Studies of word-order universals have had great impact in modern linguistics, thanks to Greenberg’s (1963) work and to Hawkins’s (1983) refinements. Greenberg’s conclusions were based on a sample of 30 languages “for more detailed information” and 142 languages “for certain limited cooccurrences of basic word order” (Hawkins 1983:xi; cf. Greenberg 1963:74–75). Hawkins expanded the 142 “to some 350 languages”, and for “between one-third and one-half of these supplementary data have been collected of the type that Greenberg listed in his 30-language sample” (Hawkins 1983:xi-xii). Hawkins proposed extensive revisions in Greenberg’s universals based on this expanded sample.

A linguistic theory can be considered to have explanatory force if it may be extended to a body of facts considerably beyond the domain for which it was originally conceived. In general, the further the new domain is from the original, the greater the support that accrues to that theory. In this paper, a number of developments within current morphological and phonological theory will be utilized in the analysis of an extraordinary form of vocal behaviour, the katajjait (sg. katajjaq) or throat games of the Canadian Inuit. The result will be a revealing account of the structures of these katajjait, as well as a remarkable confirmation of principles of linguistic theory from a domain which has been hitherto unreported in the linguistic literature.

Les travaux descriptifs traitant du statut phonologique et de la distribution du segment [Ɣ] en créole haïtien achoppent presque toujours sur un paradoxe. Il s’agit du comportement de ce dernier dans l’environnement phonique d’un segment [+arrondi]. Les études les plus pertinentes, d’Ans (1968:72), Tinelli (1970:64), Valdman (1978:56) et Dejean (1980:97) pour ne citer que celles-là, s’accordent à reconnaître dans ce contexte l’existence d’un changement dans les réalisations de surface du phonème /Ɣ/ et à mettre en relief le caractère lacunaire de sa distribution. Dejean attribue ce changement à la transformation des mots français à séquence r + [+arrondi] en [w]. Tinelli voit plutôt un processus de labialisation de /Ɣ/ dans ce même contexte. Mais, dans un cas comme dans l’autre, la caractérisation formelle du phénomène est présentée comme une propriété particulière du créole haïtien et non comme le résultat d’un processus phonologique universel. Lowenstamm (1981), citant Karl Popper, définit le contenu informatif d’une théorie comme la classe des possibilités qu’elle exclut. En d’autres termes, une théorie nous permet de cerner de plus près l’objet de notre étude si elle a pour résultat de réduire le nombre des analyses possibles pour un ensemble de faits. C’est dans cette optique que nous désirons discuter de l’opposition /Ɣ/ : /w/ en créole haïtien à travers les développements récents de la théorie phonologique.

The following is an account of glottalization and gemination in the traditional vernacular of the Greater Bolton area. Bolton is a town situated 12 miles north-west of Manchester in northwestern England. The Greater Bolton area consists of the county borough of Bolton, Farnworth municipal borough, and the urban districts of Horwich, Turton, Little Lever and Kearsley. Its population is approximately 230,000.

From a consideration of various historical, industrial, economic, social and administrative factors, the Greater Bolton area can be shown to be a relatively homogeneous cultural unit within the urban field of influence of Bolton. This cultural homogeneity is reflected in the speech of the area, which is also relatively homogeneous in character, and distinctive when compared to the speech of other parts of Greater Manchester County, South Lancashire and Merseyside (cf. Shorrocks 1980:1–27).

This study examines certain properties of human memory which impose limits on topic accessibility in discourse. While the discussion is centred on so-called “dative” and “cleft” sentences in English, the work is motivated by more general concerns which have been variously referred to as “topicworthiness” (Thompson 1988), “information flow” (Chafe 1987; Kuno, 1987), “topic continuity” (Givón 1983), “degree of presuppositionality” (Givón 1979), “pragmatic perspective” (Dik 1978), “packaging phenomena” (Chafe 1976), “staging” (Grimes 1975), “communicative dynamism” (Firbas 1967), “the theme system” (Halliday 1967), and “linear modification” (Bolinger 1952). The term adopted here is “information flow”.

One important aspect of the study of information flow is the attempt to determine the conditions under which speakers make selections from among alternative syntactic expressions of identical propositional meaning. While some of the motivation for such choices lies in sentence-internal factors such as the animacy or definiteness of NPs (e.g., Ransom 1979), I shall restrict the discussion here to the issue of contextual motivation as originally developed in Smyth (1977) and in Smyth et al (1979). A particular syntactic choice is said to be contextually motivated if the information flow features which govern it are external to the sentence, and the alternative structure is contextually inappropriate. Where contextual motivation is absent, I claim that either of the candidate syntactic forms is appropriate, although sentence-internal information flow factors may then exert a weaker influence on syntactic choice.

