Alfred Louis Kroeber died in Paris in the early morning of Wednesday, 5 October 1960, in his eighty-fifth year. He was a member of the Linguistic Society of America from its beginning, a Signer of the Call that led to its founding, and its president in 1940.

[The paper examines the situations in which semivowels occur in specific languages, analyzes these situations phonemically, and generalizes from the examples.]

A system of linguistic description is proposed which distinguishes semological and grammatical levels. The first consists of units organized in multi-dimensional structures; those units can be combined into rudimentary ‘sentences’, each of which is related to numerous surface structures which are all paraphrases of each other. Implications are drawn for descriptive theory, lexicography, cross-cultural studies, and historical semantics.

The theory that there was a spontaneous development of an obscure vowel in final position on certain occasions in Old Italian has gained general currency and has been carried on in the works of the main authorities. D'Ovidio and Meyer-Lübke speak of a ‘Murmelvokal’ and consider it to have been an obscure vowel of []-quality; Grandgent refers to it as a ‘glide-vowel’ without further definition of its phonetic timbre.

A discussion of color categories as they function in contexts which are unfamiliar to the reader introduces frustrations and misunderstandings, particularly when the reader's concerns are practical as well as academic and when they involve cross-cultural communication and interaction, for example during anthropological, psychological, or medical research. The reader who questions this observation may enjoy reading the following passage a second time, after he leaves the final word of our article.

Since the appearance of E. K.‘s dedicatory epistle in the first edition of Spenser's The Shepheardes Calendar, many theories have been advanced in explanation of the diction which Spenser used. Most of these have dealt with the influence of renaissance theories of diction on Spenser's language; many have added little to the material contained in E. K.‘s dedicatory epistle; and few have dealt with the details of the language itself. It is not my purpose in this paper to add another study to the list of those dealing with Spenser's relationship to contemporary theories of diction. It is my purpose rather to point out the extent to which Spenser used archaisms and to show that he consciously used a specialized diction for his pastoral poetry.

English aspiration in initial and medial position is shown to be part of a larger phenomenon of tense and lax consonant alternations. The alternations are accounted for in the context of a set of syllabication rules. These rules precede rules that tense initial consonants of stressed syllables, assimilate tautosyllabic consonants, and lengthen final vowels.

This paper presents a theory of the child's acquisition of the phonology of his native language. The theory predicts learning, measured by correct pronunciation of phones, as a function of ease of perception. The general prediction is that the more discriminable phones are learned earlier and the less discriminable ones later. Finally, the theory is compared with some previous suggestions in this field.