Research in prosodic phonology, as well as experiments on adult speech production, suggest that segmental and suprasegmental processes in language are not governed directly by syntactic structure. Rather these processes reflect an independent prosodic structure, which includes prosodic categories such as metrical foot, prosodic word, and phonological phrase. Five experiments examined English-speaking two-year-olds' omissions of object articles in different prosodic structures. The data indicate that children omit unfooted syllables and that foot boundaries, in turn, are influenced by prosodic word and phonological phrase boundaries. Thus, it appears that children create prosodic structures remarkably similar to those proposed in theories of prosodic phonology.

I present a model of phonological representation which represents morphemes in terms of constraint violations rather than strings of segments or root nodes. The formalism allows representation to be uniform throughout the phonology, mandates permanent underspecification of unmarked structure, derives the linear order of segments within a morpheme, and allows representation and evaluation to be conflated. Marked types of morphology (infixes, circumfixes, zero affixes; subtractive, reduplicative and templatic morphology) are represented in exactly the same way as roots. The markedness of such morphology is argued to follow from the high ranking of the violated constraints in question.

This article examines stative and passive constructions in Chichewa, finding that the syntax of the two constructions is best accommodated in a model that allows argument structure changing operations, such as stative, to be distinguished from operations, such as passive, that affect the mapping from argument structure to grammatical functions. The Chichewa facts recall observations made concerning the differences between English adjectival and verbal passives, first formalized in Wasow 1977, but provide more straightforward evidence for a distinction, due to the absence of surface homophony. The paper concludes by reconsidering English adjectival and verbal passive constructions, and showing them to be morphologically distinct.

Research on causative and applicative constructions has identified a class of symmetrical languages, in which either of two arguments may pattern like the direct object of a primary transitive verb. To date, symmetry of this sort has been identified only in a small geographically contiguous group of Bantu languages. Bajau, an Austronesian language of Indonesia and the Philippines, is shown to be symmetrical. Unlike the Bantu languages previously described, Bajau permits a benefactive applied object to be treated like an ordinary direct object. The restriction on the extraction of benefactive applied objects must therefore not be universal, contrary to the assumption of previous theories.

Most sounds can be described in terms of a standard set of phonological features, or in terms of values of well-known phonetic parameters. But some languages, particularly the smaller endangered languages of the world, also contain many unusual sounds that test our traditional descriptive theories. An example is the dental plosive followed by a bilabial trill, found in the Chapakuran languages. We suggest that there is a set (with fuzzy boundaries) of more common sounds that participate in a wide range of general linguistic processes and another set of rarer sounds that have been observed in only one or two languages.