Green 1976 shows that restrictions on main clause phenomena occurring in subordinate clauses are not capable of strict formalization, but respond to a variety of ‘syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic’ factors. This assessment is correct—more so than she gives it credit for: if we take more such factors into account and add elements like thematic structure and prosody, a number of the restrictions she has retained give way.

It is argued here that English contains a distinct class of relative clauses called amount relatives. On the surface, these are very much like restrictive relative clauses, but they have a syntax and semantics which align them more with comparatives than with restrictive relatives. By positing this new class, we can account in a general way for some apparently exceptional behavior of certain relative clauses. Issues discussed include relativization of the logical subject of a sentence which has undergone There-Insertion (such as every man there is), as well as the interaction of idiomatic expressions and relative clause formation.

Most analyses of cleft sentences have assumed that the subject it of these constructions is semantically empty. It is argued here, however, that cleft sentences are reduced forms of right-dislocated pseudo-clefts, where it is a pronominal reference to the topic which appears at the end of the sentence. The fact that this NP is always pronominalized with it is shown to follow from a more general principle which governs pronominalization in ‘identifying’ sentences.

Two fundamentally different strategies may be employed by very young children learning their first language. The basic assumptions underlying the study of children's language development, however, have provided means for dealing with only one of these strategies: that which proceeds from the parts to the whole (Analytic). This paper reports on a child who evidently proceeded from the whole to the parts (Gestalt) in producing much of his early language. Since further evidence for a Gestalt strategy exists in the literature, albeit implicitly, such a strategy is probably quite widespread, and any theory of language or language acquisition needs to be able to account for it. It is also speculated that there may be neurological bases for the different language learning strategies.

This paper addresses the problem of defining the notion ‘linguistically significant generalization’; it separates the notion of ‘generalization’ from that of ‘significance’, and proposes a rigorous objective method for determining the significance of a generalization, based on probability theory. The proposal is illustrated by applying it to examples central to theorizing in generative grammar. Precisely formulated versions of claims made by Chomsky on the use of certain abbreviatory notations (e.g. parentheses) and by Halle on certain ‘natural classes’ are investigated and shown to be not significant; i.e., they tell us nothing interesting about the nature of language. Other generalizations—on active/passive selectional restrictions, word-order universal, and noun phrase accessibility—are shown to be highly significant.