This article develops an autosegmental account of tone and stress in Serbo-Croatian. The traditional four accents of Serbo-Croatian are decomposed into two independent subcomponents within the accentual system: tone and stress. While tone participates in lexical contrasts, the location of stress is predictable from that of tone, and in this respect Serbo-Croatian represents a previously unattested type of pitch-accent language. The analysis extends naturally to a range of intonation data, some of which are beyond the scope of earlier accounts.

We consider an anomalous but internally consistent set of WH-questions produced by a 3½-year-old child. They are of theoretical interest because they appear to violate constraints against the movement of constituents out of noun phrases, thus raising questions about the conditions of applicability of such constraints. After giving an account of the probable sources of these questions in several kinds of verbal interactions between the child and his father, we propose that discourse patterns may affect the acquisition of sentence grammar in unexpected ways, and may even allow the language learner to temporarily modify the domain of applicability of universal constraints.

This paper juxtaposes two well-known competing hypotheses about the structure of resultative and descriptive sentences in Chinese. According to the P[rimary] P[redication] hypothesis, the second verb in a ...V1...V2... sequence is treated as the main verb of the sentence; according to the S[econdary] P[redication] hypothesis, the second verb is treated as a complement to the first. Three major arguments for PP are reviewed and shown not to be cogent, and an alternative analysis is proposed for each of the issues raised: the distribution of A-not-A questions, negation, aspect marking, and the properties of certain complex causative constructions. The otherwise peculiar distribution of the negative and A-not-A morphemes turns out to follow from a principle requiring them to be lexically realized in INFL, and a D-Structure analysis of complex causative sentences consistent with the SP hypothesis explains the related facts in a desirable way. Additional arguments for SP are presented which turn on certain facts of anaphora, verb reduplication, scope of negation, and tone sandhi.

In the verbal morphology of many languages of the world, certain elements define the semantic functions of particular arguments of the verb, e.g. the benefactive relation, the instrumental, and the locative. Often these elements are clearly adpositional in origin. In some of the New World languages examined here, the source of these elements, which we call RELATIONAL PREVERBS, is clearly the postposition. The hypothesis that relational preverbs are incorporated into the verb by means of a syntactic rule accounts for their observed properties in some languages, but not in others. An adequate picture of their nature emerges only when their typology is interpreted in both synchronic and diachronic perspective.