Heinz Giegerich investigates the way in which alternations in the sound patterns of words interact with the processes of word formation in the language. Drawing examples from English and German, he uncovers and spells out in detail the principles of "lexical morphology and phonology," a theory that has in recent years become increasingly influential in linguistics. He queries many of the assumptions previously made in it to produce a formally coherent theory that offers new accounts of some central phenomena in the phonology of English.

In this book, Ljiljana Progovac presents cross-linguistic data on negative polarity, reflexive binding and the subjunctive mood, and proposes a unified analysis for various languages, including English and Serbian/Croatian. She argues that Negative Polarity Items (NPIs), such as ?anyone? and ?ever?, are anaphoric in nature and must be bound in their governing category, while Positive Polarity Items (PPIs), such as ?someone? and ?already?, are subject to Principle B of the Binding Theory. She also suggests that possible binders (and SUBJECTS) for polarity items are negation or else a polarity...

In this provocative work, Luigi Burzio argues that many common assumptions within stress theory, and phonological theory more generally, are in fact rather arbitrary. He proposes radical departures from recent tradition. In Part I he analyzes stress in the underived English lexicon, arguing that the basic accentual groups or "feet" are not monosyllabic or bisyllabic, as often assumed, but rather bisyllabic or trisyllabic. This analysis brings significant simplifications to other recent theorizing, including the elimination of standard extrametrically and all rules destressing. In Part II...

Ayhan Aksu-Ko 's empirical research on Turkish children's acquisition of the past tense.

This is the first extended study written within the framework of phonological government. Following the presentation of main aspects of this theory, the process of vowel-zero alternations is addressed and analyzed together with the idea that phonological processes are determined by principles of Universal Grammar along with parameters that distinguish languages. Vowel-zero alternations are investigated in terms of proper government of empty nuclei, which receive no phonetic interpretation when properly governed. Dr. Charette also considers the constraints on proper government, and argues for...

In this examination of the role of syntax in theories of sentence comprehension, Paul Gorrell argues for a distinct processing component that is devoted to the recovery of syntactic structure and that utilizes the contrasting types of information found within a GovernmentSHBinding grammar. He contrasts the primary and secondary relations in a phrase-structure tree, and shows how this distinction is reflected in the internal structure of the parser, a model that can also predict garden-path phenomena in the processing of verb-final clauses.

Bernd Heine argues that the structure of grammatical categories is predictable to a large extent once we know the range of possible cognitive structures from which they are derived. The author uses as his example the structure of predicative possession, and shows how most of the possessive constructions to be found in the world's languages can be traced back to a small set of basic conceptual patterns. Using grammaticalization theory Heine describes how each affects the word order and morphosyntax of the resulting possessive construction.

This book offers a new and in-depth analysis of English conditional sentences. Dancygier classifies conditional constructions according to time-reference and modality. She shows how the basic meaning parameters of conditionality correlate to formal parameters of the linguistic constructions that are used to express them. Focused on English, the study also provides a framework that can be extended to a broad range of grammatical phenomena in many other languages.

All modes of perception (vision, hearing, etc.) are organized into foreground or focus and background constituents. Natural language sentences are no different. This book explores the role of focusing in natural language sentences and the role of this basic cognitive mechanism in explaining sentence stress, meaning and structure. The result is an innovative view of our linguistic competence.

A new contribution to linguistic theory, this book presents a formal framework for the analysis of word structure in human language. It sets forth the network of hypotheses constituting Paradigm Function Morphology, a theory of inflectional form. The book differs from other recent works on the same subject in that it treats inflectional morphology as an autonomous system of principles rather than as a subsystem of syntax or phonology and it draws on evidence from a diverse range of languages in motivating the proposed conception of word structure.