This special volume presents a series of papers which all deal with the semantics of nominal expressions.
It has long been clear that the relatively simple picture of the relationship between syntactic category and semantic type on which all noun phrases denote generalized quantifiers, while perhaps feasible to maintain, is an idealization that does little to advance our understanding of the great richness and variety in the semantics of nominals that is attested in the world’s languages. In the last thirty years, this picture has grown progressively more complex along at least two dimensions that we would like to emphasize here.
It should be evident that the study of the semantics of nominals continues to offer many interesting avenues to explore. There is still much work to be done to clarify what exactly incorporation consists in –to what extent it is syntactically and semantically homogeneous cross-linguistically, and what its status is within a model of grammar which pursues simplicity and economy (Van Valin 1999). Work on incorporation and related phenomena has forced rethinking about how semantic composition is achieved and how broad the semantic typology of nominals might be; it also has consequences for our understanding of argument structure. Another rich area involves the sortal domain of noun semantics –some of the papers in this volume present perhaps unexpected proposals for the sortal category of noun phrases, with interesting extensions in the empirical coverage of semantic theory. Yet a third area pointed to by the contributions to this volume involve the discourse-pragmatic aspects of meaning that are conventionalized in the interpretations of noun phrases –perhaps the area in greatest need of development.

This fourth volume of Catalan Journal of Linguistics  is devoted to a topic discussed at length in the literature but which nevertheless remains a challenge for any view of phonology: the morphology-phonology interaction. The papers collected address two related issues, the role of morphological information in phonology and the role of phonological information in morphology.
The contributions to this volume raise many interesting questions concerning morphophonemics from different points of view. In the articles some answers to these questions are suggested. One is the search for a more restrictive and coherent grammar to account for alternations. Another one is the existence of certain symmetries between the morphological and the prosodic/phonological level. Yet another one is the role of paradigms and subparadigms (patterns and subpatterns) in phonology and morphology. Unavoidably many other questions remain unresolved and have to be left for future research: What are the consequences of Freedom of Analysis and of Richness of the Base in OT? How can we integrate and limit paradigms and subparadigms in a particular linguistic analysis? Hopefully, this volume sets out further paths to explore.

Articles

Italian allora, French alors: Functions, convergences and divergences
Carla Bazzarella, Cristina Bosco, Alessandro Garcea, Barbara Gili Fivela, Johanna Miecznikowski, Francesca Tini Brunozzi
9-30

The meaning and functions of the Swedish discourse marker alltså—Evidence from translation corpora
Karin Aijmer
31-59

Different functions, different histories. Modal particles and discourse markers from a diachronic point of view
Richard Waltereit, Ulrich Detges
61-80

Adaptive Management in Discourse: The case of involvement discourse markers in English and Spanish conversations
Jesús Romero-Trillo
81-94

Uses of also in oral semi-informal German
Marta Fernández-Villanueva
95-115

The translation of oh in a corpus of dubbed sitcoms
Anna Matamala
117-136
Discussion article: Discourse markers, modal particles, and contrastive analysis, synchronic and diachronic
Elizabeth Closs Traugott
139-157
Discussion article: Pragmatic markers, interjections and discourse
Neal R. Norrick
159-168

Articles

Exclamatives: A Thematic Guide with Many Questions and Few Answers
Xavier Villalba
9-40
Deconstructing Exclamations
Elena Castroviejo Miró
41-90
Exclamative Wh-Phrases as Positive Polarity Items
Raquel González Rodríguez
91-116
Spanish Root Exclamatives at the Syntax/Semantics Interface
Javier Gutiérrez-Rexach
117-133
Catalan “Déu n’hi do” and Conventional Implicatures in Exclamatives
Laia Mayol
135-156
Pleonastic tet in the Lapscheure dialect
Liliane Haegeman, Danièle Van de Velde
157-199