This book is concerned with the meaning and use of two kinds of declarative sentences:
1) It's raining?
2) It's raining.
The difference between (1) and (2) is intonational: (1) has a final rise--indicated by the question mark--while (2) ends with a fall.
Christine Gunlogson's central claim is that the meaning and use of both kinds of sentences must be understood in terms of the meaning of their defining formal elements, namely declarative sentence type and rising versus falling intonation. Gunlogson supports that claim through an investigation of the use of declaratives as...

This work explores effect of speech perception strategies upon morphological structure. Using connectionist modelling, perception and production experiments, and calculations over lexical, Jennifer Hay investigates the role of two factors known to be relevant to speech perceptions: phonotactics and lexical frequency. Hay demonstrates that low probability phoneme transitions across morpheme boundaries exert a considerable force toward the maintenance of complex words, and argues that the relative frequency of the derived form and the base significantly affects the decomposability of complex...

This book provides an analysis of two theories of language acquisition: the theory that acquisition is primarily mediated by innate properties of language provided by universal grammar, and the opposing theory that language is acquired based on the patterns in the ambient language. A problem not often considered is that these two theories are confounded because the structures that are frequent across languages are also typically the most frequent within a specific language. In addition, the innate theory of language acquisition is difficult to quantify and qualify. Using cross-linguistic,...

This work is a detailed investigation and description of phonotactic sound patterns affecting Khoesan click consonant inventories. It also includes the first quantitative study of phonation types in Khoesan languages, and a study of phonation types associated with pharyngeal consonants all around. Although bases of OCP constraints have been presumed to be perceptual, this is a quantitative study showing the acoustic basis of a particular OCP constraint in a specific language.

"Feature neutrality" is an issue that has received much attention among linguists. For example, consider the sentence, "I have never, and will never, put my name on this document." Here, the verb 'put' acts simultaneously as a past participle (as in "have never put") and a base form (as in "will never put"), and is therefore said to be neutral between the two forms. Similar examples have been found for many languages.
The accepted wisdom is that neutrality is possible only for morphosyntactic features such as verb form, gender, number, declension class-not at the level of gross syntactic...

Central questions addressed are the analysis of subjects in Spanish and English (DP vs. NP and null vs. preverbal vs. postverbal) and the nature of constructions such as topicalization, left-dislocation, and focus preposing.

This book analyses 153 languages from a large variety of families to establish a previously unexplored relationship between phonetically conditioned sound changes such as lenitions and functional considerations.

Users of natural languages have many word orders with which to encode the same truth-conditional meaning. They choose contextually appropriate strings from these many ways with little conscious effort and with effective communicative results. Previous computational models of when English speakers produce non-canonical word orders, like topicalization, left-dislocation and clefts, fail. The primary goal of this book is to present a better model of when speakers choose to produce certain non-canonical word orders by incorporating the effects of discourse context and speaker goals on syntactic...

This book investigates two prominent issues with regard to the inflected infinitive - the syntactic distribution of the Portuguese inflected infinitive, and its origin and development from Early Romance.

Jennifer Smith shows that phonological processes specific to strong positions are distinct from those involved in classic positional neutralization effects.