Words bear relations and interact with other words in every sentence. These interactions can take the form of overt morphological reflexes as well as intuitions of semantic composition and constituency. But relations that hold between linearly adjacent words come, in a sense, pre-equipped with a quasi-mechanical explanation for any interactions that may arise between them: they interact in virtue of their obvious proximity. For example, in the phrase an apple, an takes the particular form that it does (as opposed to the consonant-less a) in virtue of being immediately followed by a word that begins with a vowel. Had a different word intervened between those two, the form of the determiner would hinge upon that new word: (a red apple). Some relations do not require that linear adjacency and can hold from a distance. When one speaks of Long Distance Dependencies, it is not obvious that there is a particular length of dependency beyond which a dependency must be deemed “long.” In this work I will use Long Distance Dependency to mean any dependency that need not hold between strictly linearly adjacent words or morphemes. As such, this will include obvious instances like wh-question (which apple did you buy?) formation as well as more bounded dependencies like those of anaphora (Jane saw herself). This admittedly broad definition serves to rule-in discussion of dependencies for which distance is immediately relevant if however delimited (say clause-bound anaphora). It will also however unfortunately rule in other such non-adjacent dependencies that are not immediately relevant and thus won’t be discussed (for example, thematic role assignment to indirect objects or semantic selection restrictions between verbs and nouns). In any case, long distance dependencies are of interest precisely because they do not come so pre-equipped with a quasi-mechanical explanation. Rather, something additional must be said to explain the a priori unexpected “action at a distance.” How can things apparently far apart come to interact as if they were adjacent? The answer to this question has repercussions for the study of language as a reflection of the human mind in general as well as the study of language for its own sake.