Agreement and government can give rise to syntactic feature conflicts; e.g., a verb may have to agree in gender with a coördinate NP composed of NP's of differing genders. The resolution of such conflicts is to some extent determined by general semantic or syntactic principles (‘principled resolution‘). In addition, the existence of a governed or agreeing form that is neutral with respect to the features in question always permits a conflict to be resolved. There is idiolectal variation as to when principled resolution occurs, and also as to which neutral forms appear in the lexicon. But there are also cases (examples are provided from English, Xhosa, and German) in which resolution is permitted on the basis of a purely phonological resemblance; i.e., the fact that the conflicting morphosyntactic requirements lead accidentally to similar phonological consequences is sufficient to prevent the conflict from causing ungrammaticality.

Four major claims are made here about the phenomenon of phonological resolution. First, it does not imply that there can be language-particular phonological conditions on syntactic rules; a universal statement is involved. Second, phonological identity cannot compensate for syntactic feature distinctness in general, even in those languages that clearly exemplify phonological resolution; the conflicting items must also differ only in syntactically imposed features. Third, it is not the underlying phonological form of an item that determines whether it can count as phonologically identical to another item in cases of true phonological resolution; these items must be identical at a more superficial level (conjectured to be identical to the ‘lexical stratum’ of lexical phonology). Fourth, a small sampling of data (from Icelandic and Finnish, as well as the languages already listed) suggests variation with respect to the number of syntactic feature differences that can be surmounted in phonological resolution.

Old Spanish clitics or weak pronominals differ from modern Romance clitics in their syntactic properties. They are NP's or PP's, share the distribution of other phrasal complements, and undergo the same movement rules.

In Old Spanish (ca. 1200–1450), weak pronominals encliticize in Phonetic Form, after syntactic and stylistic rules have applied; i.e. they are phonological clitics.

In doubling constructions, including the resumptive pronoun strategy, the pronominal/clitic is the phrase in Argument-position; the doubling phrase is a topic or focus constituent, base-generated as a left or right adjunct of one of the maximal projections (i.e. VP, S, S′, S″).

Languages differ as to whether they are accusative or ergative. In other words, grammatical rules in some languages are sensitive to the distinction between Subjects and Objects; in others, to the distinction between ergatives and absolutives. The central thesis of this paper is that, similarly, rules in some languages are sensitive to the distinction between Direct Objects and Indirect Objects; but in others, they are sensitive to a distinction between Primary and Secondary Objects. A Primary Object is an Indirect Object in a ditransitive clause or a Direct Object in a monotransitive clause, while a Secondary Object is a Direct Object in a ditransitive clause.

Analysis has shown that discourse function is an essential facet of the meaning of grammatical elements; e.g. that perfective and imperfective aspect manifest discourse foregrounding and backgrounding. By focusing on the French S[imple] P[ast] and by analysing newspaper usage, we demonstrate that foregrounding is one result of two properties inherent to SP: DETACHMENT within a universe of discourse of a DIMENSIONALIZED FIGURE. But SP has other, quite different, discourse functions, in addition to important cognitive/referential, expressive, and pragmatic meanings—all of which are also attributable to detachment and dimensionalization. Thus SP (and, by extension, verbal grammatical categories in general) manifests a complex variety of functions which must be accounted for by any complete study. Discourse analysis should not supplant, but rather complement, more traditional semantic analysis.

One component of D. Bickerton's Language Bioprogram Hypothesis is here empirically tested by reviewing studies of children's comprehension and production of articles. Seven studies reporting relevant data in English and French were reviewed. Two of them provide clear empirical support for the hypothesis that children are universally sensitive to the specific/non-specific distinction of referential meaning. Moreover, findings of all reviewed studies were generally consistent with a four-stage hypothesis of the acquisition of English and French articles, characterized by (a) the use of the indefinite and/or definite article(s) for specific referents, and zero article for both non-specific referents and naming; (b) the use of the indefinite article for non-specific referents, and the definite article for specific referents whether or not they are presupposed; (c) an increase in the correct use of the indefinite article for specific, non-presupposed referents, with a concomitant decrease in the correct use of the definite article for specific, presupposed referents; and (d) the correct use of the definite and indefinite articles.