Certain linguistic items, capable of contrast in some environments, have the property of being apparently free variants in others. This can be accounted for, if in a given item, one or more semantic features can be regarded as ‘latent’, i.e. susceptible of being activated in some contexts and suppressed in others. The technique of ‘forced-choice’ selection testing was used to investigate the phenomenon, and the hypothesis was found to be valid in respect of (a) the two preterit forms of wet, (b) the infinitive and present participle in environments where both can occur, and (c) pairs of quasi-synonyms.

The particular materials examined as a basis for the notes presented in this paper consisted of some three thousand personal letters copied from those in the files of one of the government bureaus in Washington. These letters were made available several years ago through the efforts of the Modern Language Association with the support of the Linguistic Society, and their collecting and copying financed by the National Council of Teachers of English. In this limited body of material it has been possible to record every occurrence in each category examined and by studying the facts quantitatively as well as qualitatively gain some knowledge not only of the kind of variety that exists in actual usage but also something of the relative amounts of that variation. There is much impatience with statistical studies of grammatical constructions and often with just cause. On the other hand, many of the general statements concerning particular phenomena of a language actually express or imply quantitative judgments—judgments of absolute or relative frequency. Most of these depend upon general impressions rather than upon an attempt carefully to calculate the frequency of actual instances in any body of material. Concerning the genitive there are many such quantitative statements based only upon general impressions. The material offered in these notes will assist in checking the validity of three such statements that are frequently repeated.

This paper examines ideas basic to the Praguean concepts of markedness and neutralization in the light of problems which arise in contemporary phonological theory. The partial reformulation of phonological theory suggested here goes beyond proposals by previous authors in that it provides a plausible explanation for a number of universais concerning stem-initial consonant clusters. The present proposal includes the claim that there is a universal, ordered set of redundancy rules—in the form of neutralization rules—which place constraints on the distribution of marked features in the lexicon. It is suggested that at least some of these universals are due to limitations of the peripheral speech production and perception systems.

Par rapport à l'usage du sanskrit classique (très variable d'ailleurs suivant les genres et les époques), le Rgveda (RV) ne présente qu'un nombre relativement limité de composés. Laissant à part les formations nombreuses, mais peu caractéristiques, où le membre antérieur est un invariant—préverbe, préposition, préfixe, adverbe ou nom adverbialisé—et qui n'entrent pas dans la définition stricte de ‘composé nominal’, on ne trouve en moyenne que cinq composés pour 150 mots (ou: pour 80 mots pleins), à peine davantage dans les portions récentes de la Samhitā. La proportion varie suivant le style: les passages descriptifs (ainsi 2.21) ou emphatiques en présentent davantage, les hymnes simples (comme l'hymne à Pūsan 6.54 ou le dialogue 'affectif Yama-Yamī 10.10) en ont fort peu.