This article examines the distribution of accusative case morphology in Kannada, detailing the syntactic, semantic, and morphological factors that contribute to its occurrence. Accusative case morphology is optional on inanimate direct objects. When optional, its presence indicates a specific reading, which I argue is best modeled as a choice function. The specific readings due to morphological form are distinct from specific readings that arise from syntactic position. Positional specificity is detectable only on morphologically noncasemarked object NPs. When the accusative case morpheme is obligatory, specificity effects are positional and not due to the presence of the morpheme. In this situation, additional morphology is required to achieve an inherently specific interpretation, suggesting a separation between morphological signals and meaning.

A model of speech production is proposed in which the input is a planning stage at which lexical items are arrayed, accompanied by the full panoply of phonological representations from distinctive features to their attendant tree structures. A set of instructions for control of the vocal tract is calculated leading to a sound output. Two parallel processes are involved in the calculation of these instructions, both of which replace the planning-stage representation by the appropriate motoric instructions. One of these processes is universal and involves replacing each distinctive feature with an appropriate set of motoric instructions, either unmodified or modified by the process of overlap. We postulate a parallel language-specific process that is sensitive to those features in danger of losing their perceptual saliency as a consequence of the environment in which they appear. This process, referred to as enhancement, adds additional motoric instructions to enhance the saliency of the jeopardized features. We provide a number of examples to illustrate how enhancement works. We conclude from these examples that whereas defining gestures related to distinctive features are, in many instances, weakened or even absented from the speech stream, enhancement gestures, once added to the set of motoric instructions, appear never to be subject to obliteration by overlap.

British and American speakers exhibit different verb number agreement patterns when sentence subjects have collective head nouns. From linguistic and psycholinguistic accounts of how agreement is implemented, three alternative hypotheses can be derived to explain these differences. The hypotheses involve variations in the representation of notional number, disparities in how notional and grammatical number are used, and inequalities in the grammatical number specifications of collective nouns. We carried out a series of corpus analyses, production experiments, and norming studies to test these hypotheses. The results converge to suggest that British and American speakers are equally sensitive to variations in notional number and implement subject-verb agreement in much the same way, but are likely to differ in the lexical specifications of number for collectives. The findings support a psycholinguistic theory that explains verb and pronoun agreement within a parallel architecture of lexical and syntactic formulation.

Postal (1969) discusses words as anaphoric islands. So-called outbound anaphora was further discussed in a series of papers published in the 1970s through the early 1990s, but inbound anaphora, such as Postal's himite (beside McCarthyite), has received less attention. It is shown here that a wide variety of words in Georgian are based on pronouns, including fully referential personal pronouns, reflexive pronouns, question words, quantifiers, and negative pronouns. Thus, the nonoccuring combinations of English are a language-particular problem.