Most, if not all natural languages possess complex sentences in which one single noun phrase serves as the superficial subject for two or more verbs. The most obvious case is the one involving sentences with co-ordinate verb phrases as in (1):

• (1) the man hit the girl and kicked the boy

  However, inasmuch as in the case of co-ordinate constructions one single noun phrase can also serve as the object of two or more verbs, such constructions will not be our concern in this paper. That is, any analysis that can characterize a sentence such as (1), can also characterize a sentence such as (2), where the girl is the object of both hit and kicked.

• (2) the man hit and kicked the girl

  In this paper, we will restrict our attention to constructions involving coreferential subordinate subject deletion in Russian, i.e., infinitival, gerundial and participial clauses.* We will demonstrate that, despite many superficial differences, such constructions can be characterized in terms of essentially the same general grammatical process: the deletion of a redundantly repeated, subordinate subject NP. This analysis will be shown to be more adequate than one which requires the postulation of a set of two or more independent transformations which describe the data in an ad hoc way.

This is the second of two papers comparing relational network theory with transformational theory. In Reich 1970b we defined some basic nodes and compared relational network theory with a subset of transformational theory which is commonly acknowledged to be linguistically inadequate. In this paper we shall review the types of problems which context-free phrase-structure grammars cannot adequately handle. We shall then show that each of these problems occurs in that portion of English grammar which is concerned with the English auxiliaries; thus a good test of any proposed grammatical theory is whether or not it can be used to describe a grammar of the auxiliaries in an acceptable way. Finally, we shall describe in detail a relational network grammar of the auxiliaries and attempt to demonstrate that relational network theory passes this test.