The functional head suggests that verbs acquire their inflectional properties by moving from one head position to the next in the syntactic derivation. A problem arises as affixes’ ordering is not sensitive to syntactic properties, as it is the case in Qafar. This Cushitic language exhibits two verbal classes depending on whether verbs can have prefixes. I argue that the hierarchical structure ...

What is an interface? Talk of interfaces arises when one is confronted with some boundary phenomenon that sits at a point of contact between two domains. In my area of study, namely syntax, people talk about the “syntax-phonology interface”, the “syntax-morphology interface”, or the “syntax-semantics interface”. So an interface can be understood as a borderline between two domains. This metapho...

Evidence from the intonation of wh questions in the Fukuoka dialect of Japanese is used to explore a recent proposal by Richards that the syntax-prosody interface includes a requirement for wh elements and their associated complementizers to be contained in the same phonological phrase. An examination of multiple wh questions and nested wh questions determines that this phrasing requirement ori...

Most of research work on French intonation has been conducted on prepared speech data (i.e. read speech), with various approaches ranging to purely syntactic (Rossi), Autosegmental-Metrical (Sun and Fougeron) or Phonosyntactic (Martin). This paper examines the bases of the phonosyntactic approach extended to spontaneous (nonprepared) speech data, described syntactically from a macrosyntactic po...

The present study is an attempt to explore the effect of one of the pragmatic elements of discourse (namely the conceptualizable agent) on overpassivization of English unaccusative verbs. Through employing the questionnaire originally used by Ju, (2000), 206 Iranian intermediate and advanced English majors were asked to choose the more grammatical form (active or passive) in target sentences wi...