It is commonly assumed that words are grammatically prohibited from containing antecedents for anaphoric elements, and thus constitute ‘anaphoric islands’ (Postal 1969). In this paper, we argue that such anaphora—termed OUTBOUND ANAPHORA—is in fact fully grammatical and governed by independently motivated pragmatic principles. The felicity of outbound anaphora is shown to be a function of the accessibility of the discourse entity which is evoked by the word-internal element and to which the anaphor is used to refer. The morphosyntactic status of the antecedent is but one factor affecting the accessibility of that entity. A series of psycholinguistic experiments support the analysis.

In Oceanic languages, elements that function or used to function as directional verbs of motion—‘go’, ‘come’, and ‘return‘—undergo a variety of grammaticalization processes. This study is an investigation of the semantic aspects of those developments, the factors that motivate the functional extensions, and the relations among the meanings/functions of the etyma. It is human conceptualization of phenomena (viz. metaphor and metonymy) that directly motivates the developments. Even though the various meanings/functions of an etymon are all historically related, synchronically there need not be any property exclusively shared by all of them. The nature of the motivations for the functional extensions provides support for the view of meaning as essentially subjective and open-ended.

A kind of case marking—termed variously active, active-neutral, active-inactive, active-static, stative-active, agentive, agent-patient, split S. and split intransitive—is shown to be less arbitrary than is sometimes assumed. Its semantic bases can be missed if sought only in immediate one-to-one correspondences between meaning and form. Case systems of this kind are often the products of successive diachronic developments, each individually motivated. Several factors can obscure the motivations, including not only crosslinguistic differences in detail, but also shifts of defining features over time, grammaticization, and lexicalization. To explain why these case systems have the shapes they do, we must appreciate both the diversity of features that can underlie them and the dynamic processes that mold them.

As a novel attack on the perennially vexing questions of the theoretical status of thematic roles and the inventory of possible roles, this paper defends a strategy of basing accounts of roles on more unified domains of linguistic data than have been used in the past to motivate roles, addressing in particular the problem of ARGUMENT SELECTION (principles determining which roles are associated with which grammatical relations). It is concluded that the best theory for describing this domain is not a traditional system of discrete roles (Agent, Patient, Source, etc.) but a theory in which the only roles are two cluster-concepts called PROTO-AGENT and PROTO-PATIENT, each characterized by a set of verbal entailments: an argument of a verb may bear either of the two proto-roles (or both) to varying degrees, according to the number of entailments of each kind the verb gives it. Both fine-grained and coarse-grained classes of verbal arguments (corresponding to traditional thematic roles and other classes as well) follow automatically, as do desired ‘role hierarchies’. By examining occurrences of the ‘same’ verb with different argument configurations—e.g. two forms of psych predicates and object-oblique alternations as in the familiar spray/load class—it can also be argued that proto-roles act as defaults in the learning of lexical meanings. Are proto-role categories manifested elsewhere in language or as cognitive categories? If so, they might be a means of making grammar acquisition easier for the child, they might explain certain other typological and acquisitional observations, and they may lead to an account of contrasts between unaccusative and unergative intransitive verbs that does not rely on deriving unaccusatives from underlying direct objects.