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This article is a retrospective and a prospective look at SAL on the occasion of its 50th anniversary. The founding editors and various editors reflect on their experiences

This is a review of Bantu applicative constructions by Sara Pacchiarotti. CSLI Publications, Stanford California.

Most discussion surrounding external possessors has centered around dative NPs or clitics in Indo-European or Semitic languages and focused on whether or not such structures are derived via movement. This paper examines external possessors in Chimwiini, a Bantu language that lacks datives. It will be shown that while these constructions share certain structural and semantic restrictions with their counterparts in other languages, these properties do not straightforwardly correlate with arguments for a movement or base-generation analysis. This suggests the derivational mechanics of the constructions involved are independent of the semantic restrictions placed on them.

Despite exhibiting a high degree of uniformity, Bantu languages display a surprising amount of variation in extraction contexts, particularly with regard to agreement patterns. This paper examines this variation, focusing first on Bantu OVS relatives and topicalization structures in which the raised operator triggers morphological subject agreement on the verb. After critiquing accounts by Henderson (2006) and others, this paper proposes an analysis of OVS structures in which the establishment of agreement relations is delayed until the end of the derivation. I then take this account of OVS as the basis for discussing variation in the agreement properties of operator constructions across Bantu languages.

Like linguistic perception, visual perception is an active process in which the mind makes use of innate structural principles in the computational process. It is therefore useful to ask whether the visual and linguistic computational systems make use of the same or similar principles. This article describes the role played by principles of symmetry in visual perception as suggested by researchers in that field, and suggests that a subset of those principles play a strong role in the perception of linguistic structure. It is claimed that a distinction should be made between the construction of linguistic structure and its perception in the computational system, and that principles of sym-metry apply in subtly different ways in each. It is argued that movement’s inherent locality, successive-cyclicity, has a bipartite nature, being sensitive only to certain barrier nodes in the construction of structure while adjoining to every intermediate projection in the perception of structure.

For nearly 30 years it has been assumed that some English relatives require a movement relationship between the external head noun phrase and its clause-internal position (the raising analysis) whereas other relatives do not allow such a relationship (the matching analysis). This division has largely been motivated by reconstruction facts. This paper argues that the matching analysis is eliminable if one assumes vehicle change is a general property of A-bar movement, and if one accepts that sentence construction and movement are derivational while chain formation is representational. This allows a uniform raising analysis for English relatives that eliminates difficulties with previous raising analyses, allows relative clauses to be uniformly treated as adjuncts, and accounts for otherwise mysterious extraposition facts. The conclusions also have implications for the idea that adjuncts may be merged acyclically in a derivation.

Carstens (2001) argues that multiple agreement constructions in Bantu arise through raising of the subject through each verb's specifier. This paper argues against this account, providing evidence from relative inversion that subjects move directly from their base position to their final position with no intermediate stops. It is argued that these facts are consistent with a Multiple Agree analysis in which agreement on participle verbs is parasitic on the φ-features of their selecting auxiliary verbs. Carstens's arguments against Chomsky's (2000, 2001) system of φ-complete Case checking are also discussed and a new argument against Chomsky's system is presented that demands φ and Case feature checking relations be divorced. Data come from Swahili and Kirundi.