Within the framework of optimality theory (Prince & Smolensky 2004), Steriade (2001a,b) proposes the P-map hypothesis, whose fundamental tenet is that the rankings of faithfulness constraints are grounded in perceptual-similarity rankings. This article provides empirical support for this hypothesis. In Japanese loanword phonology, a voiced geminate, but not a singleton, devoices to dissimilate from another voiced obstruent within a single stem. Based on this observation, I argue that the [+ voice] feature is protected by two different faithfulness constraints, IDENT(+ voi)Sing and IDENT(+ voi)Gem, and they are ranked as IDENT(+ voi)Sing » IDENT(+ voi)Gem in Japanese. I further argue that this ranking is grounded in the relative perceptibility of [+ voice] in singletons and geminates, and this claim is experimentally supported. The general theoretical implication is that phonetic perceptibility can directly influence patterns in a phonological grammar.

British and American speakers exhibit different verb number agreement patterns when sentence subjects have collective head nouns. From linguistic and psycholinguistic accounts of how agreement is implemented, three alternative hypotheses can be derived to explain these differences. The hypotheses involve variations in the representation of notional number, disparities in how notional and grammatical number are used, and inequalities in the grammatical number specifications of collective nouns. We carried out a series of corpus analyses, production experiments, and norming studies to test these hypotheses. The results converge to suggest that British and American speakers are equally sensitive to variations in notional number and implement subject-verb agreement in much the same way, but are likely to differ in the lexical specifications of number for collectives. The findings support a psycholinguistic theory that explains verb and pronoun agreement within a parallel architecture of lexical and syntactic formulation.

Negation is known to correlate with changes of word order, agreement, or case marking in the clause. I present data from Skou, a language of north-central New Guinea, which show obliques and adjuncts appearing postverbally in the SOV positive clause and preverbally in negative clauses. Moreover, in addition to these changes in the order of constituents, the grammatical functions assigned in the negated clause are not the same as in a positive clause, with obliques and adjuncts assuming object properties in the negated clause, as well as object positions. This results in otherwise unattested trivalent constructions in the language.

In parasitic-gap constructions an illicit gap inside a syntactic island becomes acceptable in combination with an additional licit gap, a result that has interesting implications for theories of grammar. Such constructions hold even greater interest for the question of the relation between grammatical knowledge and real-time language processing. This article presents results from two experiments on parasitic-gap constructions in English in which the parasitic gap appears inside a subject island, before the licensing gap. An off-line study confirms that parasitic gaps are acceptable when they occur inside the infinitival complement of a subject NP, but not when they occur inside a finite relative clause. An on-line self-paced reading study using a plausibility manipulation technique shows that incremental positing of gaps inside islands occurs in just those environments where parasitic gaps are acceptable. The fact that parasitic gaps are constructed incrementally in language processing presents a challenge for attempts to explain subject islands as epiphenomena of constraints on language processing and also helps to resolve apparent conflicts in previous studies of the role of island constraints in parsing.

Adjective agreement with coordinated nouns in Finnish presents a puzzling pattern: in some cases, a plural adjective is required with coordinated singular nouns, while in other cases that seem to be syntactically identical, a plural adjective is disallowed. The key to this puzzle lies at the syntax-semantics interface: plural adjectives are required in cases of NATURAL COORDINATION, where a salient close relation holds between the conjuncts, but disallowed in cases of ACCIDENTAL COORDINATION. The semantic distinction between natural and accidental coordination has a syntactic reflex in Finnish, where only the features of the natural-coordination structure are compatible with the agreement requirements of plural adjectives. We show that the distinction between natural and accidental coordination is syntactically reflected not only in Finnish, but in other languages as well, including Tundra Nenets, Russian, and Kurdish.

Postal (1969) discusses words as anaphoric islands. So-called outbound anaphora was further discussed in a series of papers published in the 1970s through the early 1990s, but inbound anaphora, such as Postal's himite (beside McCarthyite), has received less attention. It is shown here that a wide variety of words in Georgian are based on pronouns, including fully referential personal pronouns, reflexive pronouns, question words, quantifiers, and negative pronouns. Thus, the nonoccuring combinations of English are a language-particular problem.

The main focus of this article is the occurrence of some polarity items (PIs) in the complements of emotive factive verbs and only. This fact has been taken as a challenge to the semantic approach to PIs (Linebarger 1980), because only and factive verbs are not downward entailing (DE). A modification of the classical DE account is proposed by introducing the notion of nonveridicality (Zwarts 1995, Giannakidou 1998, 1999, 2001) as the one crucial for PI sanctioning. To motivate this move, it is first shown that two solutions in the direction of weakening classical monotonicity do not work: Strawson DE (von Fintel 1999) and weak DE (Hoeksema 1986). Weakening DE systematically either overgenerates or undergenerates, in either case failing to characterize the correct set of licensers. Nonveridicality is introduced as a conservative extension of DE and is shown to account for PIs also in contexts that are not DE (i.e. questions, modal verbs, imperatives, directive propositional attitudes). This theory, augmented with the premise that certain PIs (i.e. the liberal class represented by any) are subject to a weaker polarity dependency identified not as LICENSING but as RESCUING by nonveridicality, explains the occurrence of this particular class with only and emotive factive verbs. Crosslinguistic comparisons illustrate that the occurrence of PIs with only and emotive factives is not a general phenomenon, and further support the dual nature of polarity dependency and the semantic characterization of the elements that license or rescue PIs.

This article addresses general questions about the organization of grammar via a detailed discussion of a small, but well-explored, area of English: the contraction of want to to wanna. It distinguishes three general approaches to the analysis of wanna: a phonological rule, lexicalization, or a derivational rule. Each approach has a different set of strengths, but they all have weaknesses as well. The article then offers a new analysis in terms of REALIZATION, which combines the strengths of all the previous analyses. This analysis, which is based on the theory of word grammar, accounts not only for all the well-known syntactic and morphological constraints on this contraction, but also for a fact that has not been noted before: that, for some speakers, the last vowel alternates in just the same idiosyncratic way as that of to, which suggests strongly that in some sense wanna contains to as well as want. For these (but not all) speakers, the proposed analysis recognizes two words (sublexemes of WANT and TOinf) at the level of syntax and a single form ({wanna}, containing variants of {want} and {to}) at the level of form; the relations between these words and forms, and between the forms and their phonological realizations, are defined by a declarative network.