Gussmann (1980) has presented an analysis of Polish morphophonemics within the framework of SPE (Chomsky & Halle, 1968). His treatment appeals extensively to underlying representations containing segments which never appear in surface representations. He justifies this use of absolute neutralization with the claim that other rules of Polish phonology appeal to such underlying forms. Rubach (1984) has reanalysed much of Gussmann's description within the framework of Kiparsky's (1982) Lexical Phonology, retaining the analysis of the neutralized segments and even adding to the inventory of abstract elements. The arguments presented by both scholars are a paradigm of elegance and ingenuity, representing generative phonological analysis at its best. However, the considerable reliance they put on abstract underlying representations, morphologically conditioned rules, extrinsic rule ordering and other devices which give rise to a high degree of opacity arouses suspicion. For this reason I have sought to re-examine some of their material within a more ‘concrete’ interpretation of Lexical Phonology, making use of recent ideas from theories of non-linear phonology and theories of allomorphy.

Although linguists like to claim that all human languages are equal in a general sense, differing from systems of animal communication in possessing ‘design features’ like arbitrariness and productivity (Hockett, 1958), they sometimes join non-linguists in expressing the view that some languages are inadequate with respect to the cognitive or expressive resources which they offer their speakers. In the Middle Ages, this charge was commonly levelled against the European vernaculars, and it was sometime before Spanish and Italian were recognized as having autonomous grammatical and lexical resources comparable in regularity and power to classical Greek and Latin (Scaglione, 1984). By the middle of the twentieth century, following on the descriptive work of Boas, Sapir and others, the notion that the languages of ‘primitive’ peoples were fundamentally inadequate had also been eroded, at least in linguistics, anthropology, and other academic circles (Kay & Kempton, 1984:65). Yet, as Hall (1966:106) notes, there is still one group of languages which constitutes the ‘last refuge’ of the concept of inadequate grammatical or lexical resources: pidgins and creoles.

This paper is a sequel to ‘Thematic predicates and the pragmatics of non-descriptive definition’ (Burton-Roberts, 1986, henceforth PNDD) and is best read in conjunction with it. I discuss a variety of issues arising out of the explanation there given of a phenomenon I called ‘non-descriptive definition’. In explaining non-descriptive definition, we need to explain how a definition-requesting question (e.g. What is a dandy?, (2) below) can be appropriately responded to by the utterance of a sentence that does not constitute a definition and, canonically at least, would actually presuppose knowledge of the meaning of the word to be defined (e.g. Max is a dandy?, (3) below). The explanation given depends on analysing such responses as having the predicate rather than the subject as theme. On the assumption that subject is unmarked theme, such responses thus have marked thematic structure. On the further assumption of a relation of pragmatic equivalence between an utterance with marked thematic structure and some unmarked counterpart, such responses may be straightforwardly related to strict literal ANSWERS to their definition-requesting questions; that is, they can be related to DEFINITIONS – non-descriptive in the first instance (see (4) below), and (explicit) descriptive definitions in the second (see (5) below).

As part of an investigation into rapid speech and its rule-based processes, I want to present an analysis of colloquial spoken Thai and show how different tempi can be related to one another. I also want to see whether the processes displayed by colloquial Thai fit into the general picture of phonological processes which has emerged over the past 15 years or so (roughly Stampe, 1969, onwards) within different theoretical frameworks. In particular I shall try to relate my findings to the increasingly accepted notions of richer phonological structure now being envisaged (e.g. Clements & Keyser, 1983 – tridimensional; Goldsmith, 1976 a & b – autosegmental; Liberman & Prince, 1977 and Kiparsky, 1979 – metrical; Anderson & Ewen, 1980, and Durand, 1986 a – dependency).

The positions of subject and object in simple active sentences, and object of a preposition are normally filled by NP's but they can also be filled by PP's. There are reasons for analyzing such PP's as just PP's and not as PP's embedded in NP's. Yet such an analysis appears to be problematic for the analysis of raising and passive sentences assumed within the government-binding (GB) framework, which is formulated with exclusive reference to NP's. Assuming that the basic mechanisms at work in sentences with PP's in typical NP positions are identical to those in sentences with NP's, PP's must sometimes require Case to avoid a violation of the Case Filter. It is possible to incorporate this idea into the GB framework given a particular view of Case and Case assignment, and a revised Case Filter. The analysis receives some further support from a range of related data.

The history of the verb like has attracted a good deal of interest among linguists and students of the history of English, from Van der Gaaf (1904) and Jespersen (1927) up to Elmer (1981), Lightfoot (1981), and Fischer and Van der Leek (1983). The interest in this verb is caused by the fact that it presents a clear case of a verb changing its assignment of semantic to syntactic roles. In Modern English (ModE), this verb subcategorizes for a cause, which takes the grammatical role of object, and an experiencer, which plays the role of subject. But in Old English (OE), the semantic roles were assigned to the opposite grammatical roles:

It is generally assumed (with an exception to be discussed below), that this change is an instance of syntactic reanalysis. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that no reanalysis of a structure has taken place; rather, a new subcategorization frame has been introduced and gradually ousted the old one.

Remarkably little is known in detail about the phonetics and phonology of naturally occurring conversational talk. Virtually nothing of interest is known of the interactional implications of particular kinds of phonetic events in everyday talk: in particular about the ways in which participants in talk deploy general phonetic resources to accomplish specific interactional tasks. This is in part a consequence of the tendency of recent research on the phonological aspect of discourse to limit itself to ‘intonation’ as an area of primary interest. This work has moved away from the type of phonological analysis, such as that of Halliday (1967), that states intonational systems in terms of grammatically defined units or sentence types. Workers such as Brazil (1975, 1978, 1981), Brown, Currie and Kenworthy (1981), and Coulthard and Brazil (1981) have pursued Bolinger's suggestion that the relationship between intonation and grammar is ‘casual not causal’ and have sought to relate ‘intonation’ to discourse categories rather than to grammatical ones. These, and similar attempts to deal with aspects of discourse phonology, have suggested some organizational features which traditional linguistic accounts have not dealt with. On the whole, however, these recent attempts have been less than satisfactory for one or more of the following reasons.