This paper offers a phase-based analysis of adverb licensing, focusing on speech-act adverbs and epistemic adverbs in English, within the minimalist framework developed by Chomsky (2000, 2001, 2005, 2007). Although recent studies have tried to explain the remarkable properties of adverbs with regard to their distribution in terms of licensing, existing approaches such as the specifier-based analysis of Cinque (1999) and the scope-based analysis of Ernst (2002) are problematic. As an alternative, I propose a phase-based analysis of adverb licensing. Specifically, I argue that adverbs are locally c-commanded by their licensers to be properly licensed; and furthermore, that adverbs cannot be licensed by their licensers beyond phases. I show how, based on these arguments, the phase vP affects the distribution of both speech-act adverbs and epistemic adverbs in declarative sentences, and the phase CP plays a crucial role for the distribution of the adverbs in interrogatives. I also consider word order in adverb usage in light of the proposed analysis.

Cak is a Luish language belonging to the Tibeto-Burman language family and is spoken in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh. In this paper, I have tried to analyse the internal word structures of vaiŋ ‘come’ and laŋ ‘go’ in Cak.

  As a rule, in Cak, we must employ one of the directional auxiliary verbs in perfective sentences. However, there is no need to do so for the two motion verbs vaiŋ ‘come’ and laŋ ‘go’. Thus, it is better to reanalyse them as the combination of a verb and a directional auxiliary verb. The investigation clarified that, both synchronically and diachronically, vaiŋ is analysable as va ‘come/venitive’ + -aiŋ ‘venitive’ and laŋ, as la ‘take/go’ + -aŋ ‘non-specific’.

  The results also suggested that the three major Cak directives -a ‘andative’, -aiŋ ‘venitive’, and -aŋ ‘non-specific’ might be related to the Proto-Tibeto-Burman pronominal affixes *a ‘third person’, *n ‘second person’, and *ŋ ‘first person’, respectively. If this is the case, we can regard Cak as a language that is in the process of shifting from a pronominalized language to a non-pronominalized one.

Turkish has been said to have stress accent. A frequent topic of discussion is which syllable stress falls on in the case of exceptional accent patterns, i.e., when the final syllable is not stressed. This study proposes that Turkish should be categorized as having pitch accent rather than stress accent. It is proposed that there are two kinds of accent in Turkish, basic and exceptional. In basic accent a fall in pitch is not observed, while in exceptional accent the pitch falls. Exceptional accent can be further classified into two main types. In exceptional accent pattern A, the existence of a preceding fall takes precedence in accent realization, whereas in exceptional accent pattern B, the pitch always falls regardless of whether there is another fall preceding it. Furthermore, an additional subtype of exceptional accent is proposed in which the pitch falls on the syllable just after the initial syllable depending on the representational function of the semantic category.

The present study investigated how five first elements (i.e., imo, soba, kome, mugi and kokutoo) affect sequential voicing (rendaku) in the second element shoochuu across six dialect regions (i.e., Kagoshima, Oita, Fukuoka, Yamaguchi, Hiroshima and Shizuoka). A decision tree analysis of questionnaire data obtained from 405 participants was conducted to predict voiced (/z/) or voiceless (/s/) decisions based on the two variables of shoochuu ingredient and dialect region. Results indicated that the type of shoochuu ingredient as the first-element was a significant factor for voiced-or-voiceless decisions, dividing them into four groups. (1) ‘Imo+shoochuu’ showed the highest frequency of voicing at 93.83%. (2) ‘Kome+shoochuu’ (88.89%) and ‘Soba+shoochuu’ (84.69%) showed similar percentages. (3) ‘Mugi+shoochuu’ (72.59%) was significantly lower than imo, kome or soba. (4) ‘Kokutoo+shoochuu’ (56.44%) was the lowest. The present study also demonstrated that the six dialect regions appeared to have no influence on voiced-or-voiceless decisions. Dialect seems to have no influence on rendaku occurrences, at least in the case of shoochuu.

It is a widely held view that the elements appearing in the context of do-insertion in English and suru-insertion in Japanese are dummy verbs with no semantic content. The background assumption is that certain morphological requirements trigger the insertion operations. This article provides some cases of suru-insertion where no clear morphological motivation is found for its application. We show that suru in those cases seems to play a semantically substantial role. An attempt is made to account for suru-insertion of this kind by postulating a Neg head which has a [-NEG] feature.