Negation and the functional sequence

There exists a general restriction on admissible functional sequences which prevents adjacent identical heads. We investigate a particular instantiation of this restriction in the domain of negation. Empirically, it manifests itself as a restriction the stacking of multiple negative morphemes. We propose a principled account of this restriction in terms of the general ban on immediately consecutive identical heads in the functional sequence on the one hand, and the presence of a Neg feature inside negative morphemes on the other hand. The account predicts that the stacking of multiple negative morphemes should be possible provided they are separated by intervening levels of structure. We show that this prediction is borne out

Indeterminacy, inference, iconicity and interpretation: Aspects of the grammar-pragmatics interface

Every utterance is processed both grammatically and pragmatically. According­ly, in offering an account of linguistic phenomena, the burden of explanation may be on the grammar or on the pragmatics; and if on the grammar, the ac­count may invoke one sub-module or another. We describe a number of exam­ples where the overall theory is simplified if the account is switched from one (sub)module to another. Our main example concerns topic and focus fronting, where we claim that there are no dedicated Topic and Focus heads; rather, two semantically trivial heads, Gap and Φον, can be exploited to front phrases which may be pragmatically interpreted as topic or focus