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There has been a great deal of interest lately in the application of structural techniques to problems of dialect comparison. Studies in this field are rendered difficult, however, by the fact that many of the existing surveys were planned at a time when the phonemic principle was still insufficiently understood and questionnaires lacked examples illustrating points which were later found to be of great importance. As a result, many of the field records available at present are inadequate for complete phonemic analysis. If a geographical study is to yield enough structurally relevant information, it must be based on advance knowledge of the major phonemic and phonetic features characteristic of the region. A structural linguistic survey in an area not previously studied might therefore consist of two stages: (a) a preliminary series of phonological studies at selected points in the area, using informant methods of the type employed in studies of a single dialect, with a classification of dialect differences found; and (b) a detailed geographical survey with the aid of questionnaires to determine the spread of the features discovered in the preliminary study.

The declension of vocalic stems in Sanskrit as taught in Pāṇini’s grammar is presented here in such a way as to highlight those sections of the grammar that function in the formation of the declensional paradigm. Conclusions are drawn about the operation of a hypothetical grammar in which rules are ordered at random and in which the only significant principle of ordering is the context of the constituents in the base form.

This paper deals with an aspect of acculturation which has only recently received some attention in the literature. For the most part linguists have been concerned with historical and descriptive studies, and have generally ignored studies of languages in contact. Cultural anthropologists, on the other hand, have been content to investigate acculturation in its purely nonlinguistic manifestations. Studies of linguistic acculturation, however, can furnish valuable data and may shed considerable light on the general problem of acculturation. Whether language and nonlinguistic aspects of culture change differentially, or whether in every instance language complements and reflects nonlinguistic acculturation, is a crucial problem. In the present illustrations, linguistic acculturation seems to substantiate what has taken place in other aspects of the cultures of the groups under consideration, but this may not be the case everywhere.

Grammatical categories are so closely interlocked that a single grammatical concept can hardly be treated separately without certain important reservations. As regards the accusative case, which is by no means a universal category, it must be kept in mind that no case ever has the same range of application in any two given languages, and that, like any other grammatical term, the name of a case does not refer to a definite entity, but is merely a more or less adequate abstraction created for descriptive purposes. The syntactical functions of the accusative, according to the customary interpretation of the term, consist in designating (1) the immediate object of an action: I buy a house, I send a letter, (2) the intended result: I build a house, I write a letter, (3) the goal of a motion (= lative case): I reached my house, I walk home, urbem peto, and (4) the extent of an action: I walked two miles (two hours), I was bound hand and foot = τε πόδας τε. While no language clearly separates the functions (1) and (2) or entirely eliminates (3) and (4) from the domain of the accusative, there is a wide-spread tendency to express the purely concrete or local relations by other means. On the whole, this paper will be confined to the abstract-objective force of the case, especially in its connection with (I) the category of gender and (II) the grammatical device of word order.

Two systems which attempt to describe the structure of the English lexicon have been presented by Katz, Fodor, and Postal (hereafter KFP) and by Quillian. It is argued that the KFP model fails because it mistakenly aims at parsimonious storage of information in the lexicon, and that Quillian's fails because it carries insufficient information and places inadequate limits on the recall of information. What is needed, then, is a lexicon which provides for almost unlimited information storage, but permits parsimonious recall.

The chief views requiring the Assumption’ of proto-language uniformity are evaluated. The conclusion is reached that the ‘assumption’ can usefully be replaced by (1) a hypothesis regarding the relation of the reconstructed phonemic system to that of some occurrent idiolect, and (2) an assumption regarding the interrelevance of non-irreconcilable reconstructions. In the course of developing the argument, the article touches on the law of the regularity of phonetic change, and proposes a definition of the comparative method.

Problems connected with the borrowing of words from language to language have occupied the attention of many linguists. In most cases this attention has been focused on languages of the remote past, where opportunity for first-hand phonetic observation has been cut off entirely. In the meanwhile borrowing has been going on within the United States on a scale rarely equalled in history, between English on the one hand and all the immigrant languages on the other. Here it becomes possible to record by modern means and to study by modern methods the phonetic form of each word in each of its incarnations, foreign, American, or hybrid. In the following study of one such dialect the writer wishes to present a concrete instance of the possibilities inherent in this kind of research.

[The paper follows the development of the suffix -ivu in classical and medieval Latin and in the Romance languages, with the purpose of establishing the syntactic and semantic changes which it underwent and of determining the channels through which it filtered down from Latin into the vernaculars. Special attention is devoted to the substantival use of -ivu, as in Fr. l'objectif, l'initiative. See the summary at the end of the article.]