Previous work on vowel harmony (VH) in Palestinian Arabic (PA), particularly Kenstowicz (1981), has shown that this process is more adequately expressed in autosegmental than in linear terms, since the former permits the two otherwise uncollapsible regressive and progressive harmony processes to be stated in a single unified rule. The present study complements that autosegmental analysis. It shows that the autosegmental rule of VH in PA is constrained simultaneously by metrical and segmental boundaries. That is, high front vowels acquire the feature [+round] only if they are dominated by a foot marked [+round] and if they occur within the segmental domain of VH which comprises the stem and the preceding prefixes.

This paper is meant as a contribution to historical morphology, although it takes the form of a critique. What will be criticized is a particular proposal, made by Carstairs (especially, 1984b), to look upon PARADIGM MIXTURE as a cause of morphological change. An issue not unrelated to this proposal is the use of PARADIGM ECONOMY (Carstairs, 1983) as a teleological principle in accounting for morphological change. We will show that paradigm economy is likely to be irrelevant to historical linguistics.

Sociolinguistic studies have shown that variation may occur on any of the accepted levels of linguistic analysis. Variation on the phonological level has been the most commonly treated in studies of English from Labov's (1966) New York study onwards. By contrast, it is rather rare that we find studies of morphological or lexical variation (the latter being the variation in the lexical form of words, for example, the Belfast alternation of /Λ/ and /Λ/ in the word foot (L. Milroy, 1980: 118)). However, morphological and lexical variation has been favoured in studies of some other languages, for instance Norwegian (Fintoft & Mjaavatn, 1980; Kerswill, 1985a), Swedish (Thelander, 1982) and Persian (Jahangiri & Hudson, 1982). On the other hand, studies of syntactic and prosodie variation have been altogether much less common (but see Cheshire, 1982; Local, 1982). In spite of differences in emphasis, the various methodologies used have all had the aim of discovering co-variation between linguistic and non-linguistic parameters.

It will be suggested in this article that Slovene, a South Slavonic language, is on the way to acquiring verb-second (V2) word order. In providing evidence in support of this view I shall compare Slovene, on the one hand, with the closely related language Serbo-Croat and, on the other hand, with relevant details from the history of the Germanic languages. The point of comparing it with Serbo-Croat is to discover the respects in which the word order of these two languages has diverged. Taken together with what is known about the word order of Common Slavonic, the facts emerging from this comparison allow us to identify one major respect in which Slovene has changed and two respects in which it is still changing. At the same time, they reveal a major respect in which Serbo-Croat word order is also changing. The point of comparing Slovene with the Germanic languages is twofold. First, since all the present-day Germanic languages either have or have had V2 word order (Haiman, 1974), it is possible that their history can help us to understand the changes currently taking place in Slovene and to predict how Slovene might change in the future. Secondly, where details of the history of the Germanic languages are poorly understood, the possibility exists of gaining fresh insight into them in the light of the changes that have taken place more recently, or indeed are still taking place, in Slovene. In this connection we shall assess the plausibility of two theories concerning the adoption of V2 word order by the Germanic languages, those of Vennemann (1975) and Wackernagel (1892).

One of the most promising new developments of recent research into theoretical syntax within the model of Government and Binding (GB) as presented in Chomsky (1981) and (1982) has been the new importance given to the study of languages other than English. This has stimulated a great deal of work into a variety of languages (see, for example, Rizzi, 1982; Borer, 1983; Bouchard, 1984; Huang, 1984 and others). It has also been welcomed by linguists outside the TG tradition. Thus, Comrie, (1984:155) expresses his delight that ‘Chomsky (1981) makes clear that generative grammarians have come to realize that an adequate study of syntax within universal grammar requires the study of languages of different types. Chomsky's main concern has always been to formulate a theory that would achieve ‘explanatory adequacy’ by providing a restrictive set of principles which could characterize universally the notion ‘natural language’. However, detailed and in-depth analyses of various languages have revealed that in order to achieve ‘descriptive adequacy’ the theory has to allow for cross-linguistic differences, or ‘parametric variation’. The concept of parametric variation weakens some-what the restrictiveness of the universal grammar (UG) hypothesis and even more so its purported innateness, since the values for the parameters must be arrived at by the child through induction from empirical evidence. Nevertheless, explanatory adequacy may still be attained if the number of parameters is very small and each parameter has few values.

