Abstract: Two classes of saltation alternations (phonological derived-environment effects) are formally distinct under Harmonic Grammar (HG), but formally equivalent under Optimality Theory (OT, with or without local constraint conjunction). The famili…
This article proposes a unified analysis of the peripheral projections in Chinese, which does not rely on a head-directionality parameter. Each of these projections constitutes a phase and its head bears an EPP feature, which must be satisfied. Chinese…
Tiwa, a Tibeto-Burman language of India, has an obligatory wide scope disjunction particle that must outscope the directive force of imperatives. I argue that the behavior of wide scope disjunction in Tiwa provides evidence in favor of theories of impe…
This squib argues that NPI-licensing and variable binding are subject to a precedence constraint. The argument is based on Dutch, which allows extraposition of PPs. There is substantial evidence that when multiple PPs appear after the verb, their order…
Phonological rules built from a single operation, priority union, can model both feature-filling and feature-changing processes. The distinction is handled by specifying which argument of priority union is defeasible. Priority union should be considere…
The complexity of the directional construction in Chinese involves the following factors: (a) it can take a single directional item as the predicate; (b) two directional items can cooccur to serve as the predicate; (c) one or two directional items can …
In many languages with clitic or other weak pronouns, a Person-Case Constraint (Perlmutter 1971, Bonet 1991) prohibits certain combinations of these pronouns on the basis of their person features. This article explores the crosslinguistic variation in …
Sentences like That’s a beautiful dress you’re wearing are commonly heard in colloquial English. These sentences have a surface form that resembles identificational copular sentences with relative clause modifiers (e.g., This is the house I mentioned) …
It has been proposed that the Japanese lexicon can be divided into etymologically defined sublexica on phonotactic and other grounds. However, the psychological reality of this sublexical analysis has been challenged by some authors, who have appealed …