The verb προσκυνϵῖν, which is commonly used to describe the worship of the gods and the obeisance before rulers, has been the subject of several recent discussions in connection with its use in the New Testament and in the literature of the imperial cult. In a paper on Alexander, Schnabel, relying chiefly on the etymological meaning of the word, explained the proskynesis at Bactra as a kiss sent to the daimon of Alexander. This view was adopted by some scholars. But another interpretation of προσκυνϵῖν has recently found favor. Bolkestein, in his study of the Deisidaimonia in Theophrastos, has attempted to show that the gesture implied in προσκυνϵῖν was to kneel and not to send a kiss. Proskynesis, he says, is generally supposed to have had two distinct meanings, the first one implying a hand.-kissing gesture, the second indicating the Oriental obeisance. But, Bolkestein (30) continues, a careful examination of the texts shows that, although προσκυνϵῖν originally meant ‘zu Fuss fallen und küssen’, in Greek literature it is used only for a kneeling gesture; if the hand-kissing gesture was known in the religion of ancient and classical Greece it was never called proskynesis. The result of Bolkestein's study may be seen in Nock's statement that 'kneeling is the only meaning of the word, as Bolkestein has shown.' In his admirable article on the ceremonial of the Imperial court, Alföldi accepts Bolkestein's interpretation. He calls Berve's explanation of προσκυνϵῖν ώς θϵὸν τὸν Ἀλέξανδρον as a hand-kissing gesture 'ein Irrtum, verursacht durch die seither durch Bolkestein widerlegte übliche Erklärung der griechischen Proskynese.' In Horst's recent study of the verb προσκυνϵῖν, the gesture implied, especially in the classical period, is not discussed in detail, though Horst does not entirely accept Bolkestein's results.

A noun and participle (or adjective) when neither has modifiers may be combined with the article in five different ways: apn, anap,nap; a η ρ, ρ a η. In the first three, the position of the participle is called attributive, in the last two, predicative. The commonest of the attributive positions is a ρ η, as in of the predicative, a n p, In one, the participle stands between article and noun, in the other, the noun stands between article and participle. Because these two orders are so common, one is always startled to find a noun standing between the article and a participle which, because of the context, can only be attributive, or, on the other hand, to find a predicative participle (or adjective) between article and noun. Now both of these phenomena are to be found in the best prose authors. Both are subject, however, to certain laws of order which, as I hope to show, are corollaries of the regular laws of attribution and predication.

Process models of language, and generative grammars, receive support from typological theory. Typological study has found that some syntactic constructions can be correlated with characteristic sentence patterns. Thus consistent OV languages have relative clauses, possessives, and adjectives preceding nouns; consistent VO languages show the converse order. The parallelism between the three constructions can be accounted for in process models, and related to the position of the object with regard to the verb in both OV and VO languages. The central importance of the verb in language as indicated in these and other constructions is pointed up by recent neurological investigations supporting descriptive and generative theory which proposes that verbs have the primary role in sentences. These observations illuminate syntactic patterns in New High German, in Latin and the Romance languages; they also indicate that a framework is now available for historical and descriptive syntactic study.

1. The problem. The objectives of diachronic linguistics have always been to reconstruct the particular steps by which a language changes, and also to hypothesize about processes of language change in general. Recent discussion of the latter problem has frequently involved five closely related proposals. First, language changes by means of a series of individual innovations. These innovations consist primarily in the addition of single rules to the grammar of the adult speaker. Second, these innovations usually occur at some point of break in a grammar; for example, ‘before the first morphophonemic rule involving immediate constituent structure of the utterance … before the phonological rules that eliminate boundary markers from the representation’. Third, these innovations are passed on to the next generation when the child imitates the adult. A child may internalize the adult's grammar; or, more probably, he will simplify it. This is because children have an ability, not shared by most adults, to construct by induction from the utterances to which they have been exposed, the simplest grammar capable of generating sentences. The simplification will give rise to a discontinuity in transmission from generation to generation. In the interests of preserving intelligibility, this discontinuity will be minimal. Fourth, whenever the discontinuity results in radical changes such as restructuring, a mutation occurs. Finally, these mutations, which affect the overall simplicity of the grammar, are rare.

1. In many languages there are clause types characterized by the presence of a subject and complement without an element of predication such as a verb ‘to be’. Clauses of this kind, which may be termed equational, display a number of similarities across languages. Frequently there is a special negative copula; in tenses other than the present, a verb ‘to be’ is sometimes required; word order may differ from that of nonequational clauses.

[A number of examples from various languages are collected to show that the initial syllable of a word is not of itself exempt from vowel weakening nor even from the loss of its vowel. The difference in Latin between the treatment of vowels in initial syllables and those placed elsewhere demands for its explanation the hypothesis of a stress accent upon the first syllable in primitive Italic.]