Over the last decade or so, hierarchies such as the animacy hierarchy, the personal hierarchy, the case hierarchy, the definiticity and referentiality hierarchies and so forth have been identified as determinants of constituent order. It is my intention in this paper to review the set of hierarchies and rank them as determinants of NP sequencing in English. I shall from time to time compare and contrast the effect of a hierarchy in other languages with what we find in English; but it remains to be seen whether the ranking which obtains for English has a wider application: I make no a priori claim that it does. The hierarchies and families of hierarchies are ranked as follows, from the most powerful determinant to the least:

(1) the familiarity hierarchy;

(2) the topic < comment, given < new hierarchies;

(3) the universal sequencing conventions;

(4) the definiticity and referentiality hierarchies;

(5) the personal, social status, and role hierarchies;

(6) the dominant descriptor hierarchies;

(7) the formal hierarchies.

The topic of this discussion is analogical change of a particular sort, namely that where, pretheoretically, meaning seems to have had a role to play in determining the direction taken by the change. Analogy is an area of linguistic change of the highest theoretical interest. No analogical changes can take place without the involvement of ‘performance’ factors in general, including a perceiving human agent as one of these (cf. Vincent, 1974; Anttila, 1977), for many analogical acts illustrate the human mind in a condition that is at the same time relatively free and relatively fettered. It is free in the sense that the inferential processes used in the cases that interest us are ABDUCTIVE (cf. Andersen, 1973: 775; but contrast Mayerthaler, 1980: 126–7); that is, given some facts, a law may be invoked which allows the reasoner to infer that something MAY, not MUST, be the case, and to act upon that possibility in a creative way. The basic data in this paper include instances of similarity between lexemes, a notion which will receive the closest scrutiny. In the changes we will examine, people appear to invoke a law-like principle to the effect that there is a close relation between similarity of form and similarity of meaning. And they infer, abductively, that cases of similarity in such instances may be failed examples of sameness, and accordingly may replace the state of similarity by one of sameness (cf. Panagl, 1982: 5). The result is therefore the fruit of not always unreasonable guesswork rather than of the logical security of deduction (or induction). The mind is fettered in the sense that it appears condemned to try to make something transparent, or at least formally transparent, out of what is linguistically obscure; its activity is thus constrained by the rest of the linguistic system with which it operates. It is in the condition of an electrician who is summoned to sort out a dangling wire and connects it up to the first other dangling wire that he or she finds.

It is a standard assumption of government-binding theory that the relationship between a constituent displaced by the transformational rule schema Move α and its trace is subject to the locality condition known as subjacency, the central principle of the subtheory of universal grammar known as bounding theory (Chomsky, 1981, 1982, 1986). Subjacency requires that not more than one ‘barrier’ intervene between a moved constituent and its trace, but the definition of the relevant barriers has been, and remains, an issue of considerable controversy. In Chomsky (1977) it is suggested that NP and one of S or S¯ are the ‘bounding nodes’ for English, and many standard textbooks have since argued for NP and S (e.g. Radford, 1981: Ch. 7; van Riemsdijk & Williams, 1986: Ch. 4). Nevertheless, the possibility of cross-linguistic parametric variation may have to be allowed for, since Rizzi (1978) makes out a case for S¯ rather than S as the clausal bounding node for Italian in order to account for the freedom of extraction from so-called ‘wh-islands’ in that language. Chomsky (1980), however, puts forward the possibility that S¯ may be a bounding node universally, and that languages vary according to whether S is also. If it is, then there will be no long-distance movement (cf. standard German and Russian) unless individual verbs are specified in the lexicon as ‘bridges’ which nullify the barrierhood of S¯ (cf. the majority of verbs subcategorized by clausal complements in English). This view is revised and refined in Chomsky (1981: 307), where S¯ is taken to be a bounding node universally when it includes a complementizer or wh-phrase preceding a finite clause, in which case the finite clause S may also optionally be a barrier, and S is taken to be a bounding node when it is governed, as is the case after S¯-deletion in the complements of ‘raising’ predicates. Finally, Chomsky (1986) seeks to unite the definition of barrier for the purposes both of movement and government, assuming two barriers block movement and one barrier blocks government, by proposing that any ungoverned maximal projection is a barrier, and that any maximal projection immediately dominating such a barrier, whether lexically governed or not, is also a barrier by inheritance.

