Current theories place very mild constraints on possible diachronic changes, something at odds with the trivial observation that actual ‘‘language change’’ represents a tiny fraction of the variation made a priori available by Universal Grammar. Much recent work in diachronic syntax has actually been guided by the aim of describing changes (e.g., parameter resetting), rather than by concerns of...

Introduction This paper proposes a model of the syntax-phonology interface which is compatible with a central assumption of mainstream syntax, that phonology and morphology are interpreted from syntactic structures, and mainstream phonology, which models phonological processes by ranked or weighted constraints. The central idea is to combine Cophonology Theory (Ito & Mester 1995, Anttila 2002, ...

The Intonational Phrase organization of a sentence is a hybrid beast. It sometimes shows a tight correlation with the semantic properties of the sentence, namely what the sentence means in standard truth conditional terms. It sometimes appears to be a reflex of the Focus structure of the sentence. Sometimes it appears to be correlated with the length of the constituents of a sentence. And somet...

The formation of wh-questions in Northern Norwegian seems to be an example of a syntactic phenomenon which necessarily refers to phonological structure, namely the prosodic weight of the wh-expression. The subject and verb are ‘inverted’ after polysyllabic wh-expressions, but they are not inverted after monosyllabic ones. These data are discussed in the context of Pullum & Zwicky’s (1988) hypot...

This paper argues that "covert" operations like Quantifier Raising (QR) can precede "overt" operations. Specifically we argue that there are overt operations that must take the output of QR as their input. If this argument is successful there are two interesting consequences for the theory of grammar. First, there cannot be a "covert" (i.e. post-spellout) component of the grammar. That is, what...