Grammarians tend to be occupied primarily with the establishment and description of allowed patterns and with the rejection of whatever falls outside these. Some way of looking at language in which a distinction is made between grammar and lexis seems to be necessary if the patternings are to be economically stated or defined. For there is a difference between speaking about the eligibility of a particular class of unit in some place or places in the grammatical structure of a language and about the eligibility of exponents of that class of unit in such a place or places in a particular sentence. And we can only preserve the simplicity of our grammatical description if we are prepared from the start to let it be understood that there are lexical factors, factors of collocational eligibility, which (in different ways to be considered later) tend to rule out of actual use a large number of ‘sentences’ (and smaller units) even though these seem to conform to all the rules of grammatical pattern. Grammarians do not, generally speaking, much concern themselves with the rejection of such ‘sentences’ as these, for whatever shortcomings they may have are considered to be grammatically irrelevant and more a matter for the lexicologist. There are of course marginal cases in the judgment of which the grammarian may feel doubtful whether he has or has not a claim to be involved; this is a difficult matter, to which I call attention but which I do not care to pursue.

The Rigveda contains five occurrences of the 2nd sg. mid. śṛṇviṣé (accented once), a form of the fifth-class present (śṛṇóti) of the root śru ‘hear’ with the ending -iṣe, otherwise characteristic of the perfect. Whitney, Sanskrit grammar §699b, qualifies this form as ‘of anomalous and questionable character.‘ Oldenberg, Noten ad 4.42.7, and Renou, Gramm, de la langue véd. §319.1, attribute the creation of śṛṇviṣé to influence of the perfect.

The linguist is concerned with meaningful generalizations about language. In writing a generative grammar, an ordered set of rules that predicts the sentences of a given language, he looks for generalizations that can be translated into economical rules. Optimally a generative grammar uses a relatively small number of general rules to predict many different structures. This paper will focus on a particular group of sentences—those containing adjectives—and construct rules to generate them. The first section will be devoted to the formulation of rules that bring adjectives into containing sentences, and the second will discuss adjectival comparisons (some of which are covered by the earlier rules) in detail.

Explanations of transformational grammar are needed at a time when this vigorous new approach to syntax is exciting interest and winning converts. Too little is known about its procedures and terminology for some of its more advanced calculus to be intelligible to the average reader of linguistics; there are no texts designed for the complete uninitiate, and no published lists of terms or symbols. An article such as R. B. Lees's Multiply Ambiguous Adjectival Construction in English, with its outline of aims and its step-by-step analysis of some familiar constructions, is opportune and welcome.

The recent rapid development of electronic computing facilities on college and university campuses has become particularly dramatic during the past several months. Dozens of colleges and universities now have ‘medium-sized’ computers such as the IBM 650, and several campuses have larger machines. The best known of the large-scale digital computers are the IBM 704, 709, and 7090 systems, which are very similar to each other. Among the universities which have machines of this type are the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the Universities of Michigan, Washington, and California (at both Berkeley and Los Angeles), and several additional ones have recently been installed or are on order at other institutions. Comparable machines made by Remington-Rand are available at Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of North Carolina.