An interesting development in the last decade or so has been the increasing use that theoretical linguists have made of the notion ‘head’ – or rather, in order not to beg the question, of notions to which they have given the name ‘head’. The term has been around for a long time in linguistics, of course – for example Bloomfield uses it in relation to endocentric constructions (1933: 195), where the head is the daughter constituent which has the same distribution as the mother. Before that, Sweet had used ‘head-word’ to refer to any word to which another is subordinate (1891: 16, quoted in Matthews, 1981: 165). However, theoretical linguists made very little use of the term, or of the constellation of associated concepts, until quite recently. Its present status is due largely to work on X-bar syntax dating from Chomsky (1970), and especially to its recent manifestation in Generalised Phrase Structure Grammar (Gazdar & Pullum, 1981; Gazdar et al., 1985)–and even more so in the ‘head-driven’ variant of this (Pollard, 1985). But the improved status of ‘head’ is also due to some extent to the renewed interest in dependency grammar (Anderson, 1971, 1977; Matthews, 1981; Atkinson, et al, 1982; Hudson, 1984; Nichols, 1986). All these treatments agree not only in using the term ‘head’, but also in using it to refer to the element in some construction to which all the other parts of that construction are (in some sense) subordinate.

This article will be concerned with the accentuation of two types of sentence in English: straightforward intransitive sentences, like (1), and intransitive sentences embedded in the frame It's just NP V-ing, like (2), (1) The DOOR slammed. (2) It's just the DOOR slamming.

The label CLITIC has been applied to a wide variety of phenomena, from words that are prosodically dependent on neighbouring words (as are unaccented monosyllabic prepositions and personal pronouns in English) to words, or even individual morphemes, with idiosyncratic syntactic distributions (like the second-position pronominal and adverbial particles in many languages). I propose here to reserve the term for elements whose description requires more than the stipulation that they may or must be prosodically dependent.

Arguments about constituency in syntax can often be settled by such methods as testing whether conjoining is possible, or whether a particular string can be moved as a single constituent by a transformational rule. In view of the isomorphism which has been noted between syntactic structures and phonological structures (cf. Clements & Keyser, 1983:25–26; the notion of ‘structural analogy’ in Anderson & Durand, 1986:3; and most notably the isomorphism pointed out between Sentence and Syllable by Kurylowicz, 1949), one might wonder whether such means are available for settling analogous arguments in phonology. It appears that they are not: in this area conjoining does not occur, while movement rules are either not recognized at all, or restricted to those accounting for processes of metathesis, which would normally be taken to be local transformations operating on single segments (cf. Vincent, 1986:318, fn. 3). What types of arguments, then, ARE available for settling questions of phonological constituency? This article attempts to explore some aspects of this question.

The paradigm functions as a domain for certain processes of change. There can be changes in the number of grammatical categories or in the forms used to represent them. Thus, Benveniste (1968) contrasts change involving only the forms while the system remains the same (‘conservative’ change) with innovations in which there is change in the categories and the oppositions. In this paper, we will discuss both types of change in the Warlpiri pronominal system. Warlpiri is an Aboriginal language spoken in central Australia by about 3000 people. Our research has been carried out at Yuendumu, a remote community 300 km northwest of Alice Springs. While the majority of people in the community (about 750) have Warlpiri as their mother tongue, there are also about 65 non-Aboriginal people who speak English, and a few speakers of other Aboriginal languages closely related to Warlpiri. Although there is limited exposure to English, Warlpiri is the community language at Yuendumu.

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).