Transitivity, mood and theme. Part I of this paper (sections 1–3) was an attempt to sketch some of the principal syntactic options, having the clause as point of origin, that are available to the speaker of English for the representation of processes and relations, and of objects, persons &c. as participants in them. The term ‘transitivity’ was used as a general label for this area of grammatical selection. Part II (sections 4–7) is concerned with another range of grammatical options, also associated with the clause, for which ‘theme’ is being used as the cover term.

This paper is concerned with the social mechanisms of linguistic change, and we begin by noting the distinction drawn by Bynon (1977) between two quite different approaches to the study of linguistic change. The first and more idealized, associated initially with traditional nineteenth century historical linguistics, involves the study of successive ‘states of the language’, states reconstructed by the application of comparative techniques to necessarily partial historical records. Generalizations (in the form of laws) about the relationships between these states may then be made, and more recently the specification of ‘possible’ and ‘impossible’ processes of change has been seen as an important theoretical goal.

It is planned to publish this paper in three parts, in this and the two subsequent issues of the Journal of Linguistics. The three parts will consist respectively of the numbered sections 1–3, 4–7 and 8–10; references to section 4 onwards are thus to forthcoming parts of the paper. Sections 1–3 contain observations concerning transitivity; 4–7 deal with what is here referred to as ‘theme’, a general term for all those choices involving the distribution of information in the clause; in 8–10, transitivity is reconsidered in the light of certain further problems and of what has been said about theme, and some generalization is attempted.

The analysis of referring expressions can be divided into two branches for our purposes. The first includes theories of definite descriptions and proper names. The key to the riddle of the appropriate use of such expressions, it was thought, is the notion of presupposition: existence and/or uniqueness. Indeed, this was the question that dominated the literature for many years, starting with the early philosophical analyses of Frege (1982), Russell (1919) and Strawson (1956, 1964), and ending with the much later pragmatically oriented linguistic analyses, such as Liberman (1973), Kempson (1975), Prince (1978, 1981b), Gazdar (1979), McCawley (1979), Hawkins (1974, 1984) and even Loftus (1972, 1974, 1975), although this last approach is more psychological. The second branch of research totally neglected the question of presupposition. Non-syntactic/semantic theories of anaphoric expressions, pronouns especially, were psychologically oriented, and hence saw the issue to be accounted for quite differently. In fact, the objective of these theories has been to elucidate processing procedures by examining anaphoric expressions, rather than to make claims about anaphoric expressions as such.

This paper first provides an overview of the various senses in which the terms ‘marked’ and ‘unmarked’ have been used in 20th-century linguistics. Twelve different senses, related only by family resemblances, are distinguished, grouped into four larger classes: markedness as complexity, as difficulty, as abnormality, and as a multidimensional correlation. In the second part of the paper, it is argued that the term ‘markedness’ is superfluous, because some of the concepts that it denotes are not helpful, and others are better expressed by more straightforward, less ambiguous terms. In a great many cases, frequency asymmetries can be shown to lead to a direct explanation of observed structural asymmetries, and in other cases additional concrete, substantive factors such as phonetic difficulty and pragmatic inferences can replace reference to an abstract notion of ‘markedness’.

This paper is a quantitative study of the factors that determine the selection of passive constructions over active ones by English speakers. By examining a large body of passives used in spontaneous speech, together with the sentences that show an opposing choice, we are able to throw light on the crucial question of which syntactic and which semantic features of the environment act to constrain the choice and whether syntactic or semantic factors predominate in this case. In the course of the analysis, we will also have something to say about the social factors that have been reported to determine the use of the passive.

During the past few years linguists have begun to express doubts about the validity of segmental analysis for the study of child language and have come to feel that it is probable that a child perceives spoken language differently from an adult, e.g. Bellugi & Brown (1964: 113), Ingram (1966: 218), Ladefoged (1967: 148–9), Lenneberg (1967: 279–281), Weir (1962: 30). They are also beginning to realize the importance of treating a child's language as having its own independent system (Carroll, 1961: 332; Fry, 1966: 194). To date, however, investigators of child speech have made their analyses on a segmental and distributional basis and have expressed the child's phonological system in terms of the adult's phonemic system; one may cite for example Cohen (1969), Grégoire (1933, 1947), Jakobson (1941), Jakobson & Halle (1961), Leopold (1939, 1947, 1961), Lewis (1968), Ohnesorg (1959), Velten (1943) and Weir (1962). Such studies, valuable though they be, cannot be said to have succeeded in explaining the relationship between the forms and structures of child and adult and have left many questions unanswered such as: (1) What governs the choice of sound that the child will use as a ‘substitute’ for an adult sound? (2) Why does the child ‘drop’ certain sounds of the adult form or ‘substitute’ for them when he is already capable of making such sounds and is in factusing them in some other contexts? (3) Why does the child use homonyms for adult forms which appear to be quite unlike each other and which have been proved to be semantically clearly differentiated for the child? (4) What governs the form that reduplicated words take?

