Purportedly (morpho)syntactic-event-related brain wave components – P600, LAN, and e[arly]LAN – have over the years proved more likely to be domain-general responses. Studies comparing late positive responses to anomalies across cognitive domains, and manipulating their probability of occurrence, suggest that the P600 is a member of the P300 family. Other studies report individual variation in response to (morpho)syntactic anomalies, smudging the distinction between N400 and P600 responses, and suggesting that LAN responses to morphosyntactic anomaly may be an artifact of N400+P600 overlap. The eLAN has similarly been shown to be a methodological artifact. We argue that studies of long-distance dependencies have produced the most consistent and reliable results, partly because they largely avoid violation paradigms, although current insights may be profitably applied to ERP studies of syntactic islands. We also suggest that what are taken to be specialized effects of referential processing are in fact another manifestation of such long-distance (anaphoric) effects.