Transitivity involves a number of components, only one of which is the presence of an object of the verb. These components are all concerned with the effectiveness with which an action takes place, e.g., the punctuality and telicity of the verb, the conscious activity of the agent, and the referentiality and degree of affectedness of the object. These components co-vary with one another in language after language, which suggests that Transitivity is a central property of language use. The grammatical and semantic prominence of Transitivity is shown to derive from its characteristic discourse function: high Transitivity is correlated with foregrounding, and low Transitivity with backgrounding.

In Greenlandic Eskimo, a polysynthetic language, the word-building apparatus performs much of the work that is accomplished by the syntax of more familiar languages. In particular, numerous processes in this language create verbs from nouns. Evidence of a quite unusual sort shows that these noun-incorporation processes must follow certain ordinary syntactic rules, such as case assignment and modifier-noun agreement. The language thus falsifies pronouncements concerning the independence of syntax and word formation based on data from languages that are typologically very different from Greenlandic

A cross-generational study of speech in Havasupai, a Yuman language of Arizona, reveals a set of variable phonological rules, affecting person-agreement affixes, that have begun to operate in the last hundred years. These rules might seem obligatory for younger speakers; but closer investigation reveals that these speakers have instead re-analysed the paradigm. This re-analysis illustrates the principle that rules which do not allow surface evidence of the underlying form to be preserved cannot exist: obligatory application of such a rule must eliminate both the rule itself and the underlying form. The speech of the youngest children shows continuing change of the paradigm toward an internally-consistent, transparent system of person-agreement that differs radically from the original system.

A crucial problem facing historical linguists is how to account for the direction of certain changes. The direction of change taken by two constructions, Object Raising and Object Deletion, between Medieval and Modern Greek, is documented here, and is shown to be explainable by reference to substantive universal constraints holding on the form these constructions can take in natural language, as evidenced by data from a variety of languages. We conclude that universals guided the direction of these Greek syntactic changes, and in general can rule out certain conceivable changes as impossible. Universals thus lead to a more restrictive, and hence stronger, theory of syntactic change.

Consonant deletion processes may reduce sentence redundancy and thus increase the possibility of ambiguity. Historically, languages have adapted to such processes through a variety of changes in morphology and higher levels of grammar. Synchronic quantitative evidence of such adaptation is provided here through examination of the behavior of two Puerto Rican Spanish phonological variables which interact with the grammatical system in the capacity of plural markers. Although the data contain entire sentences with no morphological trace of the plural, this paper demonstrates that—through a complex interplay of semantic, syntactic, and morphological factors—no instance in the corpus shows ambiguity of number resulting from marker deletion.

The longitudinal emergence of verb inflections (-ing, -s, and -ed/IRREG) was observed in the spontaneous speech of four American English-speaking children. The occurrence of the inflections, their linguistic/non-linguistic contexts, and the conditional USE of the inflections (occurrence in optional or obligatory contexts) are described. The major results of the study are that the inflections -ing, -s, and IRREG emerged in the children's speech at the same time, but were distributed selectively with different populations of verbs. The results are discussed in terms of two major factors in the emergence of the verb inflections: the sentence relations between verbs and other constituents, and the semantics of verb aspect. The results are consistent with the general principle of ASPECT BEFORE TENSE in linguistic theory and in language development, and provide indirect evidence about the rules that children learn for verb inflectional morphology.