Very early in Middle English, texts especially in the North and East, tend to use an orthographic suffix -(e)s for noun plurals, in Southern and Western texts the plural suffix -(e)n of the Old English weak declension at first spreads, but then before 1300 also yields to -(e)s. This essay first shows that on phonological and phonetic grounds this -(e)s, which remains the productive plural in Modern English, must, as a vocabulary item, be lexically specified as +Voice; it is not voiced by any progressive assimilation process in synchronic derivations. The source of this underlying voiced sibilant -z, completely absent in Old English, is to be found in the genealogical ancestor of Middle English, Proto-Scandinavian, whose plural in all non-neuter declensions is precisely this segment (Haugen 1982). The present essay argues that this form was an integral part of the Norse brought to England by the earliest Scandinavian settlers in the 9th c. In all likelihood, the later change in Mainland Scandinavian of this -z to -r, completed in the 12th c., failed to establish itself in the Anglicized Norse of England, due to sociolinguistic factors akin to those set out in the classic paper of Labov (1963).

The new hypothesis that Middle English descends syntactically from Norse has been strongly contested by several specialists in ME syntax. One counterargument contends that ME Verb-Second patterns with Old English in sharing Verb-Third with OE but not Norse. The present paper argues that a Mainland Scandinavian adverb så ‘so’, which appears after scene-setting adverbials (mostly PPs), is in SPEC(IP) and there blocks the common and expected UG order “PP — [IP subject — finite verb — …]” found in ME. When early Anglicized Norse lost this use of the så adverbial, the UG order resurfaced in ME; this was not because of direct descent from OE.

The present article is a summary of the book English: The Language of the Vikings by Joseph E. Emonds and Jan Terje Faarlund. The major claim of the book and of this article is that there are lexical and, above all, syntactic arguments in favor of considering Middle and Modern English as descending from the North Germanic language spoken by the Scandinavian population in the East and North of England prior to the Norman Conquest, rather than from the West Germanic Old English.

This response mostly addresses the comments, but its main point is that 11th c. "language contact" syntactic changes suggest that Norse was expanding while West Saxon was contracting.

English gerunds and infinitives are often treated as nearly equivalent ways of using verb phrases as syntactic subjects and objects, even though this assumption is falsified by the actual grammatical patterns. Gerunds are indeed verb phrases that appear in all positions of freely expandable noun phrases, but infinitives and finite clauses, termed 'verbal clauses' in this study, actually never occur in noun phrase positions. What is shown here is that (i) verbal clauses that appear to be 'objects' of verbs are in clause-final position, rather than in the position of object noun phrases, and that (ii) initial verbal clauses that appear to be 'subjects' are in a pre-subject position where they bind a null expletive subject. The hypothesis in (ii) is tested and confirmed by showing that initial verbal clauses, in contrast to lexical noun phrase and gerunds, never occur in embedded or inverted subject positions. In this way, initial verbal clauses have the same distribution as other well-known 'root' or 'focus' constructions, which in pre-subject position are limited to main clauses.

This study focuses on accounting for allomorphy in Latin case/ number inflection. It attributes essentially all of it to the influence of adjacent features of standard segmental phonology on morphemes expressing case assignment. Indeed, other languages lead linguists to expect that allomorphy at a stem-suffix border can depend on any feature of a final vowel: +/- Low, +/- High, +/- Round, +/- Back, +/- Consonantal or +/- Syllabic. Empirically, it turns out that no two Latin stem-final vowels induce identical allomorphy in case/ number suffixes, nor the same allomorphy as final consonants. Moreover, some (not much) phonologically conditioned allomorphy is phonetically opaque.These two factors have led traditional scholarship to conclude that each stem-final segment should define a separate classification of noun suffixation or "declension". As there are basically six types of final segment (a, o, u, i, e and consonants), each then gives rise to a different declension (stems with final i are often put in some other group or considered irregular), thus creating five (or six) declensions. Tradition then goes on to analyse stem-final vowels not as part of stems but as some kind of separate morphemes called "thematic vowels" (with no role in either syntax or phonology).This essay argues rather that an unflinching modern and formal approach to inflectional allomorphy, exactly analogous to using phonology to reduce regular English plurals to a single lexical form, succeeds in sweeping away the sandcastle of Latin declensions and better captures the actual descriptive generalizations that account for Latin case inflection.!

