The group of sentences called existential sentences in Chinese, containing the main verbs shì ‘to be’, zài ‘to exist, be present’, and yǒu ‘to have’ are examined. Their relatedness in syntax and semantics is explored, as revealed by the kinds of noun phrases which occur in these sentences and by the co-occurrence conditions of the three verbs. Six general observations on the properties of these sentences are substantiated. It is clear that the occurrence of the three verbs is closely related to the status and position of the NP's. The verbs are also individually selectable and transformationally introducible into these existential sentences. It is finally proposed that the three verbs are variant representations of a single Chinese verb in such sentences. The NP's in these sentences are also discussed in terms of their syntactic functions and characteristics such as definiteness and anaphoricness.

The phonemes of Russian are as follows:

Consonants:

1. Plain and palatalized counterparts regardless of the following sound:

p pj b bj m mj f fj v vj

t tj d dj n nj s sj z zj

1 lj r rj

2. Plain or palatalized depending on the following sound: k g x

3. Plain only:

c š ž

4. Palatalized only:

c šč y žĵ

In Mezquital Otomi certain phonological components (rather than phonemes as such) appear to differentiate between the aspect markers of the verbs. For example, the difference between the incompletive form ‘is or was scraping’ and the completive ‘did or will scrape (at a point of time)‘ is the component of voicing. Such components appear to have morphemic status in relation to the distribution of a large proportion of verb roots. The phonemic syllable, consisting most commonly of a consonant, a vowel, and a tone, is the matrix in which the interchange of components takes place. The syllable margin, specifically the initial consonant, is the focus of operation.

Immediate constituent analysis is based on an implicit assumption that linguistic structures—especially syntactic structures—are layered structures amenable to analysis by progressive dichotomous cutting. This paper suggests an alternative assumption, viz., that some linguistic structures are layered while others are ordered like beads on a string. Negatively this alternative assumption leads to a rejection of conventional immediate constituent analysis along with its reluctance to recognize more than two constituents on the same level of cutting. Positively, it leads to the development of a string constituent analysis in which grammatical strings are discovered and described (with mention of any observable layering characteristics), and in which constituent substitution points within the strings are likewise discovered and described. It is important to note that, while string constituent analysis is not geared to the assumption of the relevance of layering at all points in the structure of a language, it does not rule out the observation and description of layering where this is relevant.