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In Item-and-Arrangement models of inflection, morphemes are associations of form and meaning stored in a mental lexicon. Saussure’s notion of the linguistic sign as a unit of an acoustic image (signifier) and a concept (signified) immediately suggests such a model. But close examination of the examples of inflectional morphology throughout the Cours brings Saussure’s ideas more in line with Process morphology, a model in which recurrent elements in word forms are exponents of content features, and realizational rules license a word form inferentially from the word’s content. The Saussurean sign allowed French structuralists to revolutionize the methods of modern social science, eschewing the motives and intentions of human actors to focus on the system of oppositions that make signification possible in each domain. Eventually, post-structuralism rejected the static nature of the linguistic sign, forcing linguistics into relative isolation (since it held on to sign-based models of language). The criticism of structuralist treatments of morphology in Process models of inflection, however, stands as an exception to this tendency. In retrospect, I argue, similar ideas can be found in Saussure’s view of the langue as a complex algebra.

In this paper, I argue that the choice of a periphrastic over a synthetic verbal form in Shona is a strategy to avoid the realization of specific combinations of morphosyntactic properties by the same word form. I argue that periphrastic forms with - nga are formally equivalent to synthetic forms in the verbal paradigm of Shona, based on the assumption that inflected words are not formed in the lexicon, but are the realization of properties specified on the terminal nodes of syntactic structures. The competition between synthetic and analytic forms in the inflectional paradigm of Shona is accounted for in a model of grammar that associates a clause with a representation that is functional and nonconfigurational, similar to f-structure in Lexical-Functional Grammar. But instead of letting lexical items project this information onto terminal nodes, I follow Anderson's (1992) proposals closely by incorporating phrasal realizational rules to the model, the function of which is to distribute inflectional features among the constituents of the clause.

Modern software development is increasingly collaborative. Open Source Software (OSS) are the bellwether; they support dynamic teams, with tools for code sharing, communication, and issue tracking. The success of an OSS project is reliant on team communication. E.g., in issue discussions, individuals rely on rhetoric to argue their position, but also maintain technical relevancy. Rhetoric and technical language are on opposite ends of a language complexity spectrum: the former is stylistically natural; the latter is terse and concise. Issue discussions embody this duality, as developers use rhetoric to describe technical issues. The style mix in any discussion can define group culture and affect performance, e.g., issue resolution times may be longer if discussion is imprecise. Using GitHub, we studied issue discussions to understand whether project-specific language differences exist, and to what extent users conform to a language norm. We built project-specific and overall GitHub language models to study the effect of perceived language complexity on multiple responses. We find that experienced users conform to project-specific language norms, popular individuals use overall GitHub language rather than project-specific language, and conformance to project-specific language norms reduces issue resolution times. We also provide a tool to calculate project-specific perceived language complexity.

This article argues for a three-way structural characterization of Fijian objects: common nouns can be incorporated or dislocated, but pronouns and proper nouns occur inside the VP as complements. These facts support an analysis of Fijian as a polysynthetic language, since it is a pronominal argument language with incorporated objects. Having complement nominals inside the VP, however, puts Fijian outside the scope of Baker’s (1996) polysynthesis parameter. The distribution of complements in Fijian follows from Hopper and Thompson’s (1980) transitivity hypothesis , since only those nominals with the highest degree of individuation can occur inside the VP.

Licensing of NPIs in Spanish varies depending on the semantics of the trigger. Nonveridical operators license n-words, and antiveridical operators license ni-minimizers. I argue that the NPIs that can occur in antiveridical contexts have a scalar presupposition, but those that are licensed in strictly nonveridical contexts are non-scalar. In this analysis, n-words are scalar (incorporating a silent ni ‘even’) in the scope of antiveridical operators. The distinction between scalar and non-scalar NPIs, I suggest, is the reason for the diversity of polarity sensitivity phenomena in Spanish, as well as in other languages.

Old Spanish had a split auxiliary system in the perfect tense, reminiscent of what is found in Modern French and Modern Italian. In this paper, I trace the progress of the displacement of ser ‘be’ by haber ‘have’ with intransitive and reflexive verbs in the history of Spanish. The data support the hypothesis that predicates that have a more patient-like subject are the last ones to lose their ability to select ser, regardless of their syntactic or morphological make-up. This analysis, I argue, adds to the mounting evidence in favor of a universal semantic account of split intransitivity.

This paper explores the interaction between Dative Clitic Doubling (DClD) in Spanish ditransitives and some semantic and syntactic factors. Usage data give statistically significant evidence that a goal is more likely to be doubled when definite or when it precedes the theme. These facts are accounted for under the hypothesis that goals alternate between an oblique function and an object function, and that dative clitics double goals only in the latter case. DClD, then, is seen as the Spanish equivalent of the English dative alternation. Ditransitives like dar ‘give’ and its English translation are analyzed as cloaked causatives, casting the dative alternation is a special case of the alternation between direct and indirect causatives. Some non-trivial differences between English and Spanish in the realization of the goal are pointed out, and are made to follow from a more general typological contrast between accusative languages and primary object languages in their treatment of causatives. The analysis is framed in the formalism of Lexical-Functional Grammar.

Analysis of the alternation between impersonal reflexives and reflexive passives in Spanish shows that higher animacy makes an argument less marked as an object. This generalization supports Hopper and Thompson's (1981) "transitivity hypothesis", since it is entailed by their claim that objects tend to be highly individuated. The article proposes an optimality-theoretic implementation of the analysis, using a feature-based approach to argument realization modeled on Bresnan and Kanerva's (1989) lexical mapping theory. The proposal highlights a contradiction between the transitivity hypothesis and the approaches to animacy that follow Silverstein's (1976) analysis of split ergative languages, for which alternatives are suggested.

Wasow (1977) argues that linguistic theory should recognize two qualitatively distinct types of rules: syntactic rules, which can affect more "superficial" grammatical function properties; and lexical rules, which affect deeper lexical semantic properties of lexical items. However, lexicalist theories of grammar have replaced syntactic rules with lexical rules leaving Wasow's dichotomy potentially unexplained. Our goal in this paper is to recapture Wasow's insight within a lexicalist framework such as HPSG. Building on Sag & Wasow's (1999) distinction between lexeme and word, we claim that there is a contrast between lexical rules that relate lexemes to lexemes (L-to-L rules) and lexical rules that relate words to words (W-to-W rules) and that these differences follow from the architecture of the grammar. In particular, we argue that syntactic function features (ARGST, VALENCE, etc.) are not defined for lexemes, while lexical semantic features (CONTENT) are. From this it follows that L-to-L rules can affect lexical semantic features, and not syntactic function features. In addition, since words are defined for syntactic function features, W-to-W rules can change them. In this paper, we support this hypothesis by examining certain differences between two types of Noun Incorporation construction, and their relation to other rules in the grammar. We argue that Compounding Noun Incorporation is an L-to-L type and that Classifier Noun Incorporation is a W-to-W type; we base our argument on the interaction of Noun Incorporation and Applicative Formation in the Paleo-Siberian language Chukchi and the isolate language Ainu.

Proceedings of the Twenty-First Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Historical Issues in Sociolinguistics/Social Issues in Historical Linguistics (1995)