This thesis consists of two parts. Part I provides an analysis of the locative inversion construction, the conjunction agreement construction, and the genitive of negation construction in Russian. These constructions are argued to share one formal property: they contain an element other than the highest nominal argument satisfying the Extended Projection Principle. The EPP is shown to be independent not only of morphological features (such as Case or agreement), but also of categorial features (such as N or D); movement to the EPP position is shown to be subject to the Minimal Link Condition for all categories, so that non-canonical subjects can move to the EPP position only when they are as "close" to it as the highest NP argument. Given our assumptions about VP structure, this happens only in sentences containing unaccusative verbs. The syntactic properties of locative inversion, conjunction agreement, and genitive of negation are shown to follow from the manner in which various general principles of Russian syntax, such as the discourse principles, the properties of covert (as opposed to overt) feature-checking, the morphological Case system of Russian, and the existential closure applying to all VP-internal positions, operate on sentences whose nominal "subjects" remain in their base-generated positions in overt syntax.
Part II investigates the processing complexity of unambiguous Japanese sentences. The investigation utilizes the theory of processing complexity developed in Gibson & Thomas (1996a), within which the memory cost associated with an incomplete syntactic dependency increases as a function of the number of lexical items that are processed between the point where the relationship is posited and the point where it is satisfied. Two types of processing complexity contrasts found in Japanese are discussed: those associated with the degree and type of center-embedding present in a sentence. Both experimental and intuitive data are provided as evidence for the existence of the complexity contrasts. It is shown that the contrasts are accounted for within the Locality Theory of Gibson & Thomas. On a more general level, this work describes the properties that any theory of processing complexity must have to successfully deal with the available Japanese data and offers a constrained and principled explanation of apparent variation in the processing complexity of similar structures across languages.