The purpose of this paper is to show the probable point (or points) of contact between the strong and the weak verbal systems, which resulted in the development of a new analogical weak preterite form with dental suffix (which either existed alongside the original strong form or entirely displaced it). Cases of borrowing from an already existent weak verb (such as sϕkta ‘sank’ for sǫkk, hangða ‘hung’ for hekk) will therefore be omitted. It is, however, often doubtful whether the weak preterite was thus borrowed or was due to association between the strong and the weak verbal systems.

Metrical convenience and metrical preference seem to enter into a poet's choice among parens, pater, and mater. Forms of parens provide suitable and desirable endings for lines of several metres, notably the dactylic hexameter. It must be remembered that sometimes a poet may choose one word rather than another because it conveniently fits into a certain place in his line, while on other occasions he writes his line in such a way as to enable him to use the word which he desires. Perhaps the two influences counteract each other.

[A specimen of cultivated speech of Columbus, Ohio, in phonetic notation. The intonation is marked throughout and analysed in a special section of the paper.]

Three recent analyses of Arabic topic-comment sentences are re-examined, and some advantages of generating these structures as NP plus an embedded S, rather than by an optional transformation extracting a topic from an ordinary S, are pointed out. The possibility of topic-comment sentences being embedded as relative clauses is examined, and a severe restriction is proposed on the structure of the sentences to be embedded as relative clauses.

[In the perfect of the Latin first and fourth conjugations, the ‘long’ paradigm in , etc. is posterior in formation to the ‘short’ paradigm in , etc. The latter represents an old inherited Indo-European perfect paradigm; it was the normal form in Vulgar Latin, and is continued in the ‘weak’ preterites of the Romance languages.]

This verb appears in a single folk-tale from Cuenca, New Castile, in three examples: 239 (‘— !Ay, yo tan bonita y venir a por agua! !Arrula, arrula, cantarillo! Y lo echó a arrular y se rompió en mil pedazos.‘)

It is probably no more than a coincidence that in both OArmenian and O Irish a distinction of voice rather generally observed in other parts of the verbal paradigm is wanting in the imperfect indicative, so that in Armenian the active and the passive of normal thematic verbs have here a common inflection, as do the active and the deponent verbs in Irish.

This paper seeks to derive historical information from linguistic material by means of statistical techniques. The material is drawn from the Melanesian languages of southeastern Papua. The principal technique employed may be designated the Czekanowski-Klimek technique, after Jan Czekanowski, the Polish anthropologist who first applied it to linguistics, and his pupil Stanislaw Klimek, who introduced it into this country, and from whom the present writer learned it.