Revised version of a paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, Atlanta, Georgia, December 1972. (DD)

Examines the theory of empty categories in a Government and Binding analysis of Modern Greek syntax. No empty subject category is found and so the pro-drop parameter is a misnomer here. Further support for the correlation between parametric variation and inflexional or morphological properties of a language is presented. (Author/LMO)

The "direct discourse analysis" introduced by Susumu Kuno is examined and found to be inadequate. To account for the data Kuno discusses, as well as for related data, a new approach to transformations is suggested. By determining the function, rather than the form, of a transformation, certain predictions are possible. Primary is the…

Given that the principal bounding nodes, or barriers, for subjacency are noun phrase (NP), S, and S-bar, with S optionally a barrier, NP and S-bar obligatorily barriers, differences between Greek and English WH-movement are discussed. The contrasts are derived from independently motivated differences in NP structure between the two languages.…

This paper addresses itself to the question of why the English language should have levelled almost all of its inflections, and what the relationship is between the breakdown of the case system and the rise of fixed word-order, prepositional phrases, and verb periphrases. The explanation proposed for the phenomenon of syntactic drift is considered…