Lieber (1980) provided a theory of the organization of the lexicon which has been extremely influential within current theories of morphology. However, one of her central suggestions, concerning the nature of phonological rules in the lexicon, has been largely ignored. Lieber (1980, 1982) considers allomorphic variation induced by relationships which are not true phonological rules, in that they refer to lexical or morphosyntactic features but which none the less seem to be statable in phonological terms. These constitute the bulk of morphologically conditioned alternations, particularly those which have the prime function of signalling morphological relationships. Such rules have been dubbed ‘morpholexical’ rules in the structuralist literature, and Lieber adopts this term, giving it a specialist technical interpretation within the Lexicalist theory she develops.

One of the milestones in typological studies is Berlin & Kay's (1969) account of basic colour terms, which has produced a steady stream of research of various types. Berlin & Kay summarized their work as follows.

In sum, our two major findings indicate that the referents for the basic color terms of all languages appear to be drawn from a set of eleven universal perceptual categories, and these categories become encoded in the history of a given language in a partially fixed order (1969: 4–5).

The analysis of referring expressions can be divided into two branches for our purposes. The first includes theories of definite descriptions and proper names. The key to the riddle of the appropriate use of such expressions, it was thought, is the notion of presupposition: existence and/or uniqueness. Indeed, this was the question that dominated the literature for many years, starting with the early philosophical analyses of Frege (1982), Russell (1919) and Strawson (1956, 1964), and ending with the much later pragmatically oriented linguistic analyses, such as Liberman (1973), Kempson (1975), Prince (1978, 1981b), Gazdar (1979), McCawley (1979), Hawkins (1974, 1984) and even Loftus (1972, 1974, 1975), although this last approach is more psychological. The second branch of research totally neglected the question of presupposition. Non-syntactic/semantic theories of anaphoric expressions, pronouns especially, were psychologically oriented, and hence saw the issue to be accounted for quite differently. In fact, the objective of these theories has been to elucidate processing procedures by examining anaphoric expressions, rather than to make claims about anaphoric expressions as such.

The main concern of this paper is sentences like the following containing so-called ‘cognate objects’: (1) (a) John died a gruesome death. (b) Harry lived an uneventful life. (c) Bill sighed a weary sigh.

One of the most important types of grammatical process in the languages of the world is that involving the intransitivization of a transitive verb and the deletion or demotion of its subject or direct object. The first such process to be analysed was passivization, involving the demotion of a transitive subject to an oblique role or its deletion altogether; this process is central to all linguistic theories and has been known as long as linguistics has been studied.