The heuristic principle of empirical discovery in semantics, as in all other understanding, is here derived from the particular case of words apprehended as mysterious in their environment; it is the rule that the best guess is that one which maximizes the redundancy of word and environment together. But the environment cannot be exclusively delimited; it is partly wordy and partly wordless, partly factual and partly fictionally invented, partly past and partly future, and so on without limit. Thus correspondence meaning (Hill 1970) can be separated out from ‘other’ meaning(s) only conceptually and then only for the moment; as soon as one tries to employ the distinction, it vanishes.

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.

Otto Jespersen 1917 pointed out that the normal meaning of the negation of a quantitative term Q is ‘less than Q’. This fact is shown to stem from the possibility of interpreting Q as ‘at least Q’ in some non-negative environments. The analysis is extended beyond quantifiers per se to other terms involved in inclusion relations, and it is shown that such relations play a role in determining the acceptability of various grammatical constructions.

In a recent paper, Bresnan claims to have shown that the Nuclear Stress Rule applies within the syntactic cycle, rather than to surface structure. Given this result, she claims to have found evidence for the existence of deep structure, for the lexicalist hypothesis, and against McCawley's 1970 analysis of English as a VSO language. B's claims are analysed here in detail. It is shown that her claims are without a basis in fact: the Nuclear Stress Rule is a global rule which applies to surface structure, but it has a global environment referring to other levels.*

The hypothesis that the Nuclear Stress Rule (NSR) of English is the last rule within the syntactic cycle, as recently advanced in Bresnan 1971, is examined and rejected. It is shown to be observationally inadequate: it makes incorrect predictions and is unable, in principle, to capture generalizations about English prosodic stress. Evidence is presented showing that, to the extent that sentential stress depends on structure, it is surface structure that is relevant. The feasibility of assigning stress by means of the NSR, at any level, is seriously questioned, and various facts are presented which indicate that prosodic stress assignment cannot be a function of structure alone.*

The Ordering Hypothesis of Bresnan 1971a projects the stress contours of simple S's onto complex syntactic structures by permitting stress rules to apply systematically within the transformational derivation. This hypothesis, a principle governing the application of stress rules, is distinct from the stress rules themselves. Berman and Szamosi 1972 fail to observe this distinction in their attempt to demonstrate the futility of any principle like the Ordering Hypothesis. As a result, their ‘counter-examples’, together with facts they do not consider, actually support the Ordering Hypothesis, which is necessary to project onto complex cases any valid generalizations about stress and surface structure or meaning. Lakoff 1972 also makes mistakes of interpretation and argument; his global alternative compares unfavorably with the Ordering Hypothesis in describing and explaining the apparent ‘optionality’ of stress contours.

The thesis of this paper is that explanation in linguistics must refer to a deductively formulated theory of language couched in terms of semiotic universals. A theory of this kind, utilizing complementarity and markedness as formal universals, is developed and applied as the explanans of linguistic phenomena from Russian, Spanish, English, and Old Balto-Slavic. Two other fundamental notions are exploited with the aim of demonstrating the explanatory importance of the functional relationship between rule components and distinctive-feature hierarchies in phonology, morphology, and morphophonemics. These notions facilitate a coherent, internally consistent examination of linguistic aetiology and permit inferences about the nature of teleological explanation.1

Three formally unrelated conditions in the phonology of Turkish ensure that no non-initial syllable in native words will have the nuclear vowel o or ö. Far from being arbitrary, this constraint, a phonological target in Turkish, produces a result that is compatible with a target in a number of unrelated languages, among them Russian and Romantsch. It is suggested that ‘universal’ or widely shared targets are often, if not always, maximally unmarked structures, and that the means languages employ to satisfy such targets may vary. But if these means are idiosyncratic, they will generally reflect structural peculiarities of the languages involved.*

Chinook Jargon was once the means of trade communication on the Northwest Coast of America. Its structural features are relatable at all levels to the several primary languages of its speakers in a systematic way, employing a framework of universals. When these relationships are traced for Chinook proper and for English, which are highly divergent in structure, it appears that Jargon sentences can be generated with a systematically ‘reduced’ grammar of either component language. Jargon is therefore not a unique grammatical system for all speakers, as in a ‘linguistic community’, but rather a surface medium of contact only, as in a ‘speech community’.*

Comparative treatment of the Germanic resonants has, in the past, emphasized Gothic. An analysis of irregular Old English material here leads to a better understanding of the problem. The present paper provides evidence for an extension of Sievers' Law to polysyllables, and a refutation of Lehmann's claim that the IE resonant system was maintained into late Proto-Germanic.1