Examining Gordon & Lakoff's influential article (1971) on conversational postulates, this paper shows that the term postulate is misleading; that G&L's concept of conversational implicature as a case of entailment is mistaken; and that their view of the interaction of conversational implicature and syntactic rules is based on an incorrect analysis. It is suggested that some of the problems in their paper stem from a pernicious ambiguity of the phrase ‘can convey’.

The investigation of data from many languages has the following results: (a) the characteristics of classifier languages are distinguished, and four types are identified; (b) defining criteria are postulated for classifiers, and it is discovered that every classifier is composed of one or more out of seven categories of classification. It is argued that classifiers typically index some perceived characteristic of the phenomenon to which the classification refers, and so the recurrence of similar noun classes in unrelated and geographically separated classifier languages shows that diverse language communities categorize perceived phenomena in similar ways.

A morphological peculiarity of Hua, a language of Papua New Guinea, is that object and possessive pronouns with a certain class of verbal and nominal roots are infixed rather than prefixed. This is shown to result from a combination of two reinterpretations, Watkins' Law and the analytic leap, both identifiable as instances of abductive reasoning. The Hua example is particularly instructive in showing how a change from prefixation to infixation, essentially a morpheme metathesis, could have occurred gradually, and in suggesting a systematic source of counter-examples to the putative universal that the order of morphemes in a word is fixed.

The mechanism of reinterpretation can, then, be described ; but functional explanations that have been proposed are only descriptions of tendencies—exceptions to which, though frequent, are unpredictable. The necessary motives of reinterpretation remain unknown.

A replication of D. Bickerton's analysis of fi-tu variation in Caribbean English (1971) indicates that a number of overly-strong hypotheses about variation in decreolization must be modified. Variation in decreolization is not always bidirectional, not completely directed by the pressure to acquire the standard language, and not entirely constrained by deep-structure categories. But this is not to deny that variation is systematic. Rather, it is directed by both social and linguistic pressures, and is constrained not only by purely linguistic factors, but also by lexical categories established by psychological processes.

The presentation of Washabaugh 1977 represents a retrograde step in the analysis of creole systems. Though he may be correct in his belief that the constraints on complementizer variation were inadequately stated in Bickerton 1971, his decision to replace that analysis by one based on lexical diffusion and the perception of surface structures is vitiated by a number of errors, both analytic and statistical, and ignores what is most interesting about linguistic change, i.e. the capacity of the human mind to make quite abstract generalizations about broad linguistic categories.

An ‘organization of repair’ operates in conversation, addressed to recurrent problems in speaking, hearing, and understanding. Several features of that organization are introduced to explicate the mechanism which produces a strong empirical skewing in which self-repair predominates over other-repair, and to show the operation of a preference for self-repair in the organization of repair. Several consequences of the preference for self-repair for conversational interaction are sketched.