The traditional typology of English poetic meters makes a binary division between strong-stress (or accentual) meters and accentual-syllabic (or syllable-stress or syllable-accent) meters. According to this typology, Old and Middle English alliterative poetry was composed in strong-stress meter; the iambic pentameter from Chaucer to Yeats and on to the present has been an accentual-syllabic meter. Intersecting with this literary typology is a linguistic typology that classifies languages of the world as stress-timed or syllable-timed or some mix of the two. English is a clear example of a stress-timed language. Whereas most descriptions of strong-stress meter focus on the counting of stresses, the present study focuses on the patterns of unstressed syllables between the stresses (possibly at isochronous intervals). The implications of this analysis suggest a new typology in which certain forms of English verse follow strict grammatical stress (mainly Old and Middle English, but for reasons different from “strong-stress” expectations) and other forms are shaped by a compromise of grammatical stress and the metrical template. Within this later group, iambic pentameter contrasts with trochaic, anapestic, and dipodic meters in lending itself more readily to modulation. Some of this modulation comes from an easy incorporation into iambic pentameter of elements associated with Old and Middle English meters.

Stroik (1992, 1995, 1999) argues for the syntactic approach to English middles. His argumentation is heavily dependent upon the occurrence of a for-phrase in middles. However, many native speakers of English judge middles containing a for-phrase awkward or at best marginal. In addition, some other adverbials show a trait of a very similar nature. These two observational facts seem to justify the Genericity Constraint on Middles (=GCM). Yet a third observational fact that middles in the past tense can be sporadic nullifies GCM. In the present article, based upon several pieces of evidence, I show that the subject of the middle is a topic. In addition, it is argued that the Topical Subject Constraint on Middles can explain away the three observational facts.

It has been claimed recently that the two computational operations Move and Agree of Chomsky (2000, 2001a) should be separated into distinct and independent operations. According to this view, Move is an “operation that applies only to meet an EPP-feature of a functional category.” It is also claimed under that analysis that “a candidate for Move is simply a syntactic object with phonetic content.” The purpose of this short paper is to show that the operation Move should still be viewed as composite; hence it must have the operation Agree as one of its prerequisites. We argue that the EPP feature of T may not be analyzed as an independent feature that triggers overt displacement in syntax. Under Chomsky's (2000, 2001a) theory, displacement in syntax must require the probe-goal (P, G) association before the actual movement takes place. It is shown in this paper that in order for an element $\beta$ to raise to the [Spec, T] position, the $\varphi$-features of T must establish a (P, G) relation with those of $\beta$ prior to movement. In short, Move requires Agree, the EPP feature being dependent on the minimal $\varphi$-feature [person] of nominals.

When teaching English in elementary schools was introduced in Korea in 1997, the theoretical basis was the critical period hypothesis (CPH). The object of this study was to test whether the Korean situation satisfies the conditions for the CPH such as the amount of English input and needs. As a test for this, English input and needs were compared in Korea, the U.S.A. and Singapore. The items for English input were on a continuum of primary to secondary sources and the items for English needs were on a continuum of immediate to future needs. The 0-5 scale was used. The result showed that the total means of English input were 4.87, 4.62, and 1.05 for children in the U.S.A., Singapore and Korea respectively. The total means of English needs were 4.32, 3.81, and 1.52 for children in the U.S.A., Singapore and Korea respectively. These figures show that Korean children's levels of both input and needs were from “almost none” to “little,” while those of children in the U.S.A. and Singapore were from “much” to “very much.” This shows that teaching English in Korea presently is far from meeting the conditions that are expected by the CPH. As an alternative to explain what happens cognitively to Korean children, this paper suggests the automatization and proceduralization processes.

Pronouns are frequently used in English, and their resolution is important to capture meaning of sentences. This paper provides a computational implementation for pronoun readings in English, based on Chierchia's (1988) Binding Theory in Categorial Grammar. A CCG-like system is newly devised for implementing his ideas, where syntactic phenomena are represented by the functor-argument relations of categories. This relation triggers resolution algorithms, and reflexives and pronominals are resolved succinctly. In sum, this paper gives an efficient resolution algorithm for English pronouns within Categorial Grammar.

This paper aims to provide an account for the English anaphors under the framework of the recent development of minimalism (Chomsky 1999, 2001). I propose that the anaphor has the uninterpretable [a] feature. The Agree operation erases the [a] feature by feature match. Once the [a] is deleted, the derivation converges, providing a proper interpretation of the anaphor. When there is no matching phi-features, the [a] cannot be eliminated, inducing the derivation to crash. The Agree operation can account for not only the typical local binding cases in English but the apparent long-distance binding cases in the picture-DP and expletive constructions. Consequently, the traditional concept of the binding domain and dichotomy between local and long-distance types are abandoned in favor of the analysis under the framework of minimalism. The minimalist accounts thus maximally simplifies the binding principles, using the general operation Agree only.

There are several English constructions in which a certain constituent appears to the left of its canonical position, typically sentence-initially, leaving its canonical position empty. Such constructions involve Left-dislocation and Y-movement. These operations are called ‘Preposing.’ The preposed constituent of such constructions is generally regarded as the topic of the sentence which involves that constituent. Topics must have at least two features; ‘aboutness’ and ‘givenness.’ The feature ‘aboutness’ defines the range of comment, and the feature ‘givenness’ means ‘informationally old or given.’ The purpose of this paper is to show that the function of Preposing is to reinforce the aboutness of the preposed constituent of a sentence and that most preposed constituents have givenness. We examined Preposing for this purpose. Tough-movement and Passivization were examined also, because they have characteristics informationally similar to those of Preposing.