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This article argues that natural languages have two binding strategies that create two types of bound variable pronouns. Pronouns of the first type, which include local fake indexicals, reflexives, relative pronouns, and PRO, may be born with a \"defective\" feature set. They can acquire the features they are missing (if any) from verbal functional heads carrying standard X-operators that bind them. Pronouns of the second type, which include long-distance fake indexicals, are born fully specified and receive their interpretations via context-shifting X-operators (Cable 2005). Both binding strategies are freely available and not subject to syntactic constraints. Local anaphora emerges under the assumption that feature transmission and morphophonological spell-out are limited to small windows of operation, possibly the phases of Chomsky 2001. If pronouns can be born underspecified, we need an account of what the possible initial features of a pronoun can be and how it acquires the features it may be missing. The article develops such an account by deriving a space of possible paradigms for referential and bound variable pronouns from the semantics of pronominal features. The result is a theory of pronouns that predicts the typology and individual characteristics of both referential and bound variable pronouns.

It has long been known that verbal roots containing homorganic consonant pairs are rare in Arabic, motivating the existence of an OCP-Place constraint (Obligatory Contour Principle on place of articulation) in the phonological grammar. We explore this constraint using an on-line lexicon of Arabic roots. The strength of the constraint is quantified by the ratio of the observed number of examples of each consonant pair to the number that would be statistically expected under random combination of phonemes. We show that the strength of the effect over all pairs is a gradient function of the similarity of the consonants in the pair. A similarity metric based on natural classes is developed, which solves the formal difficulties of contrastive underspecification theory while preserving the insight that contrastiveness plays an important role in perceived similarity. This metric is applied in an explicit model of the gradient OCP constraint, which achieves a better fit to the regularities and sub-regularities of the Arabic verbal lexicon than any prior approach. Lastly, we review evidence for the psychological reality of the constraint, for its existence in related forms in other languages, and for its cognitive/phonetic foundations in the speech processing system. We argue that the total body of evidence supports a model in which phonetic and cognitive pressures incrementally affect the lexicon, and phonotactic constraints are abstractions over the lexicon of phonological forms.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a plausibility argument for a new way of thinking about intra-personal morphosyntactic variation. The idea is embedded within the framework of the Minimalist Program, and makes use of notions of feature interpretability and feature checking. Specifically, I argue that underspecification of uninterpretable features in a matching relation with interpretable features allows us to model categoricality and variability within a single system. Unlike many current approaches to intra-personal variation (which involve multiple grammars or building stochastic weightings into the grammar itself), the system attempts to predict (rather than capture) frequencies of variants. It does this by combining an evaluation metric for the acquisition of uninterpretable features with the standard properties of features and syntactic operations in the Minimalist framework. The argument is made through a case study of was/were variation in a Scottish dialect.

Three main types of syntactic contexts and accordingly three types of indefinites may be distinguished with respect to negation and polarity. This paper investigates diachronic changes of indefinites from one polarity type to another. A discussion of the development of the indefinites in German illustrates the effect these changes may have on the entire indefinite system of a language and crucially provides evidence for changes towards both 'more negative' as well as 'more positive'.Additional data from a wide range of languages further supports the conclusion that polarity-type changes are not unidirectional. The observed changes are analyzed in terms of lexical underspecification theory as the result of one of only two possible diachronic operations: introduction of a plus-valued feature or complete loss of a feature in the lexical entries of the respective indefinites.

This paper proposes a method for computing the temporal aspects of the interpretations of a variety of German sentences. The method is strictly modular in the sense that it allows each meaning-bearing sentence constituent to make its own, separate, contribution to the semantic representation of any sentence containing it. The semantic representation of a sentence is reached in several stages. First, an 'initial semantic representation' is constructed, using a syntactic analysis of the sentence as input. This initial representation is then transformed into the definitive representation by a series of transformations which reflect the ways in which the contributions from different constituents of the sentence interact. Since the different constituents which make their respective contributions to the meaning of the sentence are in most instances ambiguous, the initial representations are typically of a high degree of underspecification.

