This paper offers a detailed survey of occurrences of English reflexive pronouns which are marked with respect to the binding theory of Chomskyan generative grammar. Through a large corpus of attested examples found in contemporary nonlinguistic prose, English reflexive pronouns are shown to violate Chomsky's Binding Principle A in a productive way. The proposed grammar of these violations draws a clear-cut line between syntax and discourse, and shows Chomsky's Binding Principle A to be (a) essentially correct for English if it is clearly defined as a theory of sentence-internal, discourse-independent anaphora; but also (b) crucially incomplete, since it ignores a whole component of the grammar of reflexives and thus fails to account for an open set of data.

In this paper I argue that there is no unique grammatical process called ‘stylistic locative inversion’ in English; its properties can be stated in purely syntactic terms if insights about similar constructions in Italian and Dutch are adapted to English. Stylistic locative inversion exemplifies what is sometimes referred to as ‘semi-pro-drop’, the existence in a language of an empty expletive subject. The language-particular trigger for this exceptional phenomenon in English is located in comp, explaining in part the root nature of the phenomenon. The proposed analysis sheds new light on a syntactic account of the related presentational there-construction, which is discussed briefly at the end of the paper.

As in a number of other languages, certain psychological verbs in French display an interesting relation between thematic roles and surface grammatical relations: the theme appears as a superficial subject, while the experiencer acts as an indirect object. This paper argues that in French the superficial subject (theme) is a direct object at a deeper level, while the superficial indirect object (dative experiencer) is a subject at a deeper level. This contrasts with the analysis of Italian by Belletti & Rizzi 1988, which emphasizes that the dative experiencer is strictly an indirect object. In this paper, it is demonstrated that French dative experiencer verbs can be straightforwardly analyzed within Relational Grammar as Inversion predicates occurring in multilevel structures whose initial subject demotes to indirect object. These results provide a challenge to GB analyses of psychological verbs; Belletti & Rizzi's analysis, for example, does not extend from Italian to French.

The Comparative Method in historical linguistics may in favorable circumstances be extended to comparative historical poetics and comparative historical ethnosemantics—the ‘new comparative philology’. The vocabulary of some cases is examined in the texts: ‘custom’ from ‘own (∗swe/o-) established usage’ and its pragmatic linkage to reciprocal interpersonal relations in Indo-European society. Examination of new facts in this light motivates the inclusion of Hittite in the same Indo-European ideology. Linguistic comparison may extend to higher units than sounds and forms; several are proposed which permit the reconstruction of formulaic phrases, whole complex sentences, and even proto-texts or text fragments. The new parameters of poetics and ethnosemantics permit a precision in historical linguistics hitherto impossible.