Because of a too liberal, often inadequate and/or arbitrary use of the term field, especially in semantics, modern semantic theory needs more than ever before a new field notion and a new field terminology. An attempt will be made to define a field notion based on what others have said about fields in semantics. With regard to terminology, I shall use the term axiological field, which appears in several of my earlier writings as well. “Axiology” is to be defined as a functional and structural approach to meaning which stands to semantics as phonology stands to phonetics. It is about values (“axiology”, a term coined by André Martinet, literally means ‘science of values’) as opposed to meanings, with values being to meanings what phonemes are to uttered sounds.

The Japanese postpositional particle wa has probably received more attention within the linguistic literature dealing with that language than any other single element of Japanese grammar. The present paper is a further contribution to the long and honorable series of attempts to come to grips with the function of this highly frequent, but still poorly understood, linchpin of Japanese grammar.

The particle wa may occur with subject nouns, as in (1), with other parts of speech, and may even be attached to entire sentences. Because of the variability of the elements with which wa can be associated, the element to which wa is attached is referred to throughout the present paper simply as X.

Traditional approaches to natural language processing (NLP) can be considered construction-based. That is to say, they employ surface oriented, language specific rules, whether in the form of an Augmented Transition Network (ATN), logic grammar or some other grammar/parsing formalism. The problems of such approaches have always been apparent; they involve large sets of rules, often ad hoc, and their adequacy with respect to the grammar of the language is difficult to ensure.

On serait tenté de croire que la question de l’acquisition des mots composés dans les langues romanes et en français plus particulièrement ne semble pas se poser d’abord en termes de processus de maturation ni en termes de dispositif d’apprenance (“learnability”) du langage (DAP). Après tout, un enfant en bas âge n’articule pas des mots composés dès lors qu’il commence à balbutier. On a même l’impression que l’enfant n’a pas besoin d’être confronté à des données très particulières pour acquérir la capacité de comprendre et de réutiliser les mots composés de sa langue. On peut même entretenir l’illusion que les mots composés n’appartiennent ni à son voculaire fondamental ni même à son répertoire lexical de jeune locuteur. Quelques exceptions mises à part, comme loup-garou ou “jouer à cache-cache, à colin-maillard, à chat-perché, à pigeon vole, à saute-mouton, etc.”, un enfant n’a que rarement l’occasion, nous semble-t-il, d’entendre les mots composés de sa langue et surtout de les enregistrer dans son vocabulaire actif. En tout état de cause, les mots composés ne poseraient aucun vrai problème d’acquisition ni seraient d’une grande pertinence en regard du DAP.

Recent analyses of word order and clause structure suggest that natural language syntax employs competing processes of Verb Fronting (VF) and Inflection Movement (IM) for the realization of Tense and Agreement (TNS and AGR) features on verb stems. As the names suggest, Verb Fronting is a process that raises a verb from the head of VP to INFL and INFL Movement is a rule that lowers the contents of INFL to the head of VP. Both rules are assumed to involve Chomsky-adjunction of the moved node to the target node and both are assumed to leave a trace.

John B. Smith (1987) recently drew attention to the occasional use of an adverb + infinitive construction in English dialects, and specifically to the non-finite phrase away to go. Joseph Wright included examples of the construction in the English Dialect Dictionary under both away and go, with away to go meaning basically ‘be off, go away, away he went’. Under away (A.5.Phr. away to go):

In Late Latin the consonantalization of unstressed nonlow front vowels in hiatus gave rise to consonant + yod sequences. These clusters, which were absent in Classical Latin, became subject to a number of phonological processes as diverse as palatalization, affrication, gemination, palatal diphthongization and lenition. Some of these changes occurred in all dialects, others were limited to a number of them. The primary aim of this study is to provide a detailed nonlinear analysis of the above-mentioned processes, which, although well-documented in philological studies, have never received a proper formal treatment.

Any theory of semantics must account for the role of inference in the interpretation of a sentence, however, it is not clear at which level of the grammar this inferencing capability must be represented. In Sperber and Wilson (1986) for example, inference plays an important role in the interpretation of an utterance in discourse, yet their theory does not integrate lexical representations with discourse and inferencing. Jackendoff (1987, 1990) on the other hand, while giving explicit representations for sentences and lexical items, does not address the question of discourse and inference. In this paper I will argue that it is essential to take account of discourse-level factors when analyzing sentence meaning, and indeed word meaning. In particular I will show that the meaning of the auxiliary verb fεla. in Bengali can be properly represented only if such discourse-level factors are included.

One proposal which has played and continues to play an important role in the syntactic analysis of Romance prepositional phrases is that not everything which looks like a preposition is in fact a true preposition. First proposed by Vergnaud (1974) for French, the idea is that some apparent Ps actually act as simple Case-marking on an NP; in Vergnaud’s case, this was the à associated with Goal arguments. As a result, the syntactic representation of Goal arguments involves no PP-node, but rather an NP with an inflectional Case-marking à. Vergnaud’s proposal was developed further for French à by Kayne (1975) and Jaeggli (1981), and is assumed to be valid for French de by Elliott (1986). Chomsky (1986) also suggests that English of is in many cases the realization of genitive Case, and Demonte (1989) argues that many instances of Spanish a or de phrases selected for by verbs are not PPs but rather NPs marked with Case.

One of the best known and most controversial features of Canadian English is the vocalic feature labeled by Chambers (1973) as “Canadian Raising”, which affects the /aI/ of right and the /aU/ of lout. This feature represents a situation in which the onset of the diphthong is closer to the target of the glide before fortis consonants than before lenis consonants: for instance, ride may have [aε] and right [3I], and loud may have [ao] but lout [ʌU]. Many of the previous studies of the feature, beginning with its original description by Martin Joos (1942), who raises the question of whether the second syllable of typewriter has the raised or non-raised variant, have involved the syllabification rules that determine when the onset is raised and when it is not. Chambers (1973) demonstrates that writer normally has the raised variant and shows that the relative stress on particular syllables can prevent raising from taking place in some cases where the diphthong occurs before a voiceless consonant. Vance (1987), Paradis (1980), and Chambers (1989) also deal with this latter problem, reformulating it in terms of linear (Vance) or Kahnian (Paradis, Chambers) theories of syllable formation.

Just over a decade ago, Catherine Fuchs and Anne-Marie Léonard (henceforth, F and L) co-authored Vers une théorie des aspects (Fuchs and Léonard 1979), a monograph on the tense and aspect systems of French and English. Although fairly influential among French linguists, their work has been largely ignored by scholars outside France. There is nothing surprising in this: indeed, the theoretical framework chosen by F and L, namely Antoine Culioli’s théorie des opérations énonciatives (‘theory of speaker-based operations’), has hitherto met with much the same fate. I do not wish to go into the epistemological, cultural or attitudinal reasons for this state of affairs. The scope of the present article is actually very restricted. My purpose will be to delineate, in deliberately informal terms, some of the critical problems that are to be encountered by anyone attempting to construct a formalized or semi-formalized representation of French tense and aspect. F and L’s book happens to be such an attempt, certainly the most explicit and comprehensive one in recent years.

This article is concerned with WH-words and WH-constructions in Prince Edward Island Acadian French (PEIAF). The principal data come from the French variety spoken in the small community of Abram-Village in the Evangeline region located in the northwest of the island. French is a minority language in Prince Edward Island, spoken as a first language by less than 6% of the population according to the 1986 census. The number of French speakers has declined sharply over the last several decades but in the Evangeline region the francophone population is stable and French enjoys both institutional support and considerable language loyalty. The majority of Abram-Village residents, educated in French-medium schools, are fluently bilingual in French and English.