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This study examines the role of distance in the decision among grammatical variants. The empirical test case is the English mandative subjunctive construction, which co-occurs with an embedded modal auxiliary, a subjunctive or an indicative verb form. The fact that the subjunctive is triggered by specific lexical items allows one to measure the distance between the triggering unit and the target verb. This distance is found to play a significant role in the grammatical decision process. With increasing distance between trigger and target, the probability of selecting a modal auxiliary increases and the probability of selecting the subjunctive decreases. The theoretical account hinges on the range and strength of linguistic units. Syntactic units (i.e. modals) are claimed to have a wider range than morphological units (i.e. indicative and subjunctive). Furthermore, the indicative is claimed to have a wider range than the subjunctive. Varying ranges are interpreted as varying decay rates. The lower decay rate of syntactic as compared to morphological units results from the syntactic level being superordinated to the morphological level in language production. The inclusion of the semantic and the phonological levels confirms that the position of a level in the structural hierarchy determines its range.

In this large-scale corpus study, we explore how direct speech is portrayed in English and Spanish Speech Framing Expressions (SFEs).While the whole SFE is taken into account in the semantic analysis, our specific focus is the finite verb of the SFE. The study has two aims. Firstly, we survey the use of verbs in SFEs and offer a comprehensive inventory of those verbs in English and Spanish as representatives of Germanic and Romance languages respectively in order to determine what verb meanings are used to cue direct speech, what lexical resources contribute these meanings, and how rich and varied these vocabularies are in the two languages. Secondly, this groundwork and the comparisons across the languages allow for making a theoretical contribution to the debate about general typological differences in the semantics and lexicalization patterns of verbs in Germanic and Romance languages to the area of verbs for speech and to meaning modelling in general. Five main semantic categories of verbs were identified in the analysis: SPEECH, ACTIVITY, PERCEPTION, COGNITION and EMOTION. We show that Spanish features a much more varied repertoire than English and makes more use of verbs related to the domains of thinking and reasoning, while the physical domain is the preferred one in the English data set. It emerges that even though the same types of lexical resources are available in both languages, their various ways of describing direct speech differ to a large extent. Semantically speaking, Spanish verbs are richer and more elaborate and, contrary to the received view in motion research, Spanish manner meanings play an important role in the lexicalization of its verbs.

This paper focuses on the interaction between raising, subject–verb inversion and agreement in Modern Hebrew. It identifies, alongside ‘standard’ (i.e., English-like) subject-to-subject raising, two additional patterns where the embedded subject appears post-verbally. In one, the raising predicate exhibits long-distance agreement with the embedded subject, while in the other, a colloquial variant, it is marked with impersonal (3sm) agreement. The choice between the three raising constructions in the language is shown to be solely dependent on properties of the embedded clause. The data are discussed and analyzed against a background of typological and theoretical work on raising. The analysis, cast in the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG), builds on research on raising, selectional locality, agreement, subjecthood and information structure, as well as verb-initial constructions in Modern Hebrew.

In Finnish, negation is expressed via an auxiliary, and no other verb may occur above this auxiliary in the structure. This gives rise to a problem with respect to the modals of obligation and necessity, which take scope over negation yet appear below it. It is tempting to account for this in terms of LF-movement, but evidence suggests that there are in fact two modal phrases in Finnish, one above negation and the other below it, the higher of which encodes necessity/obligation. Evidence for the higher phrase comes from the negative imperative. Although the PF part of a verb in a negative sentence cannot move to the head of this higher phrase, the head itself is in the right position to take scope over negation. Thus, rather than attributing the scope properties of the modals to LF-movement, it will instead be argued that the LF-interpretable part of a head is merged precisely where it takes scope, and that the relation between the LF- and PF-interpretable parts of the modal is one ofchecking at a distance. Head-movement will be regarded solely as a PF phenomenon. It will be seen that the scope relations of the modals and the imperative mood can be accounted for under this hypothesis. Thus, Finnish provides evidence for a view of syntax which identifies syntactic structure largely with the LF-interpretable part of a sentence, and sees head movement as fundamentally a PF phenomenon. There are two morphological moods in Finnish, which seem to provide counter-examples to this hypothesis, which will be left as a problem for future research.

