Showing papers in "Lingua in 1999"

TL;DR: The authors presented a framework for simulating language change in social networks derived from Social Impact Theory, where the language learner samples the speech of individuals from right across his speech community, though he may weight their input differentially according to their social position.

TL;DR: In this article, the idea that subject agreement should be considered a clitic (Taraldsen, 1992), and the relation between the agreement and subject to be one of clitic doubling was proposed.

TL;DR: The authors investigated Possessive Dative Construction (PDC) in Hebrew and Romance, and focused on the puzzling nature of the possessor Dative (PD) which behaves like a syntactic argument of the verb.

TL;DR: This article explored the nature and role of the imperfective verb in Arabic word formation and found that it plays an important role in word formation in Arabic, rather than root-based word formation.

TL;DR: This paper used social impact theory to simulate language change in a finite, structured population and found that the evolution of linguistically marked structures is more likely in small communities than in large communities, and argued that these three generalisations could be used to make sense of the different patterns of linguistic diversity observed in the Old and New Worlds.

TL;DR: In this paper, a case-study of Greek SLI data was presented and analysed focusing on the use of D-elements in the child's grammatical system: the definite article, object clitics and the wh-phrase what.

TL;DR: In this article, a case-study of Greek SLI is presented, focusing on the use of D-elements in the child's grammatical system: the definite article, object clitics and the wh-phrase what.

TL;DR: It is argued that embedded topicalization requires two kinds of licensing: 1. a topic is licensed in the projection of INFL; and 2. INFL is licensed by adjoining to COMP in LF in LF.

TL;DR: The authors discusses the theoretical and empirical framework and potentially controversial assumptions within which research into language breakdown is being conducted, focusing on questions that bear upon the relevance of studies of language pathology to linguistic theory, along with questions related to patients' diagnosis and the clinical and theoretical validity of syndromes.

TL;DR: In this article, the authors show that modern Icelandic and fifteenth-century English allow OV order in exactly the same patterns, suggesting that the facts can be understood if they are viewed from a diachronic generative perspective.

TL;DR: This paper showed that apparent agreement mismatches in constructions headed by the neuter determiner in Spanish are actually instances of specifier-head agreement at different stages in the derivation of relative cluses and related constructions.

TL;DR: The authors argue that the non-wh relatives are treated and interpreted as pronouns like who and which, rather than conjunctions (complementizers), in both types of dialects, and that the would-be contrast between two different modes of relativization is fundamentally an inflectional difference in the grammar of the different types of pronouns even though it is accompanied by some syntactic differences as well.

TL;DR: A way to reconcile Attract F with some apparent evidence for Move is proposed, based on a particular view of category movement proposed in Chomsky (1995), according to which when the category moves, two separate chains are formed: CHFF and CHCAT.

TL;DR: It seems that whereas P&P assumptions about syntactic structure are quite problematic in this area, HPSG provides just the right sort of syntactic Structure Grammar to give a satisfactory account of the process.

TL;DR: This article showed that the only common features shared by the morphosyntactic systems of the Abxaz-Adyghean, Nax-Daghestanian and Kartvelian families are reflections of typological universals characterizing the expression of ergativity in all languages (Dixon, Silverstein, Blake, Bossong, etc.).

TL;DR: The authors make a distinction between inherent form and communicated form (a self-description licensed by evidence provided by the text) and show that alliteration is an instance of communicated form.

TL;DR: The authors showed that verb gapping exists in Chinese and that the verb in Chinese can leave the VP-shell and raise to a functional category in overt syntax under particular circumstances under the assumption that verb movement is confined to the VP shell.

TL;DR: This work outlines a theory of inflectional morphology which uses ideas familiar from the Word-and-Paradigm tradition — Inflection, Lexeme and Stem — in combination with the logic of default inheritance to apply to a range of different morphological data.

TL;DR: Experimental evidence is used to establish that one and the same individual indeed manifests free variation in loans and to account for this variation, the feature geometry of autosegmental phonology is used, with separate tiers for the coronal and dorsal vowels.

TL;DR: The authors defend the position that such examples do not weaken the hypothesis since it is assumed that such postverbal subjects ought to leave the original object position and move to a position where nominative case is regularly assigned.

TL;DR: The full array of facts is explained as showing the effect of two distinct formal entities: Chain Formation, involving transfer of one feature, and Dependency, the mechanism whereby a sequence of suitably characterized and placed heads is read as a single LF object.

TL;DR: In this article, a morphophonologique du determinant postpose /la/ en haitien et st-lucien is analyzed, notamment l'alternance l/o selon que le nominal qui precede se termine par une consonne ou une voyelle.

TL;DR: The authors re-analyzes the Ekegusii data within Optimality Theory and eschews the major problems found in the derivational account, showing that the surface tonal patterns are the result of a delicate interplay between the productivity of various tonal processes and the avoidance of certain tonal structures.

TL;DR: The Split Wh-feature Hypothesis provides an account of the descriptive generalization that a wh-phrase in Spec of an interrogative complementizer cannot make any further movements.

TL;DR: In this article, it was shown that a Japanese wh-phrase in-situ that has another Japanese in-situation requires only inversely linked interpretation, and an argument similar to the one in English can be constructed based on the interaction of Japanese WH-phrases and negative polarity items.