In addition to providing an account of the empirical facts of language, a theory that aspires to account for language as a biologically based human faculty should seek a graceful integration of linguistic phenomena with what is known about other human cognitive capacities and about the character of brain computation. The present discussion note compares the theoretical stance of biolinguistics (Chomsky 2005, Di Sciullo & Boeckx 2011) with a constraint-based parallel architecture approach to the language faculty (Jackendoff 2002, Culicover & Jackendoff 2005). The issues considered include the necessity of redundancy in the lexicon and the rule system, the ubiquity of recursion in cognition, derivational vs. constraint-based formalisms, the relation between lexical items and grammatical rules, the roles of phonology and semantics in the grammar, the combinatorial character of thought in humans and nonhumans, the interfaces between language, thought, and vision, and the possible course of evolution of the language faculty. In each of these areas, the parallel architecture offers a superior account both of the linguistic facts and of the relation of language to the rest of the mind/brain.

The ‘time‘-away construction, exemplified by We slept the whole afternoon away, proves to have a complex set of syntactic and semantic properties. In particular, the NP the whole afternoon behaves syntactically like a direct object, even though it is clearly not licensed by the verb sleep. This construction is shown to be distinct from two others that it superficially resembles, the resultative and the way-construction. It is also compared with a number of other semi-idiomatic VP constructions. Two approaches for licensing the NP object are compared: a lexical rule approach, in which sleep away is treated as a complex verb that licenses the object, and a constructional approach, in which V NP away is listed as a meaning-bearing construction that licenses both the verb and the object.

A widely held position in the literature on verbal meaning is that the lexical-semantic representation of verbs involves complex event structures with semantic primitives like CAUSE and BECOME (e.g. Dowty 1979). A growing number of recent works on predicate decomposition have shown that there is a close correlation between the semantics of event structure and the syntax (e.g. Hale & Keyser 1993, Harley 1995, Travis 2000, van Hout 2000, Ramchand 2003, 2007). This article presents an additional empirical argument for the view that there is a direct mapping between semantic decomposition of predicates and the (morpho)syntax by developing an explicit analysis of the semantics and syntax of the verbal suffix -kan in Standard Indonesian. We argue that -kan is a morphological reflex of the RESULT head, the semantics of which gives rise to a causative interpretation. By treating -kan as being sensitive to a syntactic configuration involving a result state, the current analysis not only provides important empirical support for the event decomposition of predicates in the syntax but also leads to a unified semantic and syntactic account of -kan, which captures straightforwardly distributional properties of the suffix.