This work examines multiple-modal constructions in Mandarin Chinese. It is shown that modals in Mandarin Chinese are ordered in specific ways, and, while a number of factors contribute to the determination of the hierarchical order of modals, the finiteness of the complement clauses that the modals take plays a particularly important role. A generalization proposed in this paper is that (i) if a modal takes a finite clause as complement, then the modal itself can only occur in a finite context; and (ii) if a modal takes a nonfinite clause as complement, then it can occur in a nonfinite context too. This generalization is shown to account for some ordering phenomena of modals in Mandarin Chinese that would otherwise remain mysterious.

Since early studies in language development, scholars have noticed that function words, in particular auxiliaries, often appear to be missing in early speech, with the result that child utterances sometimes exhibit verbs with non-finite morphology in seemingly matrix clauses. This has led to the idea of a ‘deficit’ in the child's syntactic representations. In contrast with previous studies, this article explores the possibility that the child'sphonologymay considerably impact her overt realization of auxiliaries. Specifically, it examines the hypothesis that non-finite verbs in early speech are in fact attempted periphrastics (i.e. auxiliary/modal+non-finite verb) in which the auxiliaries are just reduced phonetically, often to the point where they remain unpronounced. We studied 28 normally developing French-speaking children aged between 23 and 37 months. New observational data uncovered a continuum in a given child's phonetic realizations of auxiliaries. Children showed various levels of auxiliary reduction, suggesting that their non-finite verbs are best analyzed as being part of periphrastics involving an auxiliary form that represents the endpoint on this continuum, i.e. is (completely) deleted. Further examination of these verbs revealed that their semantics corresponds to the semantics of adult periphrastics. Additionally, the results of an experiment where children imitated sentences with either periphrastic or synthetic verbs showed that responses with non-finite verbs were predominantly produced when the target sentence involved a periphrastic, rather than a synthetic verb.

Cantonese exhibits a pattern of variation among verbs that has often been interpreted as distinguishing a category of adjectives or a subcategory of adjectival verbs. However, neither of these approaches takes into account the complex patterns of overlap among the purported categories or subcategories. To account for these patterns, we propose a multi-dimensional, feature-based analysis, whereby morphological, phonological, syntactic, and semantic features interact to determine the distribution of each verb. While all verbs bear the same syntactic category feature, there are other features that affect the distribution of verbs independently of syntactic category. For example, constructions that resemble adjectival constructions in other languages license the semantic classes of verbs that are permanent, gradable, and/or non-dynamic, while constructions that resemble verbal constructions in other languages license the semantic classes of verbs that are dynamic, non-gradable, and/or non-permanent. Typological implications of this analysis are also considered.

Inflectional affixes are sensitive to morphological properties of the stems of the verbs they attach to. Therefore it is reasonable to assume that the inflectional material is combined with both the verbal stem of simplex verbs and the verbal stem of particle verbs. It has been argued that this leads to a bracketing paradox in the case of particle verbs since the semantic contribution of the inflectional information scopes over the complete particle verb. I will discuss nominalizations and adjective derivation, which are also problematic because of various bracketing paradoxes. I will suggest a solution to these paradoxes that assumes that inflectional and derivational prefixes and suffixes always attach to a form of a stem that already contains the information about a possible particle, but without containing a phonological realization of the particle. As is motivated by syntactic properties of particle verbs, the particle is treated as a dependent of the verb. The particle is combined with its head after inflection and derivation. With such an approach no special mechanisms for the analysis of particle verbs are necessary.

In this paper I argue that the polysemy view is not capable of giving a unified account of the meanings of CAN, MAY, MUST and SHOULD, whereas the unitary meaning view does not encounter the problems facing the polysemy view. I propose unitary meanings which are rich enough to account for the range of interpretations these modals can have, but which are specific enough to account for why they get these interpretations and not others. Proposing unitary meanings implies that we have to look for a theory of pragmatics which can explain how we achieve the different interpretations of these modals in use. I will argue that adopting the Relevance theory view of what drives interpretation gives us the basis for such an explanation.

