Over the last several years there has been increased interest in and reliance on the role of phonetics in explaining various aspects of phonology. Such notions as ‘natural rule’ and ‘phonetically explainable’ are commonly equated and are incorporated into arguments over the appropriateness of some given rule formulation or over the range of analyses permitted under alternative theoretical approaches. Those who have made the strongest, most explicit appeal to phonetics in this regard include Stampe (1969, 1973), Ohala (1971, 1972, 1974a, 1974b, 1975, 1978), Schane (1972), Harms (1973), and Hooper (1976). The common thread in these various appeals is the claim that some or all defensible phonological rules are phonetically explainable.

This paper argues that the theory of Universal Grammar must include both implicational universals and universals of language distribution in the description and explanation of word order.

Implicational universals are of the form: if a language has some property (or properties) P, then it will also have some property (or properties) Q. These ‘if P then Q’ statements require that a language must not have property P without property Q (*P –O).

Modern Greek has a Relative Clause Formation process by which the target of Relativization is deleted under identity with the head of the Relative Clause – these Relative Clauses are introduced by the invariant complementizer particle pu, which also introduces factive complements. (Greek also has a movement strategy for Relative Clauses, with an inflected Relative pronoun, but the details of this process are irrelevant here.) Examples of the deletion strategy are given below in (i):

In the last twenty years, Cummings's line ‘he danced his did’; has been at the centre of almost every major discussion of the deviant language of literature. In the last two decades, hundreds of pages and scores of articles have been written which have attempted to assess and motivate its linguistic status and aesthetic success. Without question, ‘he danced his did’ has been more closely scrutinized and extensively analysed than any other single phrase in English literature.