Anaphora clearly involves syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors. Although it is generally acknowledged that pragmatic factors are predominant in discourse anaphora, it is equally widely held (especially among Government-Binding (GB) theorists) that only syntactic and semantic factors are crucial to intrasentential anaphora. In this article, I shall argue, in the spirit of an ongoing debate about the ‘division of labour’ between grammar and pragmatics regarding anaphora (Reinhart, 1983a, b, 1986; Kempson, 1984a, b, 1988a, b; Levinson, 1987a, b, 1991; Yan Huang, 1987a, 1989), that contrary to this popular but erroneous view, the contribution of pragmatics to anaphora is much more fundamental than has been commonly believed, even at the heart of intrasentential anaphora, at least with respect to languages like Chinese. Such a position, if established, would seem to decrease the plausibility of Chomsky's (1981, 1982, 1986) claim that anaphora, and zero anaphora in particular, have a privileged access to the alleged underlying principles of the innate Universal Grammar (UG), the biologically determined endowment of the human mind.

There has been much discussion, mainly by Montague grammarians, of the fact that ‘transportation’ of adverbials affects use or semantic interpretation of perfect sentences. Consider, for example, the following perfect sentences: (1) with a durational PP in sentence-final position; (2) with a durational PP in sentence-initial position; and (3) with a durational wh-phrase in sentence-initial position:

(1) John has been in Tucson for two years.

(2) For two years, John has been in Tucson.

(3) How long has John been in Tucson?

(4) (a) John has been in Tucson for two years up to now.

(b) John was in Tucson for two years in the past.

This article argues in favour of a syntactic analysis of secondary predication as first proposed in Williams (1980) and against the semantic approach to predication defended most recently in Napoli (1989). Most of the evidence to be adduced in the proposed analysis comes from Spanish. We posit that secondary predicates are base-generated inside VP in Spanish, confirming Culicover & Wilkins's (1984) and Roberts's (1988) analysis for English. Under this hypothesis, object-oriented (O-) predicates occur inside the c-domain of V as sisters to the verbal complement, whereas subject-oriented (S-) secondary predicates attach to VP as sisters to the subject. Based on this asymmetry and adopting Jaeggli's (1981) assumption that initial wh-traces must be lexically identified, we explain the fact that only O-predicates can undergo wh-movement in Spanish. This restriction on wh-movement follows from the syntactic configuration assigned to secondary predicates in which both predicates are governed by V, but only O-predicates are c-commanded by V.

Since Paul Grice published ‘Logic and conversation’ in 1975, there have been a number of attempts to develop his programmatic remarks on conversational and conventional implicatures further (see Gazdar, 1979; Atlas & Levinson, 1981; Horn, 1985; Sperber & Wilson, 1986; and especially Levinson, 1983, and the references cited therein). The result has been a growing understanding of the relationship between semantics and pragmatics, and more generally of human reasoning in everyday language use. Many aspects of natural language understanding that were previously thought to be part of the conventional meaning of a given expression can now be shown to be the result of conversational inference. And with cancellability as the diagnostic test, a number of traditional problems in the study of meaning are yielding to more satisfactory analyses. Even more ambitiously, implicatures are penetrating into core areas of the syntax, as pragmatic theories of increasing subtlety are proposed for ‘grammatical’ phenomena such as Chomsky's (1981, 1982) binding principles (see Reinhart, 1983, and Levinson, 1987a, b, 1991).

Greenberg (1963) formulated a number of implicational universals that refer to the order of various syntactic elements. He classified languages on the basis of their order of subject, object and verb into three types, which he labelled I, II and III, and which correspond to what are commonly known as VSO, SVO and SOV languages, respectively. Since that time, evidence for the existence of the three other logically possible orders, VOS, OVS and OSV, has been presented (see Keenan, 1978; Derbyshire & Pullum, 1981, 1986), thus leaving us with a typology of six types. Lehmann (1973, 1978) and Vennemann (1974, 1976) collapsed these six types into two types OV and VO. Implicit in this move is the idea that the fundamental parameter is the order of verb and object and that the position of the subject is less important. In treating VSO, VOS and SVO as subtypes of the general type VO, the claim is that these three types are similar to each other in their other word order characteristics and different from OV languages. More recently, a number of linguists, including Comrie (1981: 90, 94–95; 1989: 96, 100–101), Mallinson & Blake (1981: 379), Siewierska (1988: 18–19) and Payne (1990: 19), but most particularly Hawkins (1980: 199; 1983: 30), have criticized Lehmann and Vennemann for collapsing VSO, VOS and SVO languages into a single category VO. They all argue that the available evidence does not support the claim that SVO languages pattern like VSO and VOS languages. The purpose of this paper is to argue that, although some of these criticisms are not without merit, Lehmann and Vennemann were largely right: with certain well-defined exceptions, the word order properties of SVO languages differ little from those of VSO and VOS languages. In short, it will be shown that with respect to a large number of word order characteristics, we do find a basic split between VO and OV languages.