Examines use of modal auxiliary "should" when used to express probability as a weaker equivalent of "must." Study shows that in order to account for restrictions on use of "must" and "should," a theory must go beyond the syntactic and semantic characteristics and take into account semantic relations between…

Argues that the polysemy view can not give a unified account of the meanings of can, may, must, and should, whereas the unitary meaning view does not encounter the problem. Unitary meanings are proposed that account both for the range of interpretations these modals can have and for why they get these interpretations. (21 references) (JL)

A brief overview is presented of previous theoretical treatments of the verb-preposition construction, concentrating on three Government Binding Theory treatments. Arguments are outlined that support a different analysis of this type of construction. (24 references) (Author/VWL)

Margaret Speas'"Phrase Structure in Natural Language" is reviewed. It presents three recent innovations in phrase structure research that offer new tools to explain data and solve old problems: the VP-internal subject hypothesis, the layered VP hypothesis, and the articulated IP hypothesis. (Contains 19 references.) (LB)

It is argued that the restrictions on "wh"-movement out of negative and factive islands cannot be explained solely by the Empty Category Principle but that embedded properties assigned by matrix verbs also intervene. (Contains 48 references.) (LB)

This paper argues, utilizing Lexical Mapping Theory (LMT), that there are modern Greek deverbal nominal predicates that take syntactic arguments. A small set of simple unification-based operations is employed to model the relation between the argument structure of verb predicates and that of the corresponding deverbal nominals with an…

The familiar linguistic diagram for language acquisition is held to be theory-neutral. Arguments of Lightfoot to the contrary are refuted, and theories about children's language acquisition are discussed. (Contains 11 references.) (LB)

Examines reflexivization in Italian and demonstrates that the proposals that (1) reflexive pronouns and their antecedents must be clausemates, and (2) the specified subject and tensed-S conditions, cannot be maintained as universals. (AM)

Data are presented from Amele and other Papuan languages to show how the medial verb form is marked for a binary distinction of realis versus irrealis modality. It is demonstrated that in these languages realis-irrealis distinction interacts with categories of tense and mood marked on the final verb to divide them into domains of realis and…

Demonstrates how syntactic constraints interact in the interpretation of Verb Phrase inversion. Specifically, it is shown that the auxiliary "be" is unique among auxiliary verbs in allowing VP inversion. (38 references) (VWL)

Analysis middle constructions in English, accounting for their key syntactic and semantic properties. The analysis rests on the observation that there are certain similarities between middle, "tough," and recipe-context null-object constructions. (55 references) (VWL)

It is hypothesized that a number of regularities in the distribution of the two types of inchoative constructions with the verbs of change of state in French can be captured by an analysis whereby monovalent verbs of change of state may project the Patient argument to the subject or to the object position. (Contains 68 references.) (LB)

Responds to counterarguments made by Haile and Mtenje (1988) concerning explicitness, arbitrariness, and complexity as it relates to earlier criticisms of an autosegmental analysis of Arabic verb morphology and the introduction of an alternative analysis presented in Hudson (1986). (eight references) (GLR)

A system of grammatical analysis is presented which has certain mathematical properties and which produces the sentences of a language by means of two simple processes: word-entry and entry-reduction. This system is not an alternative to descriptions of grammatical patterns, but rather a complement to them. (DS)