Historically, the analysis of the English auxiliary given by Chomsky 1957 has been associated mainly with the autonomous-syntax (‘interpretive semantics’) position, while the analysis of auxiliaries as main verbs first proposed by Ross 1969 has been aligned with ‘generative semantics'. This correlation is an accidental one. If less commonly discussed members of the class of auxiliary verbs are taken into account, it is possible to adduce overwhelming evidence that no line can or should be drawn between them and the items which are categorized uncontroversially as verbs. Considerations internal to several recent autonomous-syntax analyses argue for the main-verb analysis. Under the most recent revision of the AUX analysis, by Akmajian & Wasow 1975, it can be shown that at least some surface modal auxiliaries MUST have main-verb sources. We argue that this removes all principled basis for a separate category M (Modal), and suggests that all modals as well as other auxiliaries should be generated in the same way as verbs. We formulate explicitly the relevant base rules, transformations, morphological rules, and lexical categorizations to permit this. Our analysis treats all auxiliaries as verbs, is entirely consistent with current ideas in autonomous syntax, and uses no descriptive devices which would not be used in autonomous-syntax grammars of English for independent reasons. We conclude that, far from being supportive of the ‘generative semantics’ hypothesis, the main-verb analysis raises problems for it.

While relational grammar regards grammatical relations as theoretical primitives that play a central role in the formulation of syntactic rules, there has been no critical assessment of the fact that grammatical relations and surface cases are often confused by both traditional and transformational grammarians. This paper shows that grammatical relations and cases must be clearly distinguished, as there are distinct rules that are sensitive to each. Investigation of the data from Japanese and Korean specifically shows that, in these languages, the rule of Quantifier Floating—which the proponents of relational grammar have alleged to be universally sensitive to grammatical relations—must, in fact, be stated in terms of cases, while the rules of Reflexivization and Subject Honorification must be formulated in terms of grammatical relations. In addition to these syntactic processes, this paper critically examines whether there are, in fact, two subjects in the so-called double-subject construction in Japanese.

A number of experimental tasks were conducted in which subjects were asked to interpret and create novel noun + noun compounds. The results indicate that the semantic relationships that hold between the members of these compounds cannot be characterized in terms of a finite list of ‘appropriate compounding relationships’. Rather, the appropriateness of a given relationship depends on the use to which the compound will be put, the interpretability of the compound, and the extent to which it allows full exploitation of the informational resources of the compound form. These constraints derive in part from the fact that compounds, as lexical items, serve different linguistic functions than sentences do. This crucial distinction, and the existence of the constraints revealed by this study, are obscured by models which generate compounds from underlying clausal structures.

This paper argues that features should allow the expression of common phonological processes in such a way that the nature of the process will be formally explicit. Many such phonological processes will require multivalued rather than binary features. The following conventions are proposed: (1) Features are not wholly independent, but interact with each other and with syllable structure; (2) the neutral value of each multivalued feature is somewhere near the center of the scale; (3) more than one value of a feature can occur in the same segment, simultaneously (e.g. double articulations) or sequentially (e.g. affricates). Finally, a set of features for consonants is offered.

The organization of repair in a corpus of conversations in the Lue, Yuan (or Myang), and Siamese dialects of Tai is examined with regard to the preference for self-correction described by Schegloff, Jefferson & Sacks 1977 for an English corpus. In both corpora, repair is found to be an identically organized sequential phenomenon involving repair segments in the course of ongoing talk. The initiation and outcome of repair, as well as the reticulated details of the relationship between self- and other-correction, are the same in Tai and English.