Two types of bound morphemes—clitics and inflectional affixes—are found attached to (free) words in many languages. At least six lines of evidence separate the clear cases on each side: the degree of selection between the dependent morpheme and the word to which it is attached; arbitrary lexical gaps; phonological idiosyncrasies; semantic idiosyncrasies; syntactic operations affecting the combinations; and restrictions on the combinability of clitics with inflectional affixes. These criteria all indicate that English contracted auxiliaries (She's gone) are clitics, but that the English contracted negative (She hasn't gone) is an inflectional affix—a rather surprising conclusion that turns out to have satisfying consequences.

This paper is concerned with the representation of stress that poetic meter refers to. Hayes 1983 argues that meter is sensitive to the metrical grid of Liberman & Prince 1977; here it is argued that meter is sensitive to the arboreal grid of Hammond 1988. This argument is made on the basis of two constraints that hold for the meter of James Thomson. These constraints are unstatable in terms of the metrical grid or metrical tree.

It is commonly believed that agents constitute a single primitive category, distinct from other categories such as patient. This paper challenges such an assumption, arriving at three conclusions: (a) A variety of rules classify agents into affected vs. non-affected types. (b) These rules group affected agents with other affected roles such as patient, dative, and experiencer. (c) The affected/non-affected distinction is more basic than role distinctions such as agent and patient. Among the correlates claimed here for the affected/non-affected contrast is ‘causee’ case-marking, an area that has attracted recent controversy in Comrie 1976 and Cole 1976.

Since McCawley 1970, the Luganda tone system has been well known for its property of allowing at most one H[igh] to L[ow] pitch drop per word. To account for this property, the underlying system has been analyzed both in terms of underlying accents of various kinds (e.g. diacritic) and in terms of underlying tone (e.g. H vs. 0). Most accentual proposals, however, fail to account for the fact that THREE marks are necessary to characterize the high to low ‘melody’: a mark for the first H mora, a mark for the place of the H-to-L drop, and a mark for the place of the last L mora. After evaluating previous accentual and tonal analyses, we present a new approach to tone in Luganda that integrates tone and accent in the following way: (i) Accent in Luganda consists of designating certain moras as metrically strong (and hence capable of attracting tone); (ii) Tone in Luganda consists of lexical and grammatical occurrences of underlying HL contours (or ‘potential pitch drops‘). This new analysis, which continues to recognize the importance of the H to L pitch drop, provides additional evidence for the coexistence of tone and accent, which may interact in complex ways in the same language.