As a novel attack on the perennially vexing questions of the theoretical status of thematic roles and the inventory of possible roles, this paper defends a strategy of basing accounts of roles on more unified domains of linguistic data than have been used in the past to motivate roles, addressing in particular the problem of ARGUMENT SELECTION (principles determining which roles are associated with which grammatical relations). It is concluded that the best theory for describing this domain is not a traditional system of discrete roles (Agent, Patient, Source, etc.) but a theory in which the only roles are two cluster-concepts called PROTO-AGENT and PROTO-PATIENT, each characterized by a set of verbal entailments: an argument of a verb may bear either of the two proto-roles (or both) to varying degrees, according to the number of entailments of each kind the verb gives it. Both fine-grained and coarse-grained classes of verbal arguments (corresponding to traditional thematic roles and other classes as well) follow automatically, as do desired ‘role hierarchies’. By examining occurrences of the ‘same’ verb with different argument configurations—e.g. two forms of psych predicates and object-oblique alternations as in the familiar spray/load class—it can also be argued that proto-roles act as defaults in the learning of lexical meanings. Are proto-role categories manifested elsewhere in language or as cognitive categories? If so, they might be a means of making grammar acquisition easier for the child, they might explain certain other typological and acquisitional observations, and they may lead to an account of contrasts between unaccusative and unergative intransitive verbs that does not rely on deriving unaccusatives from underlying direct objects.

A number of syntactic constructions in Mandarin Chinese are analysed—which, synchronically, are unrelated and highly irregular. However, all reflect a diachronic drift from VO to OV typology which has been operating in Mandarin Chinese. In the light of this diachronic drift, the syntactic constructions can be viewed as structures in transition, and the synchronic irregularities as manifestations of the transitional process.

This paper argues that features should allow the expression of common phonological processes in such a way that the nature of the process will be formally explicit. Many such phonological processes will require multivalued rather than binary features. The following conventions are proposed: (1) Features are not wholly independent, but interact with each other and with syllable structure; (2) the neutral value of each multivalued feature is somewhere near the center of the scale; (3) more than one value of a feature can occur in the same segment, simultaneously (e.g. double articulations) or sequentially (e.g. affricates). Finally, a set of features for consonants is offered.