One of the less rewarding of our common interdisciplinary pursuits is lifting theoretical concepts from subjects not our own, and using them in contexts very distant from those they were intended for. Such borrowings often turn from theoretical claims into sloppy metaphors, leading to varieties of ‘vulgar X-ism’, the resuit of overenthusiastic appropriation with insufficient sense of the subtlety or precise applicability of the originals. Spencer's ‘Social Darwinism’, vulgar-Freudian or vulgar-Marxist literary analysis and sociology are nice examples. Linguistics, being less unique than linguists often think, is no exception: Praguian and neo-Praguian functionalism may be a kind of vulgar Darwinism, extending notions of ‘adaptation’ or ‘selective pressure’ to the inappropriate domain of language Systems (see Lass, 1980a). But every once in a while such transfers seem to work, like Darwin's borrowings from late eighteenth-century Scottish economie theory; if not always through direct applicability, then by focusing on new ways of interpreting old data, or providing a basis for linking disparate phenomena as instances of a new (putative) natural kind.

This paper provides a new perspective on the options available to languages for encoding directed motion events. Talmy (2000) introduces an influential two-way typology, proposing that languages adopt either verb- or satellite-framed encoding of motion events. This typology is augmented by Slobin (2004b) and Zlatev & Yangklang (2004) with a third class of equipollently-framed languages. We propose that the observed options can instead be attributed to: (i) the motion-independent morphological, lexical, and syntactic resources languages make available for encoding manner and path of motion, (ii) the role of the verb as the single clause-obligatory lexical category that can encode either manner or path, and (iii) extra-grammatical factors that yield preferences for certain options. Our approach accommodates the growing recognition that most languages straddle more than one of the previously proposed typological categories: a language may show both verb- and satellite-framed patterns, or if it allows equipollent-framing, even all three patterns. We further show that even purported verb-framed languages may not only allow but actually prefer satellite-framed patterns when appropriate contextual support is available, a situation unexpected if a two- or three-way typology is assumed. Finally, we explain the appeal of previously proposed two- and three-way typologies: they capture the encoding options predicted to be preferred once certain external factors are recognized, including complexity of expression and biases in lexical inventories.

Kohler (1966a, 1966b: 346–348) asks whether the syllable is a phonological universal, and concludes negatively.1 The way to support such a conclusion is not difficult to imagine: the sort of specific objections to the syllable which Kohler raises would, if well-founded, be sufficient to prove his case.

The aim of this paper is to argue that the process of code-mixing is constrained by the government relation that holds between the constituents of a sentence. The government constraint replaces a number of specific constraints that have been proposed in the literature to account for apparently ‘impossible’, ‘ungrammatical’ or ‘non-occurring’ types of intra-sentential switches. Code-mixing is a form of linguistic behaviour which produces utterances consisting of elements taken from the lexicons of different languages. Some examples are given in (1).

Previous parts of this paper have been concerned with two areas in the syntax of the English clause: Part 1 with transitivity, Part 2 with theme. Transitivity is defined as relating to the experiential component of meaning (or ‘cognitive’, though this term is not really appropriate since all components involve a cognitive stratum); the discussion has been confined to the expression of processes and the participants therein – syntactically, those functions having in general verbal and nominal realizations – although a full treatment of the experiential component in the syntax of the clause would take account of other features, the expression of time and place and other adjuncts to and conditions on the process. Theme is related to the discoursal, or informational, component; under this heading are brought together the principal options whereby the speaker introduces structure into the discourse and (in the ideal case) ensures ‘comprehension’ – the recognition of the text as a text, and its interpretation along predicted lines.

We challenge the predominant view of the English dative alternation, which takes all alternating verbs to have two meanings: a caused possession meaning realized by the double object variant and a caused motion meaning realized by the to variant. Instead, we argue that verbs like give and sell only have a caused possession meaning, while verbs like throw and send have both caused motion and caused possession meanings. We show that the caused possession meaning may be realized by both variants. Concomitantly, we argue that verbs like give, even in the to variant, lack a conceptual path constituent, and instead have a caused possession meaning which can be understood as the bringing about of a ‘have’ relation. We reassess evidence for alternative approaches adduced from inference patterns and verb–argument combinations and demonstrate how our verb-sensitive analysis, when combined with an account of variant choice, provides a more insightful explanation of this data, while having wider coverage. Our investigation affirms proposals that a verb's own meaning plays a key role in determining its argument realization options. To conclude, we consider the crosslinguistic implications of our study, attempting to explain why so many languages lack a true dative alternation.

