The Mon Tasiek dialect of Acehnese (Indonesia) was analysed by Lawler 1977 as having a passive in which the verb agrees with the initial, or underlying, subject. His argument was that the preverbal NP in Acehnese has the expected properties of a surface subject, but that verb agreement was controlled by the underlying subject—which, in ‘passive’ clauses, is not the preverbal NP. This analysis was based on limited and unrepresentative data. In the light of more extensive data, Lawler's claim that the preverbal NP in Acehnese acts as a final subject does not hold. The most obvious—and, for syntactic theory, the least problematic conclusion—is that the so-called ‘underlying’ subject is in fact a surface grammatical relation; Acehnese has no passive, and its verbal agreement is a surface phenomenon.

A commonly made, but rarely defended, assumption is that phonetic reduction processes apply to hyperarticulated phonetic targets. Results from experiments reported in this paper support this assumption. In various experimental conditions, listeners adjusted the input parameters of a speech synthesizer until the vowels it produced sounded like the vowels found in a set of example words. A preliminary study indicated that the method of adjustment is a feasible tool for studying vowel systems. Interestingly, listeners in the study chose vowels that were systematically different from those measured in productions of the set of example words: high vowels were higher, low vowels were lower, front vowels were farther front, and back vowels were farther back. We hypothesized that this extreme vowel space corresponds to phonetic targets that are hyperarticulated: HYPERSPACE. This hypothesis was tested in the two main experiments. The first experiment controlled for possible effects of instructions and phonetic training on the listeners' choices. In the second experiment, we improved the naturalness and distinctiveness of the synthetic vowels. The results indicate that the extreme vowels chosen by the listeners were consistent with those produced in hyperarticulated speech; moreover, the hyperspace effect is robust across experimental conditions. These results validate the hypothesis that phonetic targets are hyperarticulated, and are consistent with a two-stage model of phonetic implementation: at the first stage distinctive features are mapped to hyperarticulated phonetic targets, and at the second stage these phonetic targets are reduced.

The principle of cyclic application of rules has been important since Chomsky's Aspects. However, this principle has been called into question; and Grinder 1972 has argued that many examples thought to support the cycle do not, in fact, do so. Grinder discusses cases where rules must re-apply in certain derivations (e.g., Passive must apply, then Raising, then Passive again in the derivation of Alice was believed by us to have been kidnapped by Hector), and he argues that these cases can be explained without the use of a cycle. However, a new class of arguments has recently appeared, based on a theory without extrinsic ordering (cf. Koutsoudas 1973a): it has been claimed that the cycle must be used to explain why, in some derivations, a given rule must apply before another rule. I show that these arguments do not support the cycle, for in each instance some principle of grammar other than the cycle can explain the precedence of application of one of the rules.