Earticle

The expansion of research topics in semantics brought attention to problems with density associated with materials, time, space, and degree. Two different positions are reviewed in this study. One position is a sorted multi-layered structure, in which an interpretation domain is sorted into discrete and dense structures. The other is a single-layered structure with dense entities only. I argue for a sorted multi-layered structure and propose a restriction on the selection of substructures.

The claim that SVO is a basic word order for Korean receives growing justification from recent studies like Lee (2007a,b; 2008a). This paper consolidates this position by considering another piece of empirical evidence: An object wh-phrase must be analyzed as undergoing leftward movement from the postverbal position to the preverbal position, dubbed Object Lifting. This proves that the basic word order is SVO in Korean. The current result thus secures non-vacuous object movement and also supports Kayne (1994)--the universal word order is underlyingly SVO and there exists no rightward movement. The cause of Object Lifting is identified as a focus feature in the relevant vP domain. In Chinese, a language widely known to be SVO, Object Lifting is spurred by a specificity/focus feature, and some instances of this operation are adduced to cross-linguistically corroborate the current view. The lack of Object Lifting in English is attributed to the absence of the focus feature in the vP domain. Thus, Korean, Chinese and English, now all starting with the uniform SVO underlying order, manifest different surface word orders depending on the presence/absence of the specificity/focus feature in question.

This article explores how the conflicting ideological positions of two news media are reflected in their different perceptions of the postwar situation in Iraq and become encoded in discursive transitivity patterns. The major aim of the article is to practically demonstrate such differences in transitivity choices and practices of the ideological representations between the news reports about Iraq of those media in terms of a critically comparative discourse analysis. The target data were collected from the on-line news reports posted on the respective web sites of the two networks: the Fox News Channel in the U.S. (foxnews.com) and the English-language version of Al-Jazeera in Qatar (english.aljazeera.net). This study adopts an interdisciplinary theoretical framework of critical discourse analysis for news representations of ideology by integrating Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics and representative studies from critical discourse scholars. In particular, the transitivity choices and its cognitive and discursive strategies represented in the micro-level news texts are qualitatively and quantitatively examined by focusing on the three representational process and participant types: Material, Relational, and Verbal processes. As a result, this study seeks to verify the idea that the ideological differences between the news networks result in the different choices and practices of transitivity in news reports on postwar Iraq in reality. Simultaneously, it is demonstrated that this is in keeping with the line that separates the concepts of Self and Other, as those are construed according to each network's socio-cultural identity and ideology.

The recent OT-alternative, OT-CC, has been proposed to explain phonological opacity, marking traces of phonological alternations in its intermediate forms. Although the theory successfully accounts for patterns of opacity phonology and can readily extend to other data with chains involving intermediate forms, the theory reveals some fatal problems with regard to one of its three major conditions, gradual divergence. For instance, the notion of gradual divergence fails to explain cases of insertion of a place-linked vowel, nasalization of the placeless obstruent and nasalization of an oral stop, all of which incur more than two LUMs at a time. Given that such violations of gradualness are unavoidable when dealing with these cases of phonological alternations, this paper proposes to incorporate radical and contrastive underspecification into OT-CC despite their very limited roles in the development of constraint-based approaches.

Within Chomsky’s Minimalist Program it is assumed that morpho-syntactic features fall into two types: interpretable and non-interpretable. The latter must be checked within the Computational System, that is, within core syntax, whereas the former need not be checked. This seems to follow from the Minimalist assumption that uninterpretable features may not survive at an interface and that therefore some sort of erasure by checking is needed to prevent a derivation from crashing. Since interpretability roughly means “having a semantic interpretation”, this view seems to provoke a number of hitherto unanswered questions: One problem is that standard model theoretic semantics does not provide us with any interpretation of pronominal features like singular or third person, although these features need not be checked whenattached to an NP (or DP). The reason is that singular atomic reference to 3rd person is given “cognitive preference” in standard semantics: within this theory there is no way to interpret the respective features. Another problem is posed by numerous examples showing that features that need not be checked do not have the semantic interpretation one might expect. In order to overcome these problems, I propose a combination of five different modules of grammar to get the desired results, resorting to (a) assumptions about unmarkedness in morphology; (b) assumptions about the semantics of pluralization; (c) pragmatic assumptions about the choice between singular and plural; (d) grammatical restrictions on feature agreement; and (e) a certain way of interpreting pronominal features.

Concerning the issue of exceptions in generics, Cohen (2004) argues that exceptions are allowed in generics only if "homogeneity" is not violated. The homogeneity constraint restricts that the exceptions should not form a salient "chunk" of the domain of the generic. A salient chunk could be formed, depending on the way in which the domain is mentally represented. "Tree" and "geometric" representations are proposed as the two ways of mapping of cognitive mental representations. Yoon (2006) argues, however, that choices between these two mental representations claimed to be involved in the interpretation process of generics are quite arbitrary, and that counterexamples also exist for the "homogeneity" requirement. Yoon also suggests that generics involve cognitive conceptualizations based on the language users' encyclopedic knowledge, world knowledge from experiences, common sense, beliefs, stereotypes, prejudices, etc. Given this, this paper revisits the widely-agreed-upon phenomenon of exceptions in generics, and proposes that generics could be divided into two kinds depending on whether they contain trivial or real exceptions, elaborating on Yoon's analysis. It is further proposed that one kind of generics is characterizing statements based on the salient properties of "whole" sets while the other kind is characterizing statements based on the salient properties of "representative" sets. It will be shown that this approach better accounts for the acceptable and unacceptable generic statements.