Coincidences between languages are not always obvious on the plane of expression. Sometimes they arise on the plane of content and find their way onto that of expression quite deviously, so that one is scarcely aware that speakers of one language are making the same semantic distinction as speakers of another. An example is the rule of adjective position in Spanish and Italian which English lacks, and which is illustrated by such Spanish examples as

1. Tenía ricos ornamentos; Tenía ornamentos ricos: It had rich ornaments.

2. Le dio un dulce beso; Le dio un beso dulce: He gave her a sweet kiss.

3. Noté un barato perfume; Noté un perfume barato: I noticed a cheap perfume.

Les tours prépositionnels jouent le même rôle que les cas: ils expriment des relations. Jusqu’ici tout le monde est d’accord; les divergences commencent quand on veut préciser la nature de ces relations. Pour des linguistes comme R. Jakobson, B. Pottier et J. R. Gallup (ces derniers suivant une tradition guillaumienne), pour le Hjelmslev de La Catégorie des cas, pour un latiniste comme Perret, elles sont sémantiques; pour la philologie traditionnelle et pour des linguistes comme J. Kuryłowicz, E. Benvéniste, R. H. Robins, J. Perrot et des tenants de la grammaire générative comme N. Ruwet, elles sont parfois uniquement syntaxiques. Cette dernière perspective s’attache à rendre compte du « fonctionnement des éléments de langue » et, comme l’étude fonctionnelle du latin et surtout du grec a été négligée par la philologie traditionnelle presque uniquement occupée de diachronie, c’est cette perspective que nous adopterons, en nous en tenant au latin classique d’une part, à l’attique d’autre part, états (approximatifs) de langue assez semblables en ce qui concerne le problème qui nous occupe.

In this paper I will deal with a type of nominalization which appears in Desano. Emphasis will be placed on arguments justifying a given underlying structure of a class of nominalizations rather than on the types of rules needed to convert the underlying structure into the realized nominalization.

A class of nominalizations will be presented here. I will give evidence to show that these forms are to be derived from relative clauses. Consider the following forms:

In a recent article in CJL/RCL 13, 1, H. M. Logan discussed some of the problems involved in as well as the kind of results obtainable by the use ot computers in dialect studies of Middle English. While many of Logan’s points were interesting and suggested ways in which some of the statistical burdens could be raised from human shoulders, in my opinion much ot what he says tends both to oversimplify the problem of computer usefulness in this field and to underestimate the achievements of precomputer scholarship. Although it is the narrow scope of the linguistic criteria utilized in such projects as the MEDC on which Logan focuses his main objections, he himself, it would seem, fails to expand them in any significant way or to suggest, for example, that they may be more profitably derived from one descriptive model rather than another. For him “it is precisely [the] central problem of exhaustiveness which the computer solves.” But exhaustiveness in what sense? The number of occurrences of and in a text in a full or abbreviated form is surely in itself of peripheral importance (as Logan admits); yet it is the very tendency to stress the value of data collection supported by a minimum of relational classification which is prominent in his arguments. While one must admit the usefulness of the computer as a concordance builder, its ability to effect “a classification of all the grammatical forms and the significant phonological features” is only as good as the descriptive adequacy of the theory which can account for such forms and features.

Haida was originally spoken in the Queen Charlotte Islands, a group of some 200 islands situated off the western coast of British Columbia. The islands are separated from the mainland by a channel varying from 30 to 60 miles in width, known as the Hecate Straits.

A smaller group of Haida settlements was located to the immediate northeast of the Queen Charlottes, across Dixon’s Entrance. These were situated principally on Dall Island and in the southern portions of Prince of Wales Island in what is now Alaska. Apparently, a small band of several hundred Haidas had migrated from the northwestern portion of the Queen Charlotte group, possibly from Langara Island. The move was relatively recent, having taken place some 250 years ago, before the first European contacts. Several villages were established, but these were largely abandoned in favor of the newly laid-out Hydaburg after 1912.