The industry of explaining away apparent cases of extrinsic rule-ordering in phonology has been in recession recently. Kenstowicz and Kisseberth, in a recent textbook (1979), make rather soothingly conservative noises about ordered-rule solutions. In this lull, during which (it is clear) ordered-rule solutions are still reckoned to be a possibility, Vago's claim (1977) to be able to substantiate such a position has gone unchallenged.

Linguists are constantly invoking a relation of subordination of one clause to another and there seems to be agreement among linguists, about their native tongues at least. Yet the reason for the existence of the relation and the consistency of judgments concerning it is not well understood. The study of subordination and of argumentation for assigning the relation can profitably be made from at least two viewpoints. One viewpoint is paradigmatic or transformational. Evidence for subordination derives from an asymmetry in certain transformational relationships. Non-subordinating constructions on a pair of clauses show identical properties in each clause when the whole construction undergoes transformation, while the same transformations display non-identical properties in the clauses of subordinating constructions. The other viewpoint is syntagmatic or textual. One might even call this viewpoint semantic. Subordinating constructions are restricted in their co-occurrence within coreference patterns of a text in a way that corresponds to an intuitive feeling that a subordinate clause is not the topic of the text at the point where it occurs. Thus one might state the pattern by saying that the common element of meaning of all subordination markers is to indicate that the clause they operate on is subordinate in topic to the non-marked clause. However, the precise account will be in cerms of coreference patterns.

The claim made by Harris (1978) that the descriptivist position in respect of performatives is self-defeating has engendered some spirited controversy through the years since then (see Edmondson 1979, 1983, Wachtel, 1980; Spielmann, 1980; Taylor & Wolf, 1981). Let me declare right at the outset that I am with the non-descriptivists. Nevertheless, in what follows, I wish to show (a) that no brusque argument of the sort originally advanced by Harris or subsequently marshalled by the others can help settle the dispute either way, and (b) that the controversy so far has been riddled with a good deal of futile cross-talk which has blinded the participants in the intellectual free-for-all to some of the real issues at hand.

The primary aim of this paper is to show by the analysis of an extended example that a phonological description which recognizes the functional variety of phonological description which recognizes the functional variety of phonological rules is more illuminating than one in which the data are handled merely as the output of a set of completely undifferentiated processes. In particular I hope to emphasize the value of distinguishing MOTIVATED and UNMOTIVATED processes in phonology.

Existing approaches to the representation of argument structure in grammar tend to focus either on semantics or on syntax. Our goal in this paper is to strike the right balance between the two levels by proposing an analysis that maintains the independence of the syntactic and semantic aspects of argument structure, and, at the same time, captures the interplay between the two levels. Our proposal is set in the context of the development of a large-scale grammar of Modern Hebrew within the framework of Head-driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG). Consequently, an additional challenge it faces is to reconcile two conflicting desiderata: to be both linguistically coherent and realistic in terms of the grammar engineering effort. We present a novel representation of argument structure that is fully implemented in HPSG, and demonstrate its many benefits to the coherence of our Hebrew grammar. We also highlight the additional dimensions of linguistic generalization that our proposal provides, which we believe are also applicable to grammars of other languages.