this paper we provide an analysis for this complex and unusual tense marking system, in which tense values are treated as composites of three more primitive features. Furthermore we show that, while the Wambaya tense marking facts pose serious challenges to a movement-based framework, they validate a prediction inherent in the architecture of a unification-based framework that makes use of the principle of lexical integrity and thus, can be given an intuitive and revealing account within lfg. 1 Wambaya syntactic structure