Implicational universals of the form ‘If a language has some word order P, then it also has word order(s) Q’ are widely used to explain word order change. A language which develops word order P without having Q is said to be universally inconsistent, and it is predicted that it will re-introduce consistency by subsequently acquiring Q. This paper, however, argues against the validity of such a paradigm. The current assumption that the early western Indo-European dialects are inconsistent is founded on inadequate formulations of the synchronic universals. First, more precise formulations are given for some basic word order universals in a large body of languages ; then their predictions are tested against all the early daughter languages of Indo-European (using data from Friedrich 1975). None of these dialects exhibits inconsistency; hence we have no evidence for the reintroduction of consistency as a valid mechanism of syntactic change. It is shown, using historical data from Germanic, that implicational universals can nonetheless make correct predictions for the relative timing and manner of word order changes, but only on the assumption that languages in evolution obey synchronic universals. Some purely theoretical arguments are provided to support the empirical findings, and an alternative explanatory model of word order change is outlined.

In schools, from kindergarten through high school, the language of instruction was English. When students who had been taught in English left school, they were speaking English. When they married, they spoke English to their children. ‘Indians’ no longer spoke their native languages as their primary means of communication.

This was the perceived state of affairs in relation to the Hualapai language in the mid 1970s. Many members of the community thought that English was taking over their ancestral language and that their traditions were about to disappear. In response to this threat of rapid language decline, a long and tedious process of forming a community language team began, with the Hualapai Bilingual/Bicultural Program as its central force.

A central issue in the field of language processing concerns how grammatical theory and parsing are related. Evidence from processing breakdown (GARDEN PATH phenomena) reveals the conditions under which local ambiguity results in unprocessable sentences. These data provide evidence that the processor operates by admitting structure which maximally satisfies the principles of Government and Binding Theory locally at every point during a parse, and that the constraints on syntactic reanalysis during processing are also derived from grammatical theory. Alternative approaches to parsing are demonstrated to be incapable of accounting for the wide range of garden path effects.

In a ‘double-object’ construction, which of the NPs after the verb is the real object? Contrary to standard assumptions, I shall show that it is the second NP, so the first is the (traditional) ‘indirect object’. This finding is important because it challenges the hypothesis that grammatical relations can be shown configurationally and supports the competing claim that grammatical relations are basic. The paper also suggests why judgments on some constructions are so divided; the reason is that three different grammars are all compatible with the same basic data, and differ only on the relatively rare patterns where the variation appears.