The study of sign language reveals the effect of the modality of communication on the language system. This paper presents a comprehensive description and discussion of the manifestation of time, space, and person reference in American Sign Language. It is in this area that the effect of the modality on information transmission appears most clearly. Various aspects of space, time, and person are discussed: the manner in which visual language allows for deictic and anaphoric locative, temporal, and ‘pronominal’ reference, the surface manifestation of the conceptualization of time, the specialized use of the dominant and non-dominant articulators, the contrast between the ‘segmental’ nature of oral-language spatial terms and the continuous nature of locative expressions in ASL, and the manner in which verbs may incorporate agent and/or patient and manner adverbials.

A single derivational constraint is here proposed to account for the same data as Ross's Complex NP, Sentential Subject, and Coördinate Structure Constraints. However, if constraints on derivations are not only to prevent the generation of structurally ill-formed strings, but also to illuminate their ungrammaticality fully, they must be combined with certain conditions on structure. It is claimed that the proposed derivational constraint and structural principles are deeply motivated by the nature of the grammar itself, and that their implications for the theory of innateness are rather different from those normally cited for Ross's constraints.

An ‘organization of repair’ operates in conversation, addressed to recurrent problems in speaking, hearing, and understanding. Several features of that organization are introduced to explicate the mechanism which produces a strong empirical skewing in which self-repair predominates over other-repair, and to show the operation of a preference for self-repair in the organization of repair. Several consequences of the preference for self-repair for conversational interaction are sketched.

This paper offers a generative treatment of the phonological behavior of the prefix in- of Modern French. It is shown that the seemingly perplexing distribution of some of its allomorphs before stems with initial sonorant consonants is related to the predictability of the meaning of complex words from the meanings of their component parts, the semantic structure of the words (relative scope), and the productivity of word-formation rules. The formal solution presented comprises a series of morphophonological rules (nasalization, assimilation, degemination), and a proposal for the way in which in- is incorporated in the lexicon. The use of the Elsewhere Condition (Kiparsky 1973) is shown to provide a simplification of the rules, corresponding to a meaningful explanation of the relation between the rules of nasalization and assimilation.