Many working syntacticians or phonologists do not care about what all linguists tend to call philosophical issues, such as “What kind of object is a language?” They are happy to leave the ontological basis of their work unanalyzed. It is possible to accept this situation. We may choose to inquire directly and separately in what way pieces of external evidence from Acquisition, Borrowing, Change, and Damage may have an impact on ideas considered seriously by working linguists. However, the moment we decide to group the ABCD of these four domains together under the E of Externality, thus trying to organize them into an area of inquiry, this decision leads naturally to a more general type of question. Unless we grapple with such a question, our ABCD list begins to look like the well-known Borges quotation from a fictitious Chinese encyclopaedia stating that animals are divided into:

Nous présentons les résultats d’une étude empirique du discours mixte arabe marocain/français dont le but est de situer ce discours par rapport aux théories de l’emprunt et de l’alternance. Nous nous basons en grande partie sur l’analyse quantitative de la distribution des contextes syntaxiques où se juxtaposent des éléments des deux langues.

Progress in linguistic theory during the past 20 years has made it increasingly clear that language acquisition must be viewed as an essentially deductive process in which the child analyzes the input data s/he is exposed to on the basis of an innately specified set of restrictive principles — technically known as Universal Grammar — which narrowly constrain the kinds of hypotheses a child will consider vis-à-vis a given set of data (cf. Chomsky 1980, 1981, 1986; Hornstein and Lightfoot 1981; White 1982; Felix 1987). As a consequence, there is a growing interest in the question of how exactly principles of Universal Grammar interact with the child’s linguistic experience during the course of language acquisition (see e.g., Pinker 1984; Hyams 1986; Lust 1986b; Roeper and Williams 1987 among others for some more recent proposals). It appears that there are currently at least two competing views about the nature of this interaction. One of these views which I shall call “perceptionism” holds that the task of Universal Grammar (UG) is essentially restricted to constraining the types of intermediate grammars that the child will construct, while the developmental process itself is essentially data-driven, i.e., driven by the child’s (changing) perception of the external evidence. The other view which may be termed “maturationism” claims that UG is both responsible for the types of (intermediate) grammars that in principle may emerge and at the same time for the specific nature of the developmental process. Under the maturationist view language acquisition is therefore seen as a process that is driven primarily by internal, i.e., biologically determined maturational mechanisms.

Il suffit d’écouter attentivement plusieurs locuteurs franco-ontariens pour se rendre compte que /h/ est encore bien vivant dans cette province. Mais il est réalisé de manière si irrégulière qu’on peut se demander s’il n’est pas menacé de disparition. La chose ne serait pas surprenante, puisqu’on a déjà noté son amuïssement en latin, avant la période classique, et surtout en français moderne, quelque 20 siècles plus tard. Assisterait-on au même phénomène d’économie phonétique en franco-ontarien?

La question a déjà été abordée, dans des pré-publications, par Cichocki et Lepetit (1981) et Thomas (1982), mais l’absence de dimension diachronique dans ces deux études en a considérablement réduit la portée. Les données, en effet, étaient basées sur deux corpus d’adolescents francoontariens, provenant respectivement de Welland et de Sudbury, et ce n’est que par recoupements et déductions successives en synchronie dynamique que les auteurs arrivaient à postuler une évolution probable du /h/.

Although “language” and “community” are assumed for all normal, that is, stable, conditions experienced by human beings, both phenomena are problematic in situations where there is no shared means of communication. We should like to know how they emerge, which one takes precedence or is more dominant (if such can be determined) and what factors accompany the predominance of one of these phenomena. In this paper, I approach the problem by examining the origin of jargons and pidgins. I propose, as a modest contribution to the enormous task that has to be addressed, a set of generalizations that might serve as a heuristic for understanding pidginization as a context for the emergence of both language and community.

Years ago, Piaget (1926:121) reported the fact that children, in their spoken language, show little concern for identifying the appropriate antecedents of their pronouns. In the texts he presented, they would typically introduce one or more antecedents followed by a series of pronouns. Such examples show a simple rule of linear order whereby a pronoun needs to refer to an antecedent somewhere preceding it. Further, this rule appeared to characterize the productive language of older children in the years five to ten, when much of the structure of language has already been acquired.

In this paper I address the question what Media Lengua can tell us about the distinction between stems and affixes, the nature of lexical entries, and the relation between the lexicon, syntax, and phonology. It is part of a much larger attempt, coming from a variety of subdisciplines to provide what is sometimes termed external evidence for particular assumptions about the nature of the human language faculty.