Like so many others before it, this exposition is of the meaning of the English modal auxiliaries, which are found in utterances conveying modal meanings such as ability, possibility and permission. However, unlike the majority of its predecessors, the present rendering admits to being about more than semantics. With the five central modal auxiliaries, can, may, must, will and shall, the modals for short, as a point of departure, a framework will be formulated to shed light on some central aspects of the immense cotext and context sensitivity involved in the meaning of utterances of sentences containing a modal auxiliary.

Part of the meaning of a verb phrase containing a form of one of the English modal verbs CAN and WILL1 is that the actions, events, etc., indicated by the following full verb took place, takes place and will take place. I shall use the term MODALITY to refer to the meaning of the modal verb and EVENT to refer to the meaning of the full verb and say that, in certain circumstances, there is ACTUALITY of the event or that the event is ACTUALIZED. I wish to discuss the circumstances in which this is so and attempt to provide explanations in terms of some of the characteristics of modality in general.

IntroductionThis article describes aspects of the semantics of Japanese verbs of dress, first from a contrastive standpointvis-à-visEnglish, and subsequently in terms of their position within the structure of the vocabulary of Japanese. It is hoped that the treatment may draw attention to the semantic interest of this area of the vocabulary in different languages, and to the importance of a hitherto little-described sense relation of oppositeness.

In an earlier paper (Huddleston, 1977) I analysed the would of (I) If he had stayed in the army, he would have become a colonel as the unreal mood form of an epistemic modal verb WILL that figures in the underlying syntactic representation and falls within the semantic scope of a past element realized by HAVE. Palmer (1978) criticizes this analysis, claiming that WILL is ‘obviously’ semantically empty, a mere ‘dummy’ inserted to carry the mark of unreality – that would have become is ‘the Unreal and Past form of BECOME’.

Sentences (1) and (2) have traditionally been related by a process that is called Verb Phrase Deletion (VPD).(1) If I wanted to collect bottles, I would collect bottles.(2) If I wanted to collect bottles, I would.The earliest analyses of this phenomenon suggested that (2) was derived from (1) by a syntactic deletion rule (hence the ‘deletion’ in the name of the process – cf. Ross (1969a)). Later (Jackendoff, 1972; Wasow, 1972; Fiengo, 1974; and Williams, 1977a, among others), it was suggested that a null anaphor was generated in the base followingwouldin (2), and that the semantic component read this anaphor as meaningcollect bottles, hence accounting for the synonymy of (1) and (2). A third possibility is that (2) is generated in the base with nothing followingwould, woulditself serving as a proform forwould collect bottles. And fourth, (2) could be derived from (1), leavingwouldas a proform, in a process resembling pronominalization more than deletion (perhaps ‘proverbalization’).

The modal auxiliary should, when it is used to express ‘probability’, is generally considered as a weaker equivalent of must (see for instance Leech & Svartvik, 1975: 131 and Hornby, 1962: 223). Although this informal assumption contains a fair degree of truth, this paper will show first, that it requires qualification and secondly, that it gains strength once it has been qualified. In other words, there is more truth in the assumption than is suspected by its casual users.The method I will use is to consider the compatibilities between must and should and their environment. Though the relevant kind of environment cannot be defined in a purely syntactic way, it can be accurately specified in simple semantic terms, many of which have syntactic correlates. Verbal contexts are generally available but situational contexts will occasionally have to be used. It will then appear that the diversity of situational contexts can be reduced to very few elementary relations.

