A new type of noun + verb compound formation is attested in Japanese which involves a sentential structure as its input and presumably takes place in the phonological component. This ‘postsyntactic’ compounding serves not only to weaken the strong lexicalist hypothesis but also to elucidate problems surrounding the delicate and controversial issue of where word formation processes take place. The discovery that morphological constraints that have hitherto been believed to characterize lexically formed words also apply to postsyntactic compounds leads us to dissociate these constraints from the lexicon and set them up as an independent system of general principles that constrain word formation processes in various components in a global manner. The proposed word formation model thus instantiates Chomsky's modular conception of grammatical organization.

In the syntactic process of causative formation in Oromo, the affixation of the causative morpheme is sensitive to initial grammatical relations: the number of causative morphemes corresponds to the number of logical subjects in the clause. Thus, transitive and unergative verbs can be distinguished from unaccusatives in causative constructions. A causative-intensive construction may also be formed via reduplication of this causative morpheme. However, not all predicates that appear to be causatives can be intensified in this way. We propose that these predicates (a restricted number of unaccusative verb stems) combine derivationally with the causative morpheme, and that the output of this derivation may not be intensified. Oromo, then, shows the distinct effects of similar morphological processes arising either in the lexicon or in the syntax.

Through the detailed investigation of the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of one grammatical construction, that containing the conjunction let alone, we explore the view that the realm of idiomaticity in a language includes a great deal that is productive, highly structured, and worthy of serious grammatical investigation. It is suggested that an explanatory model of grammar will include principles whereby a language can associate semantic and pragmatic interpretation principles with syntactic configurations larger and more complex than those definable by means of single phrase structure rules.

A central issue in the field of language processing concerns how grammatical theory and parsing are related. Evidence from processing breakdown (GARDEN PATH phenomena) reveals the conditions under which local ambiguity results in unprocessable sentences. These data provide evidence that the processor operates by admitting structure which maximally satisfies the principles of Government and Binding Theory locally at every point during a parse, and that the constraints on syntactic reanalysis during processing are also derived from grammatical theory. Alternative approaches to parsing are demonstrated to be incapable of accounting for the wide range of garden path effects.