The paper attempts to determine the motivating causes of palatal vowel harmony (PVH). Previously suggested causal explanations of PVH are critically evaluated, especially the progressive palatal assimilation view of the origin of PVH. Data on PVH restrictions from Finnish and Turkish are examined against a set of perceptually motivated working tendencies. It is shown that PVH and “labial harmony” are only special cases of a single, unitary type of restriction, statable acoustically in terms of the frequency of the second formant. A perceptual theory of the causes of PVH is proposed and general phonetic conditions for and against the development of PVH in a language are suggested. On the whole, the paper is an argument for a substance-based approach to phonology.

The Government-Binding theory cannot account for reflexives in Slavic languages. We may guess that the more a language differs from English with its quite rigid word-order, the worse are the predictions made by the theory.

One cannot exclude Slavic reflexives as non-anaphors in a non-arbitrary way while keeping the spirit of Chomsky et al. The Slavic reflexives behave “as they ought to” in tensed clauses, too. An attempt to exclude them would also be another step on the self-destructive path that started by excluding the Japanese reflexives in order to cope with the facts clashing with the Government-Binding theory. Many interesting cases of English reflexives would also have to be ignored for the sake of the theory.