An ‘organization of repair’ operates in conversation, addressed to recurrent problems in speaking, hearing, and understanding. Several features of that organization are introduced to explicate the mechanism which produces a strong empirical skewing in which self-repair predominates over other-repair, and to show the operation of a preference for self-repair in the organization of repair. Several consequences of the preference for self-repair for conversational interaction are sketched.

Coördinate constructions are subject to a surface-structure constraint requiring that their constituents belong to the same syntactic category and have the same semantic function. This constraint accounts for a wider range of data than the Coordinate Structure Constraint of Ross 1967, which it makes superfluous.

Five earlier accounts of a certain class of restrictions barring noun clauses from environments that are in some sense ‘internal’ are argued to be empirically deficient in a number of ways. An alternative proposal is put forward with a view to (i) remedying the empirical inadequacies of the earlier analyses and (ii) predicting what types of languages exhibit the restrictions at issue. It is further argued that the proposed alternative restrictions exhibit non-trivial correlations with independently established facts of language processing, and that the latter can explicate to an important degree the existence of the former in the languages of the world.

This paper indicates how sentence processing depends upon the active construction of a perspective, which is the way a speaker or a listener becomes actively involved in a sentence. For this reason, the perspective is usually the starting point of the sentence. A number of linguistic and psycholinguistic studies are reviewed in the light of this approach to sentence processing.