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This article explores the characteristics and syntactic behaviour of a peculiar construction in which what seem to be two finite complementisers are allowed to co-occur in specific subordinate clauses. As well as providing a detailed description of the structure in a number of Romance varieties, this research focuses on the different roles played by items belonging to the category traditionally labelled as COMP and on the status of the subjects found in the left periphery. Adopting the so-called split-CP hypothesis the proposed analysis argues for the expression of both discourse and inflectional features at the C level, overtly realised as distinct heads, and claims that there are both topicalised and focalised positions available to pre-verbal subjects in the left periphery, be they a DP or a quantified element. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper discusses the semantically parenthetical use of clause-embedding verbs such as see, hear, think, believe, discover and know. When embedding verbs are used in this way, the embedded clause carries the main point of the utterance, while the main clause serves some discourse function. Frequently, this function is evidential, with the parenthetical verb carrying information about the source and reliability of the embedded claim, or about the speaker's emotional orientation to it. Other functions of parenthetical uses of verbs are discussed. Particular attention is paid to the parenthetical uses of verbs which are standardly assumed to require their complements to be presupposed. It is demonstrated that when so used, these verbs are in no way presuppositional; that is, there is no presumption, or even pretense, that their complements have common ground status. It is further demonstrated that this loss of presuppositionality is not accompanied by a lack of commitment on the part of the speaker to the truth of the complement, as in the standard cases of non-presuppositional uses of these predicates. It is argued that this non-presuppositional use of factive verbs provides support for the (minority) view that presupposition is not a conventional property of lexical items. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This paper examines morphophonological alternations involving apicoalveolar tap-consonant clusters in Urban East Norwegian from the framework of gestural Optimality Theory. Articulatory Phonology provides an insightful explanation of patterns of vowel intrusion, coalescence, and rhotic deletion in terms of the temporal coordination of consonantal gestures, which interacts with both prosodic and morphological structure. An alignment-based account of derived-environment effects is proposed in which complete overlap in rhotic-consonant clusters is blocked within morphemes but not across morpheme or word boundaries. Alignment constraints on gestural coordination also play a role in phonologically conditioned allomorphy. The gestural analysis is contrasted with alternative Optimality-theoretic accounts. Furthermore, it is argued that models of the phonetics–phonology interface which view timing as a low-level detail of phonetic implementation incorrectly predict that input morphological structure should have no effect on gestural coordination. The patterning of rhotic-consonant clusters in Norwegian is consistent with a model that includes gestural representations and constraints directly in the phonological grammar, where underlying morphological structure is still visible. On the assumption that Universal Grammar lacks faithfulness constraints on input timing, the phonology is free to include non-contrastive phonetic detail such as intersegmental gestural coordination without the danger of overgenerating impossible contrasts. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Phonologically conditioned allomorphy is sometimes determined by universal marking conditions derived from low-ranked constraints, which is viewed as an effect of the emergence of the unmarked (TETU) in optimality theory. In this paper we present two case studies that make crucial use of allomorph selection as TETU but also of an additional property of the lexical representation of allomorphs, namely lexical ordering of allomorphs. The first case is the puzzling selection of definite marker in Haitian Creole (analyzed as an instance of anti-markedness in previous OT works), which yields to an appropriate analysis in terms of allomorph ordering. In the second case study, gender allomorph selection in Catalan, we propose a constraint Respect that ensures compliance with idiosyncratic lexical specifications, which further interacts with allomorph selection. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]