The editors are indebted to all those who have helped make this monograph possible.First and foremost, we would like to thank all the authors for both their enthusiastic participation in the

Current generative syntax says little about language-particular grammars, though it vaguely endorses 'Borer's Conjecture,' that they consist of 'granmmatical lexicons,' i.e. lexical entries for morphemes whose only features play a role in syntax (i.e., 'closed class' morphemes). However, little research has focused on formal properties of these entries. Nonetheless, Emonds (2001) indicates that these items, unlike open class items, can give rise to 'flat structures,' whereby a grammatical item and its complement, e.g. a French causative verb and its V complement, can be daughters of the same VP. This essay defines a formal property of such structures, 'Permissive Subordination,' and shows that instances analyzed until now conform to the Conjecture. The essay then moves on to English 'Preposition Stranding' and Phrasal Verbs, showing that they also exemplify Permissive Subordination: they consist of Ps that don't project to PPs. But then Borer's Conjecture must be modified; the Stranding property characterizes all English selected grammatical Ps, and hence it is not a property of their lexical entries but of the English grammatical Ps taken as a grammatical class.

Most current versions of Chomskyan syntax take for granted that maximal or extended projections of the fundamental lexical categories N,A,V and P contain elaborate systems of functional heads and projections (sometimes referred to as "the functional sequence") which are also significantly different for each of these four categories. This study argues that this approach more than "takes to extremes" this proliferation of syntactic categories; I argue here that it is fundamentally misguided. All functional modifier categories truly independent of lexical categories stem from the natural language ability to count and/or quantify. Among its other advantages, this hypothesis reveals for the first time the close affinity of subject phrases and measure phrases, and moreover provides a simple account of differences between English and Japanese regarding two ways of counting and agreement vs. non-agreement of predicates with subjects.

English vocabulary is divided: a Germanic core inherited from Germanic sources and a second vocabulary borrowed from the Romance family and Classical Greek. Several synchronic criteria divide the two vocabularies. The primary vocabulary still conforms to the general Proto-Germanic rule; stress can only fall on a morpheme's first syllable. In contrast, its secondary vocabulary stress patterns follow Chomsky and Halle's (1968) "Main stress rule" often referred to as the "Romance stress rule." There are several correlations between this stress-based division and morpho-syntactic properties; secondary vocabulary always exhibits regular productive inflection and an analytic grading of adjectives. This study focuses especially on syntactic differences: only primary vocabulary verbs freely combine with post-verbal particles of direction and allow double objects with no preposition. These general properties seem hard to express in lexical terms. Nonetheless, a device proposed here seems to capture both these English-particular characteristics: Secondary vocabulary verbs do not lexically select complements whose lexical heads have the feature +DIRECTION. Though at first glance this condition seems too strong, the essay argues that this restriction can stand when indirect objects are structurally properly analyzed.

Previous studies of the English passive have not recognized a subtype whose auxiliaries are not simply be or get, but transitive grammatical verbs, in particular have, get, want, need, see or hear. These "indirect passives," as I call them, are shown here to be verbal and not adjectival, and to not consist of embedded passive clauses containing simple passives, such as reduced relatives or other types of "small clauses." Rather, indirect passives are structurally parallel to the traditional ("direct") passives, except that their auxiliaries are transitive rather than intransitive verbs. Both passive and active participle phrases, of all subtypes, are argued here to be adjective phrases (APs), whose verbs have word-internal right hand heads, the As -en and -ing. Passive auxiliaries in both direct and indirect passives are then grammatical verbs that select adjective phrase complements.The limitation of passive auxiliaries to grammatical rather than open class verbs provides crucial evidence for dividing lexicons into two components, whose members enter syntactic derivations differently. Open class items, including the -en and -ing heads of lexically stored adjectives, enter trees only when derivational phases begin, while closed class items, including auxiliaries and the inflectional endings -en and -ing, can also enter derivations "late," after a phasal domain is sent to Logical Form. Their "empty A heads" are neither interpreted as properties nor visible during the next derivational phase tau, prior to the late insertion of closed class items on tau. Consequently, even though they are distributionally and often morphologically APs, the inflectional participles (so called verbal passives and progressives) all exhibit familiar internal V-headed syntactic patterns. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Many grammatical phenomena occur only in “root clauses,” i.e., main clauses and a limited type of embedded clauses called indirect discourse. Among these are certain transformational movements. Earlier generative studies stipulate that root transformational movements are simply exempt from constraints on landing sites of movements. Two recent more restrictive theories remedy this. Rizzi (1997) restricts landing sites to SPEC and head positions of specially labeled projections such as TopP and FocP. Emonds (2004) proposes rather that such root projections (“Discourse Shells”) have no labels. This essay argues that root movements are then subject, like all others, to Structure Preservation, and that their landing sites are better conceived as SPECs and heads of “label-less” or a-categorial projections. Keywords: discourse shell; dislocation; focus movement; German Verb-second; head movement; left periphery; rightward movement; root transformation; structure-preservation; tensed-S constraint; topicalization

Previous studies of the English passive have not recognized a distinct subtype where the auxiliary is not simply be or get, but a transitive grammatical verb, in particular have, get, want, need, see or hear. These "indirect passives," as I name them, are shown here to be verbal and not adjectival, and to NOT consist of embedded passive clauses containing traditionally analyzed simple passives, such as reduced relatives or other types of "small clauses." Rather, indirect passives are structurally parallel to the traditional ("direct") passives, except that their auxiliaries are transitive rather than intransitive verbs that select adjective phrase complements. The limitation of indirect passive auxiliaries to grammatical rather than open class verbs provides crucial evidence for dividing lexicons into two components, the members of which enter syntactic derivations differently. Open class items, including the -en of passive adjectives, enter trees only when derivational "phases" begin, while closed class items, including auxiliaries and the inflectional passive -en can also enter derivations "late," after a phase has been interpreted.

