This study demonstrates that Preferred Argument Structure holds for the early stages of English. Preferred Argument Structure aims to uncover preferred discourse configurations of arguments over other configurations of grammatically possible alternatives. Grammatical roles A, S, O and Oblique are examined and found to be systematically ordered from the viewpoint of referential forms and information status at each synchronic stage-i. e. A<S<O<OBL-which means that the more to the left a role is situated, the less likely it is to realize a lexical new mention. This implicational hierarchy has gradually been shaped over time. I argue that such form-information combinations have consistently evolved in the shaping of grammatical systems despite the different grammatical details in the earlier stages of English.

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The vowels of New Zealand English have been developing for over a century, though the vowel system is phonemically identical to that of RP. While the chain shift of short front vowels and the rotation of closing diphthongs maintain vowel contrasts, the merger of front centering diphthongs eliminates them and collapses the vowel system. This paper demonstrates that these sound changes are all ascribed to dominance relations between the constraints on contrasts, and that the NZE constraint ranking achieves a vowel system with at most three phonologically significant degrees of height.

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Zeller proposes that introducing a new structural notion“structural adjacency”can explain various unique properties of particle verbs. Extensive arguments are given to show that there is a special local relation between a particle and the head verb, although particles and verbs are independent of each other in many syntactic respects.
The book is interesting and insightful, trying to argue that the unified concept of structural adjacency plays a significant role in accounting for intriguing (and sometimes conflicting) characteristics of verb particles. An extensive amount of relevant data is explored, taken from some major Germanic languages (mostly German and Dutch with occasional reference to English, Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish). Zeller also provides careful suggestions of possibilities to deal with various types of apparent counter examples.
In this article, I first demonstrated that Zeller's semantic-based arguments, and his referentiality-based arguments are not as strong as Zeller seems to have intended. Then, I pointed out two conceptual issues and suggested a minimalist way of describing a difference between particles and other ordinary complements, in terms of the structural relation to the head verb, which still captures Zeller's intuition that the verb and the particle are in a special local relation.

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This paper will examine the three verb-deriving processes in English, affixation (e. g. film_N→filmize_V), conversion (e. g. catalog_N→catalog_V), and back-formation (e. g. television_N→televise_V) and will claim that while affixation is a concatenative process in the morphology, conversion and back-formation result from a listing process in the lexicon. It will be demonstrated that conversion and back-formation belong to the same derivational type, and the latter follows automatically from the proper characterization of the former. The elimination of back-formation from the inventory of derivational processes will be claimed to contribute to the maintenance of morpheme-basedness of English morphology.

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The purpose of this paper is to consider the ellipsis phenomenon called Pseudogapping. Several researchers have assumed that Pseudogapping results from VP ellipsis, with a remnant having moved out of the deleted VP. Given this assumption, I will propose that Pseudogapping involves movement of a remnant to Spec of vP in the overt component, followed by both PF-deletion of a verb projection excluding the remnant and LF-movement of a corresponding phrase out of its antecedent. I will show that this proposal provides a straightforward account of some properties of Pseudogapping that are distinct from VP ellipsis.

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