This article examines the phonological status of schwa in clitics, in particular whether or not schwa should be included in their lexical representation. Several distributional and experimental arguments pointing to the lexical status of clitic schwas are reviewed and are shown to be inconclusive, due to the existence of additional data that suggest a different interpretation not involving underlying schwas. The discussion includes experimental results that fail to show residual lip rounding in the vicinity of an omitted schwa at clitic boundaries, contra Barnes and Kavitskaya's (2002) previous claim. In the absence of evidence to the contrary, the non-contrastive nature of clitic schwas militates against their underlying status.

Adoptive transfer of autologous dendritic cells (DCs) loaded with tumor-associated CD4 and CD8 T cell epitopes represents a promising avenue for the immunotherapy of cancer. In an effort to increase the loading of therapeutic synthetic peptides on MHC II molecules, we used a mutant of HLA-DM (DMY) devoid of its lysosomal sorting motif and that accumulates at the cell surface. Transfection of DMY into HLA-DR+ cells resulted in increased loading of the exogenously supplied HA307–318 peptide, as well as increased stimulation of HA-specific T cells. Also, on transduction in mouse and human DCs, DMY increased loading of HEL48–61 and of the tumor Ag-derived gp100174–190 peptides, respectively. Interestingly, expression of DMY at the surface of APCs favored Th1 differentiation over Th2. Finally, we found that DMY− and DMY+ mouse APCs differentially stimulated T cell hybridomas sensitive to the fine conformation of peptide–MHC II complexes. Taken together, our results suggest that the overexpression of HLA-DMY at the plasma membrane of DCs may improve quantitatively, but also qualitatively, the presentation of CD4 T cell epitopes in cellular vaccine therapies for cancer.