Syntactic features like case, person, and gender are often assumed to have simple atomic values that are checked for consistency by the standard predicate of equality. The case feature has values such as nom or acc, and values like masc and fem are assumed for the feature gender. But such a view does not square with some of the complex behavior these features exhibit. It allows no obvious account of feature indeterminacy (how a particular form can satisfy conflicting requirements on a feature like case), nor does it give an obvious account of feature resolution (how person and gender features of a coordinate noun phrase are determined on the basis of the conjuncts). We present a theory of feature representation and feature checking that solves these two problems, providing a straightforward characterization of feature indeterminacy and feature resolution while sticking to structures and standard interpretations that have independent motivation. Our theory of features is formulated within the LFG framework, but we believe that similar solutions can be developed within other syntactic approaches.

Four lexical features of a noun are relevant to agreement: (i) semantic conditions on reference, (ii) person, number, and gender features of the referential index, (iii) concord features, and (iv) declension class. These four features are correlated by a chain of binary constraints. When individual constraints are violated, the chain is broken, resulting in intricate patterns of mixed agreement. Three main types of mixed agreement are predicted, all of them attested in Serbo-Croatian. This theory helps explain Corbett's (1983) crosslinguistic agreement hierarchy.

The lexical semantic structures of change-of-state verbs are explored via linguistic theory, corpus analysis, and psycholinguistic experimentation. The data support the idea that these verbs can be divided into two classes, those for which the change of state is internally caused and those for which it is externally caused (Levin & Rappaport Hovav 1995, cf. Smith 1970). External causation change-of-state verbs have been hypothesized to denote two subevents, internal causation change-of-state verbs only one event. Consistent with this difference, the psycholinguistic data indicate that, in both transitive and intransitive constructions, sentences with external causation verbs take longer to comprehend than sentences with internal causation verbs.

The primary purpose of this study is to present evidence, based on experimental data from Western European languages, that there is orderly variation in the choice of perfective auxiliary with intransitive verbs. Specifically, auxiliary selection is sensitive to a hierarchy of aspectual/thematic verb types: some verbs require a given auxiliary categorically, whereas others allow both auxiliaries to a greater or lesser extent depending on their position on the hierarchy. It is argued that this gradience has potentially important implications for the unaccusative hypothesis, and more generally for theories of the lexicon-syntax interface.

This article has two main parts. In the first, the subject pronoun in a cleft sentence together with the cleft clause is shown to function pragmatically as a discontinuous definite description. Applying the givenness hierarchy (Gundel et al. 1993) makes it possible to explain the distribution of this-clefts and that-clefts in discourse, and predicts the more frequent occurrence of it-clefts. Clefts also semantically share existential and exhaustiveness conditions with definite descriptions. The second part presents a new syntactic analysis of clefts, which treats the cleft clause as an extraposed complement of the cleft subject pronoun, adjoined to the clefted constituent.