I argue that the Tiberian system of accents which annotate the text of the Hebrew Bible has a prosodic basis. Accentual representations are constructed in terms of units somewhat similar to the modern prosodic hierarchy, and they deviate from syntactic constituency in ways that are characteristic of prosodic representations. They are constrained by the effects of syntactic edges, geometric properties of prosodic phrases, principles for organizing phrases into higher-level constituents, and position in the phrase, associated with variations in tempo. It is shown that the Tiberian representation can best be understood by integrating results of phonological, phonetic, and psycholinguistic research on prosodic structure.

In experiments requiring sentence comprehension, young children sometimes appear to accept coreference in sentences such as Thelma touched her. This has motivated the claim that 4- and 5-year-olds lack knowledge of the principles of binding and coreference. Another option, however, is that the requisite principles are present from the very start and children's poor performance is due to performance factors. We test this claim through a longitudinal analysis of the spontaneous speech of three children, analyzing their usage of the pronoun me and the reflexive myself. Even 2- and 3-year-olds virtually always use these forms in accord with the adult grammar—they will say John hit me and not John hit myself (obeying Principle A) and I hit myself and not I hit me (obeying Principle B). We argue that the best explanation for these results is that children understand the principles of binding and coreference at the earliest stages of language development.

Locative inversion in English and Chicheŵa shows remarkable similarities which can be explained by hypothesizing the same underlying argument structures and principles for mapping argument structure roles into syntactic functions. However, the alignment of roles with syntactic categories reflects a profound typological difference between the two languages: Chicheŵa categorizes locatives in a gender class system; English, in an abstract case-like system. The resulting syntactic differences defy analyses within a widely-assumed architecture of Universal Grammar and support the alternative adopted by Bresnan & Kanerva 1989.