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The authors approach the topic of final particles from a dualistic perspective taking as a starting point the distinction between sentence grammar and thetical grammar (Heine I et al. i [4]) and the macrogrammar/microgrammar distinction by Haselow ([3]). In a very long 40-page chapter 8, co-editor Alexander Haselow argues for a distinction of grammar into a macrogrammar and a microgrammar domain, thus also advocating a dualistic framework. Microgrammar establishes local morphosyntactic and semantic relationships, while macrogrammar fulfills a more global, discourse-organizational role. Being fairly new to the idea of dualistic views on processing and grammar myself, I found the book to be a very good introduction to the core ideas and tenets of dual-processing frameworks. [Extracted from the article]

This article introduces the Special Issue on pragmatic marker (PM) combinations. While research on pragmatic markers, or discourse markers, is a well-established area in pragmatics, investigating their combinatory behavior is a relatively recent trend. The article argues that research on PM combinations involves two main perspectives, namely the question of PM co-occurrence and the question of PM ordering. Addressing the first question means to analyze which PMs co-occur and which do not and to explore the motivations for co-occurrence. The second question investigates the regularities in ordering PMs that occur in combination and explores possible explanations for these regularities. The papers collected in this special issue address both of these questions in a diverse selection of languages and in the left and right utterance periphery. This introductory essay discusses the individual articles, summarizes the main findings of the Special Issue as a whole, and points to avenues for future research. • This essay introduces the articles included in the Journal of Pragmatics Special Issue on 'Pragmatic marker combinations'. • Prior research is introduced with a focus on the dimensions PM co-occurrence and PM ordering. • The article summarizes current questions in research on PM combinations and points to avenues for future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article describes an extended replication of a reading study by Sereno and Jongman (1995) that reported acoustic differences between noun and verb pronunciations of English disyllabic, non-stress-shifting homophone pairs, for example, answer (v) versus answer (n). The original findings point to a gradual influence of the typical stress patterns of both grammatical categories, with noun readings exhibiting a tendency toward trochaic and verb readings toward iambic pronunciation. However, the effects found by Sereno and Jongman (1995) did not consistently reach statistical significance and were based on a very small sample size. Employing a considerably larger group of speakers, the current replication fails to find the reported effects of the grammatical category. The null result obtained can be accounted for within speech production models that assume identical metrical templates for the homophone pairs tested and no direct influence of the grammatical category on the phonetics of stress assignment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the role of distance in the decision among grammatical variants. The empirical test case is the English mandative subjunctive construction, which co-occurs with an embedded modal auxiliary, a subjunctive or an indicative verb form. The fact that the subjunctive is triggered by specific lexical items allows one to measure the distance between the triggering unit and the target verb. This distance is found to play a significant role in the grammatical decision process. With increasing distance between trigger and target, the probability of selecting a modal auxiliary increases and the probability of selecting the subjunctive decreases. The theoretical account hinges on the range and strength of linguistic units. Syntactic units (i.e. modals) are claimed to have a wider range than morphological units (i.e. indicative and subjunctive). Furthermore, the indicative is claimed to have a wider range than the subjunctive. Varying ranges are interpreted as varying decay rates. The lower decay rate of syntactic as compared to morphological units results from the syntactic level being superordinated to the morphological level in language production. The inclusion of the semantic and the phonological levels confirms that the position of a level in the structural hierarchy determines its range. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]