The most productive class of strong verbs in English is that exemplified by the verb string/strung. Both historical and experimental evidence show that the class is phonologically defined. However, the members do not share a single set of phonological features. Rather, the class is organized around a prototypical member (in the sense of Rosch 1978), to which the other members stand in a family-resemblance relation (in the sense of Wittgenstein 1953). The defining attributes of the class include the final consonants as well as the initial consonants and consonant clusters, and to a lesser extent the vowel of the base verb. The organization of the formal aspects of linguistic units is shown to follow the same principles as the organization of the content of the linguistic units. The phonological shapes of verbs in morphological classes can be organized into natural categories, like other natural and cultural objects.

The absolute construction exemplified by with the bus drivers on strike consists of with plus a constituent that possesses all the characteristics typical of embedded S's, except for having to contain a verb: it serves as a domain for cyclic application of transformations, it serves as a scope for quantifiers and negatives, and its elements do not command elements of the main clause. An analysis of these constituents as underlying S's, subject to optional deletion of be (or of possessional have and its subject) explains why this construction allows adverbs as adjuncts to constituents that normally do not support adverbs. Peculiarities of the distribution of adverbs in the construction support the contention that the NP in with NP PP is an underlying subject of be in some cases, an underlying object of have in others.

This is a systematic lexical study of a little-documented phenomenon, viz. the syntactic properties of the English verbs that can appear in sentence pairs such as Bees are swarming in the garden and The garden is swarming with bees. The result is more than a list of such verbs. Various phenomena have been uncovered related to a hitherto unnoticed phenomenon of sentence productivity: the verbs in these sentences can be replaced by others derived from them by metaphorical extension. These groups of verbs then form open classes, whose size at any given moment cannot be measured, and into which new verbs enter in a regular and productive way. Such new uses of existing sentence forms (not only of new word derivations) permit an explicit description of what is intuitively and loosely meant by productivity.