All English regular verbs and about half its irregular verbs have the same form for the finite past tense and the past participle. The finite past tense is different from the participle only for a closed class of about 100 irregular verbs. These latter can be analyzed by a lexical device of wide-ranging applicability called Alternative Realization. All other Past forms of Vs, finite and non-finite, can then be derived from a single morpheme -ed which appears in two contexts: one when V is finite and one when it is selected by a semantically empty stative verb, have or be. There is also a third use of -ed to form passive participles, in both verbal and adjectival passives.The paper presents a formalized system of selection features for lexical items including but going beyond classical subcategorization. This system permits formulating a single full lexical entry for the suffix -ed that covers all its uses. The final version of this entry exemplifies how to specify Alternative Realization, uninterpretability of categories and disjunctive contexts, and independently justifies each of these notations.

Adjectives in many Indo-European languages morphologically agree with the nouns they modify in gender, number and case (if the language's nouns can differ in case). These agreeing items seem to undermine several otherwise broad generalizations about morphology, word order and phrasal stress. Mysteriously, agreement in Germanic languages is limited to pre-nominal attributes, while all adjectives agree in Romance and Slavic languages.This essay proposes to analyze adjectival agreement in terms of a "Derived Nominal Hypothesis," which assigns agreeing adjectives a word-internal nominal structure whose head is the agreement suffix itself. Consequently, these "adjectives" are actually Nouns (by Lieber's Right Hand Head Rule), and so qualify as unexceptional heads of NPs. This supports Abney's controversial conjecture for pre-nominal attributive adjectives (that they are heads of NPs). The Derived Nominal Hypothesis additionally succeeds in making several traditional observations on the behavior of agreeing adjectives fully compatible with current explanatory grammatical theory. It also accounts for many previously puzzling morphological properties of agreement and its syntactic distribution in those languages on which the study primarily focuses, namely Dutch, German, Latin and Czech. To a lesser extent, the essay touches on English adjectival word order and on common properties of Spanish and Latin agreement.

Adjectives in many Indo-European languages morphologically agree with the nouns they modify in gender, number and case (if the language’s nouns can differ in case). These agreeing items seem to undermine several otherwise broad generalizations about morphology, word order and phrasal stress. Mysteriously, agreement in Germanic languages is limited to pre-nominal attributes, while all adjectives agree in Romance and Slavic languages. This essay proposes to analyze adjectival agreement in terms of a “Derived Nominal Hypothesis,” which assigns agreeing adjectives a word-internal nominal structure whose head is the agreement suffix itself. Consequently, these “adjectives” are actually Nouns (by Lieber’s Right Hand Head Rule), and so qualify as unexceptional heads of NPs. This supports Abney’s controversial conjecture for pre-nominal attributive adjectives (that they are heads of NPs). The Derived Nominal Hypothesis additionally succeeds in making several traditional observations on the behavior of agreeing adjectives fully compatible with current explanatory grammatical theory. It also accounts for many previously puzzling morphological properties of agreement and its syntactic distribution in those languages on which the study primarily focuses, namely Dutch, German, Latin and Czech. To a lesser extent, the essay touches on English adjectival word order and on common properties of Spanish and Latin agreement.

This paper argues that Middle English (and therefore Modern English) originates as an amalgam of West Germanic Old English and North Germanic Old Norse, and that the fusion of the two languages dates back not to early Scandinavian settlement in England, but about 200 years later, especially the 12th century during the full impact of the Norman Conquest. Using examples of large numbers of daily life and grammaticalised vocabulary, I demonstrate that the nature of Scandinavian words incorporated into Middle/Modern English is distinct from and more central than later French loans and reflects a deep and typologically significant impact of Scandinavian on Middle/Modern English. Then I discuss several syntactic properties (e.g., word order, P-stranding, infinitival and directional particles, passive participles and case inflections) to show that with respect to all these characteristics Middle/Modern English groups with North Germanic and not with West Germanic.

argues that adjectives and adverbs that seem exceptions to head-initial order in Germanic and Romance are internally headed by X-zero categories of the same type as the lexical head on their right