We examine the formal encoding of feature indeterminacy, focussing on case indeterminacy as an exemplar of the phenomenon. Forms that are indeterminately specified for the value of a feature can simultaneously satisfy conflicting requirements on that feature & thus are a challenge to constraint-based formalisms which model the compatibility of information carried by linguistic items by combining or integrating that information. Much previous work in constraint-based formalisms has sought to provide an analysis of feature indeterminacy by departing in some way from 'vanilla' assumptions either about feature representations or about how compatibility is checked by integrating information from various sources. In the present contribution we argue instead that a solution to the range of issues posed by feature indeterminacy can be provided in a 'vanilla' feature-based approach which is formally simple, does not postulate special structures or objects in the representation of case or other indeterminate features, & requires no special provision for the analysis of coordination. We view the value of an indeterminate feature such as CASE as a complex & possibly underspecified feature structure. Our approach correctly allows for incremental & monotonic refinement of case requirements in particular contexts. It uses only atomic boolean-valued features & requires no special mechanisms or additional assumptions in the treatment of coordination or other phenomena to handle indeterminacy. Our account covers the behaviour of both indeterminate arguments & indeterminate predicates, that is, predicates placing indeterminate requirements on their arguments. References. Adapted from the source document

This paper presents a systematic account of the tone system of Peñoles Mixtec (PM). While /H/ and /L/ tones are unambiguously needed in underlying representations, we argue that the third tone is not /M/ but must rather be underspecified as /∅/. Perhaps the most interesting of the several arguments presented is that strings of /∅/ tone‐bearing units are invisible to a process which deletes the second /L/ of a /L‐∅*‐L/ sequence. We propose that all /L/ tones are underlying floating and that /L/ rather than /H/ is the marked tone in this three‐value system. The surface mid and low‐falling pitches in outputs are shown to derive by a small number of realizational rules, which also are responsible for producing successively upstepped H tones. The PM tone system is unusually interesting both from a general tonological perspective as well as for its relation to Dürr’s (1987) Proto‐Mixtec tones which have the inverted values in PM.

This paper investigates the word-prosodic system of the Curaçao dialect of Papiamentu. Curaçao Papiamentu has both lexically distinctive stress and, independently, a word-level tone contrast. On the basis of a detailed acoustic investigation of this tonal contrast, we propose a privative phonological interpretation of the tone contrast, similar to proposals for the Scandinavian word-accent systems (Riad 1998, to appear). As compared to previous treatments of Curaçao Papiamentu word prosody, our hypothesis makes crucial reference to intonation and to tonal underspecification. We also investigate the realisation of primary and secondary stress in Curaçao Papiamentu.

We introduce LTAG-spinal, a novel variant of traditional Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammar (LTAG) with desirable linguistic, computational and statistical properties. Unlike in traditional LTAG, subcategorization frames and the argument-adjunct distinction are left underspecified in LTAG-spinal. LTAG-spinal with adjunction constraints is weakly equivalent to LTAG. The LTAG-spinal formalism is used to extract an LTAG-spinal Treebank from the Penn Treebank with Propbank annotation. Based on Propbank annotation, predicate coordination and LTAG adjunction structures are successfully extracted. The LTAG-spinal Treebank makes explicit semantic relations that are implicit or absent from the original PTB. LTAG-spinal provides a very desirable resource for statistical LTAG parsing, incremental parsing, dependency parsing, and semantic parsing. This treebank has been successfully used to train an incremental LTAG-spinal parser and a bidirectional LTAG dependency parser.

This paper presents the Constraint Language for Lambda Structures (CLLS), a firstorder language for semantic underspecification that conservatively extends dominance constraints. It is interpreted over lambda structures, tree-like structures that encode λ-terms. Based on CLLS, we present an underspecified, uniform analysis of scope, ellipsis, anaphora, and their interactions. CLLS solves a variable capturing problem that is omnipresent in scope underspecification and can be processed efficiently.