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In this chapter, Scottish Gaelic data are presented as evidence for the necessity of two modifications to Cowper’s (1998 and forward) feature geometry for tense and aspectual contrasts. Both modifications involve dependencies on the PRECEDENCE feature, which in Cowper’s geometry of English is responsible for the past tense marker -ed and the past participle morpheme -en/-ed. The first modification is a RESTRICTED feature. This feature is used to encode the temporal restriction between event and reference times in the near perfect and near prospective aspects found in Scottish Gaelic. The second modification is a REVERSED feature, which reverses the temporal ordering of two times. This feature is argued to mark unrestricted and restricted prospective aspects. It is claimed that certain future-like meanings in Scottish Gaelic do not involve a modal feature like IRREALIS but rather the proposed REVERSED feature.

The paper engages with a variety of data around a supposedly single biomedical event, that of heart transplantation. In conventional discourse, organ transplantation constitutes an unproblematised form of spare part surgery in which failing biological components are replaced by more efficient and enduring ones, but once that simple picture is complicated by employing a radically interdisciplinary approach, any biomedical certainty is profoundly disrupted. Our aim, as a cross-sectorial partnership, has been to explore the complexities of heart transplantation by explicitly entangling research from the arts, biosciences and humanities without privileging any one discourse. It has been no easy enterprise yet it has been highly productive of new insights. We draw on our own ongoing funded research with both heart donor families and recipients to explore our different perceptions of what constitutes data and to demonstrate how the dynamic entangling of multiple data produces a constitutive assemblage of elements in which no one can claim priority. Our claim is that the use of such research assemblages and the collaborations that we bring to our project breaks through disciplinary silos to enable a fuller comprehension of the significance and experience of heart transplantation in both theory and practice.

There has been extraordinary attention devoted to the Celtic mutations over the years, with various authors arguing for phonological, morphological, or lexical treatments (and various blends thereof). Strikingly, this literature is virtually bereft of any mention of the phonological restrictions that can sometimes limit the applicability of mutation. In this article, we provide a detailed experimental and corpus-based investigation of the phonological restrictions on Scottish Gaelic mutation. Using both techniques, we show that the phonological restrictions are alive yet are in a state of flux. The continued productivity of these phonological aspects of the mutation system argues that any analysis of mutation must attend to them.

Purpose Policies and procedures exist in many jurisdictions regarding ‘anonymity’. These prohibit communication between transplant recipients and donor families. Social media may enable identification of donor families/recipients resulting in unsupervised communication and exchange of information. We have previously reported that heart transplant recipients want to connect with their donor families. The purpose of this study was to ask heart donor families what they thought about current practices around anonymity. Methods This was a phenomenologically informed audiovisual qualitative study. Inclusion criteria: ability to provide informed consent, having consented to heart donation, between 1 and 10 years after consent to donation, ability to communicate their experiences with clarity. Semi-structured open ended interviews were conducted in their homes, by an experienced qualitative interviewer. Interviews were audio/video-taped to capture voice and body language and were transcribed verbatim. Data collected also included personal artifacts (e.g. photos, letters) and field notes. Analysis involved coding language, bodily gestures, volume and tone in keeping with our phenomenologically informed visual method. Results Mean time since donation was 61.7 months (± 31.01; range 15-115 months). 22 donor families (40 participants) were interviewed from across Canada (27% Alberta, 32% Ontario & 41% B.C). Mean interview duration was 72 minutes (range 19-149). Four key themes emerged relating to anonymity: 21/22 families wanted to know the recipient(s), 19/22 wanted to meet the recipient(s). 17 had received letters from the recipient(s) and 12 had sent letters. Those who didn't write a letter frequently cited concerns around 3rd party vetting and redaction as a barrier. 21 of 22 donor families wanted to meet their recipients, and wanted to see policy change to enable this. Conclusion Donor families want to know and meet the recipients. This is in keeping with the views of heart transplant recipients who wish to know their donor families. We believe it is time to re-assess current policies on anonymity in transplantation. Donor families raised many possible solutions to how this may be accomplished.

Scottish Gaelic has been cited as providing an instance of vowel excrescence (Hall 2006). One of the defining properties of excrescent vowels is that they are phonologically inert and are not motivated by – nor do they contribute to – the syllable structure of a language. In this paper, we report on a series of experiments which tap into native speakers' intuitions of syllable structure in Scottish Gaelic. Insofar as intuitions about syllable count and syllabification reflect phonological structure, our results suggest that the relevant vowels of Scottish Gaelic are not phonologically inert, and contribute directly to native speaker intuitions involving the number of syllables and the affiliation of consonants to those syllables. However, our results also establish that the relevant vowels have an intermediate phonological status, which also distinguishes them from underlying vowels.

In this short paper, I look at the phenomenon of “mixed category” verbal nouns in Irish. Unlike previous accounts, I claim that nominal characteristics of these categories follow from two sources: In one group of verbal nouns, they exhibit nominal properties because they have nominal functional morphology (following Borsley and Kornfilt, 2000 ). In the other group, there is no nominal functional structure and the “nominality” of verbal nouns is epiphenomenal. Instead, I claim that the relevant “nominal” properties of this second group are simply the effect of an inherent-case-as-repair strategy used when a structural case position is unavailable due to a variety of causes, including idiosyncratic selectional effects.

