During the past five years it has become clear that phrase structure rules and transformations provide a grossly inadequate characterization of the notion ‘rule of grammar.’ The problem is this: phrase structure rules and transformations are local; they define well-formedness conditions on individual phrase-markers and on pairs of successive phrase-markers. However, certain rules of grammar are global in nature; they extend over entire derivations, or parts of derivations, and cannot be stated in full generality (if at all) by local operations. I have proposed that rules of grammar be considered as well-formedness conditions on derivations (or ‘derivational constraints’). In the most general case, rules of grammar will be global in nature. Phrase structure rules and transformations turn out to be special cases of derivational constraints. From the point of view of linguistic description, the theory of derivational constraints is as much an innovation over transformational grammar as transformational grammar was over phrase structure grammar. In this paper a few of the phenomena that require the postulation of global derivational constraints will be considered. Some of these are purely syntactic in nature; others involve the interaction of syntax and phonology. The cases that involve the interaction of syntax and semantic representations are not considered here, nor is the formal characterization of such constraints included.

This idiom was explained by Zimmer as a preterite passive (passé indéfini) which secondarily acquired active meaning. He confined his investigation to the spoken dialects and appears to have been misled by French grammatical categories. In fact the meaning is present and active, and the phrase is a blend of two uses of the verb ‘to be’ which date from the Old Irish period. It may be as early as the 13th century.

In comparative Germanic grammar it is conventionally assumed that IE e eu became respectively PGc. i iu when a high front vowel or glide (i ī j) occurred in the following syllable. Apart from differences of opinion regarding the manner in which this development took place, the grammars show very little disagreement on the subject. Nearly all assign the change to Proto-Germanic (or at least pre-Gothic) times, although Schulze in particular has noted an apparent lack of umlaut in early runic inscriptions and foreign spellings of Germanic names. It is also a conventional assumption that IE i u became respectively PGc. e o when a low or mid vowel () occurred originally in the next syllable, provided that neither i ī j nor a cluster of nasal plus consonant intervened. In this instance, however, some scholars have doubted that the change took place in Proto-Germanic times.

Though considerations of meaning in linguistics can be replaced, up to a point, by rigorous structural procedures, i.e. procedures involving solely the kinds and order of the elements of the language under investigation, they cannot be replaced by distributional procedures, despite the claim recently made by Harris. Distributional procedures may be sufficient to establish the rules by which all longer expressions (especially sentences) can be constructed out of the elements, but they are inadequate for the establishment of certain other rules that would mirror the so-called logical properties and relations of sentences and other expressions.

It is odd that linguists, who pride themselves on the rigor and scientific nature of many of their concepts, should nevertheless be so tolerant of vague, unverified statements in some parts of their field. To take an example, Bloch has made many contributions to linguistic theory in a long series of excellent publications, but he does not appear to have adopted any scientific procedure to check the validity of the phonetic statements (e.g. those about tongue positions during vowel sounds) which often occur in these works. It seems as if he regards the justification of phonetic statements as outside his field as a linguist. Thus he says, ‘Qualities are identified by ear; but in linguistic works they are traditionally defined in terms of their assumed production by the vocal organs.’ This uncritical acceptance of the traditional descriptive techniques is, as we shall show, inadvisable. Disclaimers such as ‘articulatory terminology is used only because a usable auditory terminology has not yet been developed’ (loc.cit.) are not sufficient excuses for making seemingly dogmatic assertions about physiological facts.

[A re-examination of the evidence in case of the two Gothic nouns gakunds (Gal. 5.8) and gakunþs (in the phrase uf gakunpai, Luc. 3.23) yields the result that the former serves to translate π∈ισμοvή in the sense of ‘submission’ or ‘submissiveness’, whereas uf gakunþai is a free rendering ('when he became known') of the Greek participle άρχóμ∈vos (i.e., 'when he began'). Here as elsewhere, Ulfilas proves to be a competent translator from Greek, more so than, e.g., Erasmus or Luther.]