It has been suggested by various proponents of case-grammar that locational and directional expressions are not distinct in underlying structure and that the interpretation of such expressions and, where relevant, the selection of the preposition that is to occur in such expressions are determined by properties of the verb on which each expression is dependent. Fillmore (1968: 25) writes:

There is a certain amount of evidence… that locational and directional expressions do not contrast but are superficial differences determined either by the constituent structure or by the character of the associated verb.

The school of generative phonology ‘discovered’ two things. First, that both morphophonemic and allophonic rules could be formulated in terms of distinctive features (most of which had phonetic correlates). This was one of the reasons why both types of rules were brought together under the common name of phonological rules. Secondly, that these rules normally seemed to be natural, in the sense that they showed phonetic plausibility (related, e.g., to substantive properties of the vocal tract). This naturalness was attested by their tendency to appear in identical or similar form in several languages. For some time, then, the typical generative phonologist endeavoured to write all morphophonemic and allophonic alternations he worked with as natural phonological rules.

I. In recent years, considerable attention has been paid to stylistic variation in linguistic description. Variation which used to be described as ‘free’ has lately been described as fitting within identifiable linguistic and/or social parameters. I discern three trends. In the first, variation that was previously ignored is incorporated into description in a fairly systematic way. An example of this is Harris' (1969: 7) claim that variation among the Spanish forms [esbjuðo], [ezbjuðo] and [ezβuðo] es viudo ‘he is a widower’‘not only CAN but MUST be described in terms of stylistic levels… it will be shown that careful examination of the kinds of alternation under discussion leads to some interesting questions about the form and organization of phonological rules’ (emphasis original).

I. Noam Chomsky turned the previously rather specialized discipline of linguistics into a subject of considerable general philosophical interest by his argument that the discovery of universal properties of natural language requires us to adopt a ‘nativist’ or ‘rationalist’ view of human mind – a view according to which ‘our systems of belief are those that the mind, as a biological structure, is designed to construct’ (Chomsky, 1976: 7). (I shall use the terms ‘nativism’ and ‘rationalism’ interchangeably in this article, since any difference we make between them is not important in the context of Chomsky's work. The truth is that, as with many philosophical ‘isms’, the two words do duty for a range of many more than two closely related, partly overlapping theses.) When Chomsky began publishing, a widespread attitude to human language was that expressed by Martin Joos (1957: 96): ‘languages [can] differ from each other without limit and in unpredictable ways’. Chomsky claims that this is false: to quote one of his favourite examples, it is perfectly possible to imagine a language which forms yes/no questions simply by reversing the order of the words in the corresponding statements, yet in fact no natural language has a rule remotely like this (even though this rule seems rather simpler, in an absolute sense, than many of the rules which are found in natural languages). Human languages differ in some respects, but in other respects they are all cut to a common pattern. Much of Chomsky's and his followers' work consists of formulating and testing increasingly refined hypotheses about the precise limits within which natural languages may vary.

In the dialects of Early Modern English (ENE) described by John Hart (c.1550) and John Wallis (c.1680), as in contemporary American and British English, a number of vowel nuclei alternate in quality and segmental composition, depending on the specification for the feature [+tense]. These alternations have motivated analyses in Chomsky and Halle 1968 (SPE) in which the abstractness of underlying representations, the arbitrariness of diacritically used feature specifications, and the limited scope of some rules, motivate a search for analyses which are preferable in terms of applicable evaluation criteria such as the simplicity metric and the Weak Alternation Condition. Furthermore, the SPE analysis of Hart's system accounts for a version of the phonetic facts which in some respects are inconsistent with Hart's descriptions. In §§ 3 and 4, we will see that, by proceeding from the phonetic facts and not, as did Chomsky and Halle, from an assumption about the underlying representations, we may indeed propose phonological subcomponents which, as § 6 concludes, are more highly valued than their SPE counterparts, described in § 5. In § 7 it will be seen that the present interpretation of the phonetic facts described by John Hart is a more faithful version of that description, and it will be concluded that this fact adds support to the present analysis of Hart's vowel alternations. Historical claims made by Chomsky and Halle will be examined in § 8.

Educated spoken Arabic (ESA), like any of the world's innumerable other koineized forms of speech, greatly depends for its maintenance and dissemination on the binding power of writing, on its quasi-permanence and transferability in space and time. It is understandable, too, that koines – and the koineizing tradition is an ancient one in the eastern Mediterranean – should regularly call upon earlier, whence written ancestral forms and, as far as the Arab and Islamic worlds are concerned, the fundamental importance of the immutable Koran cannot be over-estimated. Although a koine needs a spoken base, Classical Arabic, itself probably never the dialect of any single group or region (cf. Ferguson, 1959), substantially contributed through its more or less fixed written norms to an older koine and nowadays, via the so-called Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) of contemporary literature, journalism and ‘spoken prose’, to a more recently emergent pan-Arabic or, conceivably, pan-Arabics. In a not dissimilar way, in the Romance-speaking area, Latin existed for centuries as the language, for example, of clerics, side by side with developing regional koines and subsequent new literary languages which borrowed greatly from it, just as the Classical Latin koine was itself modelled by writers, like Cicero, whose cultural values were determined and carried by Greek. A crucial difference, however, between Latin vis-à-vis the Romance languages and Classical Arabic or the substantially similar MSA vis-à-vis ESA is that the latter qua spoken language may not be any more freely written than the regional vernaculars of Arabic. It is not, for instance, orthographic or orthoepic difficulties that inhibit the ‘transcribing“ of spoken Arabic of whatever kind but rather the almost mystical regard in which Arabs hold their written language to the detriment of spoken counterparts.

Our aim in this paper is to study the s-ø alternation found in pairs like côtecostal. As far as we know, the phenomenon has not been studied in detail by any generative phonologist. We have found in the literature some passing references to the question but all the solutions seem to be based on scanty evidence. In contradistinction to previous approaches, we have based our analysis on an exhaustive list of all the alternations in question. The source of our material is the Petit Robert (Rey et al., 1972), which includes approximately 50,000 words. We are perfectly aware of the fact that no French person knows/uses all these alternations and are therefore dealing with an ‘idealized’ speaker. But, since the solution we propose is heavily based on the morphological marking of words, it would be no blow to our analysis if one were to discover (as is possibly the case) that in a particular dialect of French very few of these forms are actually related.

It is now well established that creole language situations such as those that exist in West Indian communities like Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad, etc., are characterized by continuing variation resulting from increasing modification of Creole structures in the direction of the lexically-related model language. The pace of the modification depends in turn on such factors as the degree of social mobility and the strength of corrective pressures from above. In all such cases, however, there develops ‘a continuous linguistic spectrum of speech varieties… which includes all possible intermediate varieties’ (DeCamp, 1971: 28).