L’incidence interne du substantif

Le terme d’incidence chez Guillaume recouvre un rapport de dépendance : l’adjectif est un apport qui trouve un support dans le substantif; l’adjectif est ainsi incident au substantif, un rapport d’incidence externe. Mais Guillaume a proposé que le substantif, lui aussi, a un apport, qui est incident à un support interne. De cette façon, il a réusi à distinguer adjectif et substantif, problème que Jespersen n’a pas su résoudre. Dans cet article on a essayé de préciser la nature de l’incidence interne du substantif, et de démontrer que ce rapport interne, distinctif pour le substantif, est en même temps la base non seulement des contrastes (1) singulier/pluriel, et (2) défini/indéfini, mais aussi du contraste de signification entre adjectif préposé et adjectif postposé dans les langues romanes.The term incidence in the work of Gustave Guillaume represents a dependency relationship: a modifier is said to be incident to its head. By proposing that whereas adverbs and adjectives have external incidence, a noun has internal incidence, Guillaume succeeded in clarifying the difference between an adjective and a noun in a dependency grammar, a problem that Jespersen had struggled unsuccessfully to solve. The attempt is made in this paper to elucidate the fundamental nature of internal incidence, and to show that this internal relationship, distinctive to the noun, is also the basis not only for the following fundamental nominal contrasts: (1) singular/plural, (2) definite/indefinite, but also for the contrastive meanings of preposed and postposed adjectives in the Romance languages

The Auxiliary DO in English

The DO auxiliary of English has either been dismissed as a meaningless 'dummy', whose purpose is purely positional, or, if treated as meaningful, it has been given special lexical meanings such as OCCURRENCE QUESTIONED (Penhallurick 1985) for which there is no lexical justification whatever. Starting from minimal pairs, it will be shown that the DO auxiliary is necessarily meaningful, and that when used contrastively it provides a dynamic reading for the verb phrase. Given that DO has such a generalized meaning that almost all other verbs may be considered its hyponyms, and given that all auxiliaries undergo 'esoteric subduction' (Guillaume 1938, 1964:75) or semantic bleaching, it will be proposed that DO, with its full verbal morphology, represents the occurrence of an event, and that its dependent infinitive clarifies, with its lexical precision, the nature of the event. It will also be argued that representing these two elements of the verb phrase separately is an elegant solution to cognitive problems confronted in the construction of interrogatives and negatives. The question of affirmative DO will also be addressed, and also the reason why this auxiliary is not normally used in the formation of the interrogative and the negative of the verb TO BE

Verbal Derivation in Micmac

In Indo-European languages the most frequent morphosyntactic device for distinguishing verbs that are transitive, intransitive, reflexive, reciprocal, etc., is the addition of nominal or pronominal elements to the Verb Phrase. In Algonkian languages, these differences are handled by the derivational morphology of the verb, several layers of derivation being possible. The ordering of these different layers will be illustrated from the derivational verb morphology of Micmac, an Algonkian language spoken in the five most easterly provinces of Canada, to show how several dozen different verbs can be formed from a single stem, providing rich representational possibilities for the individual speaker. The interplay of the different categories also allows us to draw conclusions about certain aspects of transitivity and the way that it is represented in different languages

Motivated Syncretism

The purpose of this paper is to examine the sharing, by two distinctively different functional elements, of a common morphology, and to show how such syncretism is sometimes motivated, and is, in a sense, iconic, since the sharing of a common morphology is a reflexion of important features the two functional elements have in common. More particularly the syncretism of the animate singular obviative and inanimate plural markers that is found throughout the Algonkian languages is examined, and parallels drawn'with similar syncretism in Indo-European languages between feminine singular and neuter plural

Some Fundamental Issues in Semantics

A number of approaches to meaning have suffered from not taking into account all levels and aspects of meaning. The attempt is made here to relate together all the different types of meaning, linguistic and non-linguistic, and to show as well the relevance of such elements as the situational or pragmatic matrix and the fact that language is a dynamism, a process, not a static entity. The purpose of the paper, therefore, is to create an awareness of the complexities and problems that have to be faced when linguists deal with linguistic meaning

A New Look at French Liaison

The phonology of French has attracted a great deal of attention from the theoreticians, especially for the phenomena connected with what is known as liaison (Trager 1944; Schane 1968; Hooper 1976; Klausenburger 1978; Gaatone 1979; Clements and Keyser 1983, Stemberger 1985, to mention only a selected few). What has largely been ignored, however, is that a given liaison may be either (a) obligatory, (b) optional or (c) forbidden. The purpose of this paper is to examine under what circumstances the requirement for liaison varies, and the probable underlying reason for this variation

John Hewson-a Festschrift

Dr. John Hewson's appointment to Memorial University's Henrietta Harvey Chair in May 1997 marked 37 years of distinguished service as scholar, teacher and administrator. Dr. Hewson, an APLA member since the early days of our association and a scholar of national and international reputation, cannot be pinned down to any particular specialization: one could say that he has had a distinguished career in several branches of Linguistics. His scholarly achievements in General Linguistics, Theoretical Linguistics, Historical Linguistics, Amerindian, and Romance Linguistics are impressive in both quality and quantity. His CV lists 14 completed books (with 3 more in preparation), 141 published papers and reviews, and 93 papers to Learned Societies, including, for example, the closing address of the final plenary session of the most recent International Congress of Linguists (a world event staged every five years), held in Quebec in 1992