The nature of the auxiliary system in English has drawn much attention in the past fifteen years because it involve fundamental issues in linguistic theory, such as categories and the nature of levels of representation. This article presents an analysis of the English auxiliary system within the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar (cf. Bresnan 1982c). By presenting explicit representations and explicit rules (syntactic and lexical), we find that an analysis incorporating a distinction between Modals and Verbs, in which auxiliaries like have and be belong to one of these categories depending on inflectional properties of particular forms, can explain all the relevant facts about auxiliaries that have appeared in the literature, Explicit analyses for ‘irregular’ auxiliaries like ought and used to are also provided.

The obligatoriness of English bisentential too varies with the prominence of the focus on contrasting constituents. This fact leads to a possible explanation for its obligatoriness: too is obligatory where an overt element is needed to emphasize what is important about the content of a two-clause text—i.e., when what is important is that the same thing is predicated about two contrasting items. Too is just the element to do this, because of what it conventionally implicates (that what is predicated by the speaker about the contrasting item in one clause is also predicated about the contrasting item in the other) and because of its hypothesized discourse function (to emphasize the similarity between contrasting constituents).

Many languages use haplology, suppletion, and the blocking of derivations to achieve avoidance of ‘accidental’ repetition of surface morphs. At the same time, many languages permit accidental repetition and even encourage ‘deliberate’ repetition through reduplication. Strong universal constraints against morph repetition therefore fail. This furthermore implies the inadequacy of accounts of morphological processes in terms of matching templates or schemas. We present a psycholinguistic processing model built on evidence from language acquisition, and drawing on activation theory, which affords a unification of the linguistic data while allowing for their variety.

Children, like adults, coin words to fill lexical gaps. To do this, children must build up a repertoire of word formation devices to use. This study examines the influence of semantico transparency, of formal simplicity, of productivity, and of conventionality on the acquisition of a repertoire of word formation devices by looking at the role of these principles in Hebrew-speaking children's coinages of novel agent and instrument nouns, and comparing their patterns of acquisition to those of English-speaking children for the same lexical domains.