Unmarked terms in the lexicon, compared to marked ones, are typically more frequent in use, less complex in form, and acquired earlier by children learning a language. Terms which are unmarked in single languages are often unmarked in all languages; however, marking is not always invariable across languages, or through time within individual languages. The present work focuses on variation in cultural importance as a factor which influences marking. As the importance of a referent changes within a speech community, the marking value of its label alters, often resulting in lexical change. Introductions of previously unknown referents in culture contact situations—e.g. domestic plants and animals—frequently have led to shifts in cultural importance. Such examples illustrate how cultural factors, by influencing the assignment of marking, often play an important role in lexical change.

Sentence stress is not always a sufficient condition for interpretation as focus. An insightful analysis of the appropriate generalizations can be accommodated under a ‘modular’ approach to grammatical theory. Certain observations concerning the stress properties of WH questions are shown to be consistent with the assumptions of trace theory as developed in, e.g., Chomsky & Lasnik 1977, where the relationship between focus and stress is mediated by S-structure. The notion of focus has no consistent pragmatic characterization; it is, rather, a grammatical notion. The interpretation of this grammatical notion in particular discourse contexts is provided by rules of Discourse Grammar using the predicate ‘c-construable’, which is here defined.

Data collected from the Mayan language Quiché suggests that considerable differences may exist across languages in the form of children's first words. Several classes of Quiché words, including the verbs and the positional element k'o:(lik), take ‘terminations’. Although the termination does not encode a simple semantic or syntactic meaning, the children used it correctly in over 86% of their first verbs. The syllable structure and stress rules conspire in Quiché to promote the early acquisition of terminations, suggesting the primacy of intonation in morphological development.