Polar interrogative sentences (‘yes/no questions’) are different from the corresponding declarative sentences not only pragmatically—in terms of the illocutionary forces that utterances of them can have—but also semantically, i.e. in terms of the Linguistic analysis of their meaning. Keeping a clear distinction between syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic analyses, we can isolate a very small number of syntactic categories and an equally small (but not isomorphic) number of semantic categories, but a virtually unlimited number of illocutionary forces, which result from the interaction of these categories with the total situation. The analysis of ordinary polar interrogatives also applies, without change, to tag questions.

It is argued that Conjunction Reduction, Gapping, and Right-node Raising are three separate phenomena in English, each having its own set of constraints and therefore needing a separate rule. Contrary to earlier analyses, these rules do not delete, but just raise. This is true even of Gapping, which is shown to be a special case of a more general rule of Conjunct Postposing, which is also responsible for ‘split coördinations’ like John came, and Bill (too). All three rules appear to apply at the level of surface structure, and can be formulated in such a way that they leave that structure perhaps surprisingly unaffected.

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.