It is argued that Conjunction Reduction, Gapping, and Right-node Raising are three separate phenomena in English, each having its own set of constraints and therefore needing a separate rule. Contrary to earlier analyses, these rules do not delete, but just raise. This is true even of Gapping, which is shown to be a special case of a more general rule of Conjunct Postposing, which is also responsible for ‘split coördinations’ like John came, and Bill (too). All three rules appear to apply at the level of surface structure, and can be formulated in such a way that they leave that structure perhaps surprisingly unaffected.

This article is concerned with the interaction of linguistic theory and linguistic description. It is shown that an independently needed extension of the Keenan-Comrie Accessibility Hierarchy to island structures predicts that an asymmetry in relativization strategies in Modern Hebrew (which, at first glance, would appear to be caused by constraints on NP accessibility), has in fact another explanation. A detailed examination of aspects of case-marking and relativization in Modern Hebrew supports this prediction. The asymmetry in relativization strategies turns out to be caused by the interaction of case-marking, relativization, and a constraint against the stranding of prepositions. The article demonstrates how the results of theoretical linguistics (here the Extended Accessibility Hierarchy) may be of direct use to the descriptive linguist in making language-particular descriptions.

Most grammarians have treated the word that, used in relative clauses, as a relative pronoun. However, its syntactic behavior is not at all like that of a pronoun, and therefore it must be a conjunction. Data from Standard English that-relatives and WH-relatives, non-Standard English that-relatives, and relative clauses in Dari (Kabul Persian) and Yoruba suggest that syntactic islands be added to the Keenan-Comrie Accessibility Hierarchy (1972). The use of that in relative clauses is related to its use as a complementizer with declarative verbs.

Although important insights have been gained by comparing small amounts of data from disparate sources, linguistic generalizations are unlikely to prove valid when based on data whose synchronic status is not well-defined. As a case in point, the recent proposal by Koutsoudas, Sanders & Noll 1974 for universal principles of grammatical rule ordering is here shown to be insufficient, from their own data and on the basis of phonological rules derived from a thorough synchronic analysis of Old Icelandic. It is maintained that a proposal can have positive empirical consequences only if it imposes no conditions to eliminate extrinsic ordering from a grammar.

The structure of relative clauses has attracted considerable attention in recent years, and a number of authors have carried out analyses of the syntax of relativization. In our investigation of syntactic structure and change in New Guinea Tok Pisin, we find that the basic processes involved in relativization have much broader discourse functions, and that relativization is only a special instance of the application of general ‘bracketing’ devices used in the organization of information. Syntactic structure, in this case, can be understood as a component of, and derivative from, discourse structure.