Scottish Gaelic is sometimes described as having nasalized fricatives (/ṽ/ distinctively, and [f̃, x̃, h̃], etc. through assimilation). However, there are claims that it is not aerodynamically possible to open the velum for nasalization while maintaining frication noise. We present aerodynamic data from 14 native Scottish Gaelic speakers to determine how the posited nasalized fricatives in this language are realized. Most tokens demonstrate loss of nasalization, but nasalization does occur in some contexts without aerodynamic conflict, e.g., nasalization with the consonant realized as an approximant, nasalization of [h̃], nasalization on the preceding vowel, or sequential frication and nasalization. Furthermore, a very few tokens do contain simultaneous nasalization and frication with a trade-off in airflow. We also present perceptual evidence showing that Gaelic listeners can hear this distinction slightly better than chance. Thus, instrumental data from one of the few languages in the world described as having nasalized fricatives confirms that the claimed sounds are not made by producing strong nasalization concurrently with clear frication noise. Furthermore, although speakers most often neutralize the nasalization, when they maintain it, they do so through a variety of phonetic mechanisms, even within a single language.

SETTING: The University of Arizona's idyllic desert campus. As in many colleges across the United States, ‘formalist’ linguistics is implicitly understood to be at cross-purposes with ‘functionalist’ linguistics. The Linguistics Department's only course on non-minimalist syntax is famously nicknamed ‘Bad Guys’. Although the linguistics department forms a unified front, malcontent quietly simmers across campus as functionalist sociolinguists, discourse analysts, grammaticalization specialists and linguistic anthropologists outnumber formalists, though they roam within their own language-department fiefdoms. Politeness and cooperation reign among senior faculty linguists, who have realized that antagonism only hurts students and programs in all the language sciences. The junior faculty are more brash: they work hard, publish a lot, and speak loudly to get tenure as respected form/functionalists. They socialize together and joke about each other's positions, but don't talk very much serious shoptalk. Until now …

When hearing speech, listeners begin recognizing words before reaching the end of the word. Therefore, early sounds impact spoken word recognition before sounds later in the word. In languages like English, most morphophonological alternations affect the ends of words, but in some languages, morphophonology can alter the early sounds of a word. Scottish Gaelic, an endangered language, has a pattern of ‘initial consonant mutation’ that changes initial consonants: 'P'òg ‘kiss’ begins with [ph], but 'phòg '‘kissed’ begins with [f]. This raises questions both of how listeners process words that might begin with a mutated consonant during spoken word recognition, and how listeners relate the mutated and unmutated forms to each other in the lexicon. We present three experiments to investigate these questions. A priming experiment shows that native speakers link the mutated and unmutated forms in the lexicon. A gating experiment shows that Gaelic listeners usually do not consider mutated forms as candidates during lexical recognition until there is enough evidence to force that interpretation. However, a phonetic identification experiment confirms that listeners can identify the mutated sounds correctly. Together, these experiments contribute to our understanding of how speakers represent and process a language with morphophonological alternations at word onset.

Initial Consonant Mutation in Scottish Gaelic is considered to be morphological, somewhat idiosyncratic, and neutralizing, that is merging either the mutated sound and some underlying sound or merging two mutated sounds. This study explores articulation in one class of mutation, called Lenition (also Aspiration), asking the question of whether these sounds are articulated in the same fashion or not. Comparison of relevant ultrasound images collected from 3 native speakers of Scottish Gaelic shows that speakers maintain distinctions between True Lenition and False Lenition, suggesting that there is incomplete neutralization. Furthermore, when Lenition of two distinct sounds converge on the same target, subjects again keep the two articulations distinct. These results are consistent with a phonological model which distinguishes between surface forms corresponding to different sources, showing very little complete articulatory neutralisation. Index Terms: articulatory phonetics, ultrasound, lenition, Scottish Gaelic, consonant mutation

In this article, an underdetermined theory of phrasality is presented, in which bar level plays no role with respect to the rest of the grammar. Evidence for this comes from mismatches in bar level and behavior in Irish and Tagalog nonverbal predication structures, Irish construct state nominals, and Persian nominals.