Analyses of word-meaning can usually be divided into those which assign a meaning to a word IN ISOLATION FROM a specific context of use, and those which regard the meaning of a word as being largely, if not entirely, DEPENDENT UPON a specific context of use. The ultimate expression of the latter ‘polysemantic’ approach is probably that of the later Wittgenstein who argued that ‘every difference in a word’s use is a consequence of and evidence for a difference in its meaning’ (Wertheimer, 1972: 49). One recent example of the former ‘monosemantic’ approach is that of Bolinger (1977) whose stated purpose is to ‘reaffirm the old principle that the natural condition of a language is to preserve one form for one meaning, and one meaning for one form’ (p. x); also, the proponents of lexicalism are likewise ‘monosemantic’ in inclination in that they stress the primacy of lexical units over the syntactic relations which exist between them. Both these approaches have their advocates, and it should be stated at the outset that neither is necessarily right or wrong; each can only be judged according to whether the phenomena it is used to interpret are thereby illuminated.

Defining the constraints on the use of the modalswillandwouldin futurateif-clauses in English poses problems to both descriptive and theoretical linguists. One ‘rule’ often referred to is that while futurewilland counter- factualwoulddo not normally occur in conditional sub-clauses withif, volitional and dispositionalwillandwouldcan be used in that context.This paper attempts to account for this general rule and for the so-called exceptions to it in terms of two different syntactic positions ofif-clauses in the sentence. It is suggested that the contrast can be formalized within current versions ofX̄-theory.

In this paper we propose an analysis of the semantic structure of modal sentences in English. Central to this analysis is the notion of ‘speech act’. The notion of speech act derives principally from the work of J. L. Austin (cf. especially Austin, 1962). Austin is particularly concerned with the use of sentences like I promise to go, I bet you sixpence and I name this ship ‘Queen Elizabeth’. One of his main purposes is to show that it is a mistake to class these sentences with sentences like John is running as statements. To utter the sentence I promise to go is not to make a statement about or to report some inner condition of mind or consciousness. It is to perform the act of promising, just as to say I bet you sixpence is to perform the act of betting. Indeed, in the case of these kinds of acts (promising, betting, naming, etc.) it is difficult to see how one could engage in them without using sentences of this kind. Austin calls verbs like promise, bet and name ‘performative’ verbs. It follows from this account that verbs like say, state and assert are also performative verbs. So that the mistake involved in classing I promise to go with John is running is not that in uttering the first sentence one is performing an act and in uttering the second one is not (ignoring the uninteresting fact that the act of vocalizing is common to both), but that the speaker is performing a different act in each case—in the one case promising and in the other stating. The fact that in the case of the utterance John is running the performative verb state does not occur, so that what Austin terms its ‘illocutionary force’ is not explicitly marked in the way in which the utterance I promise to go is explicitly marked as having the illocutionary force of a promise by the words I promise, while giving rise to certain difficult problems,2 does not affect Austin's main point, which is that a complete account of the meaning of a sentence cannot be restricted to semantic analyses as these are usually understood and that they must be extended to include information about the kind of speech act involved in uttering the sentence – that is, its illocutionary force.

Evidently, if VPC does not explain the ungrammaticality of (7) there is no explanation for the ungrammaticality of (i ib). It appears Rosenbaum's argument for NP domination in the complement structures dealt with here is: x IS DOMINATED BY NP IF IT CAN BE PSEUDO-CLEFTED. To bring this argument into disrepute we need to (a) establish that strings dominated by VP (according to Rosenbaum's analysis) can be pseudo-clefted; or (b) establish that what is pseudo-clefted is not an NP. (a) is discussed and (b) is not. The main point under (a) is that both prefer-type and condescend-type complements can be pseudo-clefted; if this is established, then obviously pseudo-clefting cannot be used to distinguish deep structure differences between them. The fact that she condescended to talk with us can be pseudo-clefted was overlooked by Rosenbaum because he took condescend as the most underlying form of the verb, that is, that form of the verb which has not undergone any transformational operations. (For further arguments, cf. JL 4 (I967) 9I Wagner, and Bowers, YL 4 (I967) 83-84.) We find, in fact, with Wagner and Bowers, that when to is inserted in the sentences that are deemed ungrammatical by Rosenbaum, they become perfectly acceptable pseudo-clefted sentences which appear to be paraphrases of their non-pseudo-clefted congeners. Thus