We here propose and defend a system in which lexical representations of words are expressed in their surface-phonetic isolation forms, and in which phonological rules permit lexical pronunciations to be ‘undone’ in various ways that relate segments to other segments. To the extent that the phonological component is descriptively adequate, it permits morphological rules (which apply after each ‘undoing’ of a phonological rule) to parse lexical representations correctly; this accounts for speakers' knowledge that, e.g., baron and baronial are related, though they have not been given this information explicitly. We argue that this represents a significant advance over other phonological theories: it automatically captures certain alternations that require exception features or exceptional rules in other accounts, it provides a principled basis for constraining phonology in ways that are commonly thought desirable, and it explains why so much linguistic innovation takes place at the ‘bottom’ of the grammar.

This paper supports a hypothesis that poetic ‘options’ (at least on the phonological plane) are of the same types as language changes—i.e., that ‘poetic license’ consists of the relaxation, re-ordering, generalization, inversion etc. of rules of the natural language to yield metrically relevant representations that may differ considerably from outputs in the spoken language. The issue of when to measure metrical, rhythmic, or linguistic complexity is discussed, and a case is made for measuring linguistic complexity in the examples presented here.

The derivation of Lat. sum, es(s), est from IE *esmi, *esi, *esti involves methodological problems. The data, as they appear, e.g., in early drama, are well known, but they have been incorrectly described. At face value, the paradigm of Plautus contains allomorphic variation—sum, ess ~ ss, est ~ st—which has traditionally been explained away by ‘aphaeresis’. This has been used as a synchronic morphophonemic rule, generating the surface variants from the underlying forms /ess/ and /est/ respectively, and with the implication that the IE model is related directly to these underlying forms. But there is evidence that ‘aphaeresis’ has no linguistic basis in Latin, and the IE paradigm described must be in terms of the allomorphic variation observable in Plautus. It is claimed here that the development of sum from *esmi is related to the origin of the variation est~st (< *esti). The study is primarily concerned with the mechanism of this remodeling process, but some chronological suggestions are also made.

This paper questions the basic claim of M.-L. Rivero's ‘Referential properties of Spanish noun phrases’ (Lg. 51.32–48)—i.e., that a correlation exists between the ‘specificity’ of the head NP, as she calls it, and the mood of the dependent relative clause. It is demonstrated here that the indicative mood accepts both ‘specific’ and ‘non-specific’ NP's, and that the sentences in the subjunctive mood are either ungrammatical or are actually in the indicative mood. Moreoever, it is shown that the traditional distinction between referential and attributive NP's should not be interpreted as a distinction between specific and non-specific NP's. The final sections of the paper point out that Rivero's data do not show conclusively that existential import affects definite and indefinite NP's alike, nor that these two types of NP's receive their existential interpretation through the same linguistic means.

This paper, a reply to Rojas 1977, re-affirms my conclusion (Rivero 1975) that specificity is marked in Spanish NP's by the mood of restrictive modifiers, and that it is independent of the degree of definiteness and the existential claims associated with those NP's. Specific and non-specific NP's alike may be referring expressions depending on their position in sentences. However, contrary to what I previously assumed, the notion of specificity is not connected with the pragmatic distinction between the referential and attributive uses of definite descriptions.

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.