This article offers a detailed analysis of the English suffix -ee (employee, escapee, refugee, etc.) based on fifteen hundred naturally occurring tokens of some five hundred word types. The data suggest that formation of nouns in -ee is moderately but genuinely productive, and that analyses based on the syntactic argument structure of the stem verb are unsatisfactory. Instead, formation of -ee nouns systematically adheres to three essentially semantic constraints: first, the referent of an -ee noun must be sentient; second, the denotation of an -ee noun must be episodically linked (as defined below) to the denotation of its stem; and third, a use of an -ee noun entails a relative lack of volitional control on the part of its referent. I argue that these semantic constraints taken together amount to a special-purpose thematic role that actively constrains productive use of derivational morphology.

A grammatical affix undergoing phonetic erosion is sometimes abruptly replaced by a conveniently available lexical stem with which it shares one or more phonological segments. The new affix has the phonological shape of the old independent stem, but acquires the basic grammatical function of the old affix, though it may also bring in a portion of the stem's own morphological and semantic idiosyncrasies. Because the old affixal form is eliminated, the historical process can easily be misdiagnosed as reflecting the gradual compression of an original syntactic construction which includes the relevant independent stem. Recognition of the system-renewing element in this particular type of stem-to-affix grammaticalization leads to awareness of the pivotal role of the inherited system in grammaticalizations, and to a general critique of historical models which see grammaticalization as a straightforward syntax-to-morphology compression.

This article presents a semantic analysis of the English progressive as an intensional operator within the framework of modal semantics proposed by Kratzer. This treatment allows a combination of the central idea of Dowty's influential analysis, that the progressive's meaning has a major modal component, with the insights of other scholars (Parsons, Vlach, and Landman). My claim is that using a more sophisticated background theory of modality allows natural solutions for the problems raised for the modal account.

An increasingly influential current in creole studies considers there to have been no appreciable break in transmission or simplification in the birth of creole languages, instead treating creoles as gradual, relatively nondisruptive developments of their lexifiers amidst conditions of heavy language contact. Central to this superstratist view is the claim that creole is a sociohistorical, but not synchronic, term. This article outlines three features which in fact render creoles synchronically distinguishable from other languages, all three of them clear results of a break in transmission followed by a development period too brief for the traits to be undone as they have been in older languages. It is also shown that an expanded data set reveals flaws in the sociohistorical argumentation behind the superstratist framework.

Neidle, Kegl, Bahan, Aarons, & MacLaughlin 1997 argues that rightward WH-movement in ASL constitutes a counterexample to claims by Kayne (1994) that all phrasal projections exhibit specifier-head-complement order and that syntactic movement is leftward. Petronio & Lillo-Martin 1997, although not adopting Kayne's antisymmetry framework, offers a critique of our analysis and a proposal involving leftward WH-movement. Here, we argue that Petronio and Lillo-Martin's interpretations of the data are incorrect and that their analysis cannot account for the facts of the language. We therefore maintain our position that ASL WH-phrases move rightward in ASL, and that universal grammar must allow the option of rightward movement.