Truth is the most fundamental of all questions of appropriateness in language. Communication presupposes non-concealment between interlocutors, which logically excludes all forms of deception, not merely propositional lies. The lie, broadly conceived, is therefore a proper object of study for linguists, and a necessary one at a time when lying is cultivated as an art. As members of society, we have an obligation to contribute our skills in this as much as in other ways. Happily, a number of linguists have begun to respond by investigating the lies implicit in presuppositions, deletions, indirections, and loaded and jargonesque elements in the lexicon.

The claim that Rule insertion—rule addition anywhere in the middle of a grammar—is a possible type of phonological change is considered and rejected. Some putative cases of Rule insertion are shown to reduce to rule re-orderings governed by revised constraints on re-ordering; others involve non-controversial rule addition prior to the phonetic rules of a grammar; remaining cases of apparent Rule insertion are the fictitious consequence of incorrect analyses. New phonological rules can be added at only one point: at the end of the phonological rules but prior to the low-level phonetic rules.

This paper examines the main phonological properties of vowel harmony, with facts drawn exclusively from Uralic and Altaic languages. It is demonstrated that vowel harmony rules apply iteratively; and that exceptional stems and suffixes differ in that the former do not serve as context to the vowel harmony rule, while the latter do. Evidence is presented for the incorporation of abstract segments and absolute neutralization rules into phonological theory. Specifically, abstract and non-abstract analyses are compared side by side in a Turkish dialect, Buriat, Manchu, Vogul, Cheremis, and Hungarian: in each case the abstract analysis is shown to be superior or the only one tenable. The abstractness controversy is discussed in detail, and a principled resolution is offered.

Halle & Keyser cast their theory of iambic pentameter in the form of a set of rules against which lines of poetry are matched to ascertain the degree of correspondence; the result of the matching process is a description of the line in terms of its metrical complexity. A sub-part of their rules is examined here and found to be needlessly complex. A new set of rules for this sub-part is then proposed which is simpler and more revealing.

The syntactic evidence provided by Robin Lakoff for the existence of a negative transportation rule is examined, and is found to be insufficient to establish the rule. It is shown that performatives are not the only verbs requiring tag questions to be formed on the next S down, and that this is of crucial importance in arriving at an adequate account of tag questions. Attention is drawn to certain semantic regularities which seem to account for the pattern of occurrence of tag questions without recourse to a rule of negative transportation. In the final section, an attempt is made to widen the field of discussion in the negative transportation debate by raising a new problem.

Hitherto, post-Saussurean linguistic theories have been unable to provide satisfactory descriptions of a creole continuum. This paper reviews previous attempts in the field, and indicates the need for a different theoretical orientation—one which would replace static, synchronic models of polar dialects with a single dynamic model incorporating both these and all the intermediate variations. In support of this argument, two sub-systems of the Guyanese creole continuum—the copulative and the pronominal—are described in terms of the dynamic evolution of the continuum as a whole; and it is demonstrated that, far from being an area of random variation, such a continuum represents a series of developmental stages ordered in accordance with basic principles of linguistic change. Finally, it is claimed that both the theory and the methodology advanced here cannot be limited to creole situations, but must have universal validity.