint application of two operators: a lexical SATURATION operator (also seen in verbal passive) and a syntactic REIFICATION operator (also seen in nominalization). The analysis straightforwardly extends to similar alternations with Subject- and Object-Experiencer adjectives (proud, irritating). Among its important implications are (i) lexical saturation is not restricted to external arguments (internal ones may also be saturated), and (ii) ' referential ' (R) roles are not restricted to nominal predicates (adjectives may assign them as well). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Adger (2006) claims that the Minimalist Program provides a suitable theoretical framework for analysing at least one example of inherent variability: the variation between was and were after you and we in the Scottish town of Buckie. Drawing on the feature analysis of pronouns and the assumption that lexical items normally have equal probabilities, his analysis provides two 'routes' to we/you was, but only one to we/you were, thereby explaining why the former is on average twice as common as the latter. This comment points out four serious flaws in his argument: it ignores important interactions among sex, age and subject pronoun; hardly any social groups actually show the predicted average 2:1 ratio; there is no general tendency for lexical items to have equal probability of being used; the effects of the subject may be better stated in terms of the lexemes you and we rather than as semantic features. The conclusion is that inherent variability supports a usage-based theory rather than Minimalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notion of subject in human language has a privileged status relative to other arguments. This special status is manifested in the behavior of subjects at the morphological, syntactic, semantic and discourse levels. Here we present evidence that subjects have a privileged status at the lexical level as well, by analyzing lexicalization patterns of verbs in three different sign languages. Our analysis shows that the sub-lexical structure of iconic signs denoting states of affairs in these languages manifests an inherent pattern of form-meaning correspondence: the signer's body consistently represents one argument of the verb, the subject. The hands, moving in relation to the body, represent all other components of the event - including all other arguments. This analysis shows that sign languages provide novel evidence in support of the centrality of the notion of subject in human language. It also solves a typo-logical puzzle about the apparent primacy of object in sign language verb agreement, a primacy not usually found in spoken languages, in which subject agreement generally ranks higher. Our analysis suggests that the subject argument is represented by the body and is part of the lexical structure of the verb. Because it is always inherently represented in the structure of the sign, the subject is more basic than the object, and tolerates the omission of agreement morphology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a unified analysis of adverb scope and quantifier scope phenomena in a lexicalist approach to complex predicates. I first observe that the availability of scope ambiguity for adverbs and for quantifiers always coincides for a given type of complex predicate, drawing on data from different kinds of compound verb constructions, the verbal noun-taking predicates and the nominative object construction. The challenge for a unified treatment in lexicalist frameworks comes from the fact that syntactic structures cannot be taken as the locus for representing the scope of adverbs and quantifiers, unlike in derivational frameworks where such an analysis is the most natural. Thus, a previous lexicalist analysis by Manning, Sag & lida (1999) makes use of completely different mechanisms to account for adverb scope and quantifier scope, failing to capture the close parallel between them. I remedy this problem of Manning et al.'s analysis by proposing a unified account of adverb scope and quantifier scope that crucially makes use of a slightly enriched semantic representation explicitly encoding the property of mono-/biclausality with respect to scopal phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper discusses phonologically motivated gaps in inflectional paradigms. A model is offered in which the appearance of gaps is based on a tension between markedness constraints, faithfulness constraints, and constraints which require the expression of morphological categories. After presenting the model, additional implications are analyzed. Situations in which the same problem has different solutions in different morphological contexts are predicted insofar as constraints requiring the expression of different categories can vary in their ranking relative to some faithfulness constraint. Hence, the same phonotactic problem can yield a gap in one situation and a repair in another. This prediction is illustrated and further details of the prediction are explored, including the identification of a situation requiring a more restrictive version of the model. This is achieved by drawing on Smith's (2001) proposal that faithfulness constraints can be indexed to lexical categories to model this situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues for a constructional approach to English progressives. On this view, progressivity is a construction-level property, rather than a lexical property of the ing forms that progressive verb phrases contain or of the auxiliary. The incompatibility of ing forms with state verbs in progressive constructions provides crucial evidence in support of the construction-based perspective, given that stative ing forms are fully acceptable in gerundive and other ing constructions. Of course, underlying this approach is the proposal that gerund is neutralizable with present participle (Huddleston 1984, 2002b, c; Pullum 1991; Blevins 1994). A lexicalist and construction-based analysis of gerundive nominals, as in Pullum (1991) and Blevins (1994), offers a means of claiming that progressivity is a property of the combination of an auxiliary and ing participle, just as the perfect aspect is expressed by the combination of have and a past participle, as proposed in Ackerman & Webelhuth (1998) and Spencer (2001b), and implicitly in Curme (1935) and other traditional grammars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The point of departure of this paper is the consideration of how words with the meanings of property concept states (states that are lexicalized as adjectives in languages that have that lexical category, cf. Dixon 1982), e.g. ‘red’, are related to words denoting their corresponding change of state, e.g. ‘redden’. It is shown that while many languages relate words with these meanings to one another via some morpholexical process, this is not so in the Polynesian language Tongan. A detailed case study shows that in this language there are no non-causative change of state lexemes based on property concepts. Rather, these meanings are derived pragmatically from verbs denoting the corresponding state via aspectual coercion (Moens & Steedman 1988, Jackendoff 1997, de Swart 1998, Zucchi 1998, Michaelis 2004). This finding is shown to have consequences for the understanding of the typology of change of state predicates (Koontz-Garboden 2005, 2006, Koontz-Garboden & Levin 2005) and for theories of event structure: (a) the typological space is broader than previously thought and (b) theories of event structure need to be reconsidered in order to account for the postlexical derivation of meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term morphological reversal describes the situation where the members of a morphological opposition switch their functions in some context (as with Hebrew gender marking, where -Ø∼-a marks masculine∼feminine with adjectives but feminine∼-masculine with numerals). There is a long tradition of polemic against the notion that morphology can encode systematic reversals, and an equally long tradition of reintroducing them under different names (e.g. polarity, exchange rules or morphosyntactic toggles). An examination of some unjustly neglected examples (number in Nehan, aspect in Tübatulabal, tense in Trique and argument marking in Neo-Aramaic) confirms the existence of morphological reversal, particularly as a mechanism of language change. This is strong evidence for the separateness of morphological paradigms from the features that they encode. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates how the parser employs thematic and contextual information in resolving temporary ambiguities during sentence processing. We report results from a sentence-completion task and from a self-paced reading experiment with native speakers of Greek examining two constructions under different referential context conditions: relative clauses (RCs) preceded by complex noun phrases with genitives, [NP1 +NP2Gen], and RCs preceded by complex noun phrases containing prepositional phrases, [NP1 + PP[P NP2]]. We found different attachment preferences for these two constructions, a high (NP1) preference for RCs with genitive antecedents and a low (NP2) preference for RCs with PP antecedents. Moreover, referential context information was found to modulate RC attachment differently in the two experimental tasks. We interpret these findings from the perspective of modular theories of sentence processing and argue that on-line ambiguity resolution relies primarily on grammatical and lexical-thematic information, and makes use of referential context information only as a secondary resource. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]