This article argues for the hypothesis that the location of the nucleus of the intonation contour is rule-governed. The term ‘nucleus’ is taken to refer to what has elsewhere been discussed as the ‘nuclear syllable’ (Crystal, 1969), ‘tonic’ (Halliday, 1967a), ‘sentence stress’ (Schmerling, 1976), ‘[I stress]’ (Chomsky & Halle, 1968), and ‘Designated Terminal Element’ (Liberman & Prince, 1977) (ignoring certain differences of analysis, such as that between double-nucleus and single-nucleus interpretation of some contours). Drawing on the facts of English and Dutch, it does so by attempting to identify the linguistic options available to speakers that are relevant to the location of the nucleus. The main argument hinges on the assumption that the chief functions of the location of the nucleus are (1) to signal the focus distribution of the sentence and (2) to signal whether the sentence is or is not meant as a counter-assertion, with the proviso that in many instances the location of the nucleus allows of more than one interpretation of one or both variables. Section 1 devotes some discussion to the problem of predictability, while the concepts of ‘focus’ and ‘normal stress’ are explored in Sections 2 to 4. Section 5 states the sentence accent assignment rule (SAAR), giving illustrations of its application. In Section 6, special attention is devoted to the pragmatic effects of SAAR in subject + predicate sentences. Section 7 attempts to give a fuller definition of the constituents the rule refers to and puts a general condition on its application. Section 8 introduces the variable mode, while Section 9 defines the problem of the location of the nucleus in sentences with minimal focus and introduces another accent assignment rule (PFR). A summary in the form of a set of propositions concludes the article. I should like to point out that most of the examples in this article are attested; it is only the more pedestrian ones that have been made up for the purpose of illustrating certain points.

The properties of gaps are intrinsically significant in that the language learner can confront little direct evidence bearing on them, so that it is reasonable to assume that they reflect deeper principles of UG, the biologically determined endowment that will be the primary concern for those interested more in the nature of the human mind than in the arrangement of data in the environment (Chomsky, 1982:19. Some concepts and consequences of the theory of Government and Binding).

Recent work on morphology – Lieber, 1981; Williams, 1981; Kiparsky, 1982; and Selkirk, 1982, in particular – has extended the notion of HEAD from syntax into new areas in morphology. In particular, these writers propose that in forms with derivational affixes, like English happiness, the affix is the head of the combination; for instance, Kiparsky assumes (following Lieber) ‘that all word formation is endocentric’, meaning by this ‘that the category of a derived word is always non-distinct from the category of its head, in English usually the rightmost constituent (cf. Williams, 1981)’ (133).

There has been much discussion of intra-lingual varieties in recent years. Catford has pertinently stated the problem which has prompted this discussion and justified the need to solve it (1965:83): ‘The concept of a “whole language” is so vast and heterogeneous that it is not operationally useful for many linguistic purposes, descriptive, comparative and pedagogical. It is therefore desirable to have a framework of categories for the classification of “sub-languages” or varieties within a total language.’

Consideration of the problem of alternative agreement forms (§ 1) leads us to postulate a hierarchy of agreement positions (§ 2) which allows us to make predictions as to the possibility and relative frequency of semantic as compared to syntactic agreement. The hierarchy is justified by data from a variety of languages which permit alternative agreements (§ 3). Confirming evidence comes from a study of the instances where agreement in case and person is required in different languages (§ 4). The status of the hierarchy and the type of prediction it makes are discussed. It is suggested that the hierarchy determines the main divisions of a measure called SYNTACTIC DISTANCE and that other factors (word order, distance between controller and agreeing element, depth of stacking) determine relative degrees of distance within these main divisions (§ 5). The basic claim of the paper is that as syntactic distance increases so does the likelihood of semantic agreement.

This paper examines two contrasting perspectives on morphological analysis, and considers inflectional patterns that bear on the choice between these alternatives. On what is termed an ABSTRACTIVE perspective, surface word forms are regarded as basic morphotactic units of a grammatical system, with roots, stems and exponents treated as abstractions over a lexicon of word forms. This traditional standpoint is contrasted with the more CONSTRUCTIVE perspective of post-Bloomfieldian models, in which surface word forms are ‘built’ from sub-word units. Part of the interest of this contrast is that it cuts across conventional divisions of morphological models. Thus, realization-based models are morphosyntactically ‘word-based’ in the sense that they regard words as the minimal meaningful units of a grammatical system. Yet morphotactically, these models tend to adopt a constructive ‘root-based’ or ‘stem-based’ perspective. An examination of some form-class patterns in Saami, Estonian and Georgian highlights advantages of an abstractive model, and suggests that these advantages derive from the fact that sets of words often predict other word forms and determine a morphotactic analysis of their parts, whereas sets of sub-word units are of limited predictive value and typically do not provide enough information to recover word forms.

A long recognized problem for linguistic theory has been to explain why certain sounds, sound oppositions, and sound sequences are statistically preferred over others among languages of the world. The formal theory of markedness, developed by Trubetzkoy and Jakobson in the early 1930's, and extended by Chomsky and Halle (1968), represents an attempt to deal with this problem. It is at least implicit in that theory that sounds are rare when (and because) they are marked, and common when (and because) they are not. Whether sounds are marked or unmarked depends – in the latter version of the theory, particularly – upon the ‘intrinsic content’ of acoustic and articulatory features which define them. There was, however, no substantive attempt among early proponents of the theory to show what it was about the content of particular features and feature combinations that caused them to be marked, and others not.