The present note has two purposes: to discuss the relation of intervocalic to initial and final consonant sequences in Spanish; and on the basis of the Spanish data to suggest a general model for describing the relative probability of occurrence of intervocalic clusters.

[Sinclair Lewis is generally looked upon as the representative American novelist of this generation. His popularity is partly due to his censorious attitude toward American conditions. If for no other reasons, German translators of his works ought to take more care in rendering his ideas than hitherto. Four of his novels in the translations of three different interpreters give a distorted picture of American life and manners.]

Various proposals for treating the word even in a transformational grammar of English are reviewed. It is shown that the word cannot be derived from a structure in which it is directly associated with that portion of the sentence which constitutes its semantic scope. An alternative account based on principles of interpretation of derived structure is sketched and motivated. The semantic content of the word is suggested as the source of limitations on its appearance within the sentence.

In no respect perhaps do the Southern and Midland Middle English texts of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries show greater differences than in the loss or retention of the final n of unstressed inflectional syllables. Disregarding all but the gross differences, we can recognise three types of distribution to one or the other of which the various texts tend, in the roughest way and in varying degrees, to conform. These three types of distribution may be illustrated by the Owl and the Nightingale, the Cotton Nero A 14 text of the Ancren Riwle, and the London English of Chaucer.

J. W. Marchand, in an article which bears almost the same title as the present note and which was published in Language 33.346–54 (1957), reexamines the question posed in that title, and reaches the conclusion that the reflexes of PIE /i/ and /e/ did not contrast in identical environments, i.e. that these two PIE phonemes had merged in Proto-Germanie, and that, accordingly, the system of PGmc. short syllabics exhibited only a three-way contrast: one front vowel, one back vowel, one low vowel. He presents arguments which are intended to establish the validity of two assumed sound-changes for Pre-Germanic : PIE /i/ > /e/ before /a/ sounds, and PIE /e/ > /i/ before /u/, and he declares that if we deny the occurrence of these sound changes, we must accept the phones [i] and [e] as members of different phonemes. My contention here is simply that the occurrence of the alleged changes for Proto-Germanie (or Pre-Germanic) has not been proved, and that Proto-Germanie must therefore be assumed to have exhibited, as asserted by Twaddell and Kuryłowicz, an asymmetrical structure in its system of short syllabics.