Le nombre de constructions copulatives que l'on peut retrouver avec des predicats non-verbaux a recemment fait l'objet de controverse. Les approches traditionnelles soutiennent qu'il existe deux constructions copulatives : une construction equative - avec deux syntagmes nominaux arguments - et une construction predicative - avec un seul argument et un predicat non-verbal. Recemment, plusieurs auteurs ont remis en cause cette opposition en argumentant que les constructions equatives manifestent des asymetries semblables a celles des constructions predicatives, que ces asymetries sont dues a une simple distinction sujet/predicat, et qu'il n'existerait donc qu'une seule construction copulative dans les langues naturelles : la construction predicative. Cet article presente des arguments syntaxiques en faveur de la division semantique traditionnelle entre les equatives et les predicatives. Il est montre qu'en irlandais moderne, deux ordres de mots distincts correspondent a la division equative/predicative et que ces deux constructions possedent des proprietes syntaxiques et semantiques distinctes. De plus, il est aussi demontre que les asymetries utilisees comme argument en faveur d'une unique construction copulative sont dues a de simples conditions structurales plutot qu'a une division sujet/predicat

Part I. Basic Ideas in Syntax: 1. Defining syntax 2. Syntactic data 3. Hypotheses: rules Part II. Categories and Subcategories: 4. Words and lexical categories 5. Functional categories 6. Pronouns 7. Other subcategories of nouns 8. Subcategories of verbs 9. Tangent: tense, aspect and mood 10. Auxiliaries Part III. Constituents, Merge and Trees: 11. Constituency 12. Complements 13. Complements: a case study 14. Specifiers of VP and TP 15. Specifiers of NP and DP 16. Tagging 17. Adjuncts 18. Drawing trees Part IV. Movement and Control: 19. Passives 20. Non-finite clauses 1: control constructions 21. Non-finite clauses 1: raising constructions 22. Head movement 1: auxiliaries 23. Head movement 2: main verbs 24. Wh-movement Part V. Conclusions and Appendices: 25. Evaluating our progress 26. The next steps Appendix 1. Glossary, symbols and abbreviations Appendix 2. Features and their values Appendix 3. Rules, constraints and principles.

CONSTITUENCY Objectives: Understand the definition of constituent. Explore constituency tests including: standing alone, replacement and displacement. Start looking at representing these structures in tree format. Constituents Definition A constituent is an identifiable subpart of a sentence. It can either be a single word or a group of words that functions as a unit. Most constituents are called phrases . (We'll develop a better definition of “phrase” later.) Comment In unit 3, looking at evidence from the formation of yes/no questions, we saw that rules like Subject/Auxiliary Inversion make reference to the internal structure of sentences. Constituents are these internal structures. In this unit, we look at how we identify these structures. Discussion As a first step, we can observe that constituents typically correspond to strings of words that are bound together in terms of semantics. The relevant notion here is vague but hopefully intuitive: modification. If one word modifies the meaning of another, they will be linked together in a constituent. Consider the string the very big can of tuna . Look at the words very and big; notice how there is a close relationship between these. Very modifies big; it tells you how big the can is. Compare this to the relationship between very and can : very does not tell you how can something is! This means that there is a constituent consisting of very and big , but excluding can .

This book is different from many other syntax textbooks in that it attempts to teach syntax through discovery rather than through simple presentation. Like other books in the Cambridge Coursebook series, this book is structured as a series of definitions, comments, discussion, and exercises that allow you, the reader, to explore the material on your own. Learning syntactic analysis is best done in consultation with an experienced linguist, so if you are tackling this book on your own, you might contact your local university to see if there is an advanced undergraduate or (post-) graduate student who would be willing to answer those questions that you have. Unlike other books in the Coursebook series you will need your own notebook to answer many of the questions in this volume. You will be drawing syntactic diagrams, which take up a fair amount of space. In order to reduce production costs, we haven't included that space in this book. All the questions that you should try to answer are marked with a Q followed by a number. The questions are divided into three types.

1. Contributors 2. Acknowledgments 3. Abbreviations 4. Introduction: When verbs come first (by Carnie, Andrew) 5. Part I. VP movement vs Head-movement 6. What fronts?: On the VP-raising account of verb-initial order (by Chung, Sandra) 7. Coordination and constituency in St'at'imcets (Lillooet Salish) (by Davis, Henry) 8. Two derivations of VSO: A comparative study of Niuean and Tongan (by Otsuka, Yuko) 9. Force first: Clause-fronting and clause typing in San Lucas Quiavini Zapotec (by Lee, Felicia) 10. V1 and wh-questions: a typology (by Oda, Kenji) 11. Preverbal particles in verb-initial languages (by Bury, Dirk) 12. A note on predicates and heads in Irish clausal syntax (by McCloskey, James) 13. Seediq: Antisymmetry and final particles in a Formosan VOS language (by Holmer, Arthur) 14. VP-internal structure in a VOS language (by Travis, Lisa deMena) 15. Part II. Categories, Information Structure, and Prosodic factors 16. Lexical categories, lack of inflection, and predicate-fronting in Niuean (by Massam, Diane) 17. Word order without syntactic categories: How Riau Indonesian does it (by Gil, David) 18. Nominal properties of vPs in Breton: A hypothesis for the typology of VSO languages (by Jouitteau, Melanie) 19. On the parallelism of DPs and clauses: Evidence from Kisongo Maasai (by Koopman, Hilda) 20. Ordering clitics and postverbal R-expressions in Tagalog: a unified analysis? (by Billings, Loren) 21. The syntax of Chalcatongo Mixtec: Preverbal and postverbal (by Macaulay, Monica) 22. Accounting for verb-initial order in an Australian language (by Laughren, Mary) 23. References 24. Index