Bad luck with biological models has left historical linguistics with such a heritage of confusion and specious explanations as to condition linguists to reject or ignore all putative parallels between languages and living organisms. Traditional textbooks for the history of the English language, though they show vestiges of biology-patterned language history, make regular protests that a language, after all, is not really an organism. Sapir charged ‘the evolutionary prejudice’ with being ‘probably the most powerful deterrent of all to clear thinking’, and offered a devastating, memorable comparison: 'A linguist that insists on talking about the Latin type of morphology as though it were necessarily the high-water mark of linguistic development is like the zoölogist that sees in the organic world a huge conspiracy to evolve the race-horse or the Jersey cow.' A few years ago Charles F. Hockett attacked the shoddy terminology of historical linguistics, demonstrating that, from both the pedagogical and the professional point of view, ' “evolution” and “progress” certainly ought to be avoided', that ‘law’, a longtime troublemaker, was distorted by deterministic biology as well as by physics, and that the use of kinship terms ‘must be modified in order to render them fit for use in discussing language’. Henry M. Hoenigswald's Language change and linguistic reconstruction treats language so unbiologically that the few traditional terms employed for language relationships—‘ancestor’, ‘daughter’, and 'sister'—are as startling as if they were bold, fresh metaphors. Quite recently Winfred P. Lehmann declared on behalf of historical linguists: 'We now view language as a set of social conventions so complex that a simple biological or geometrical model is totally inadequate. Rather than force one on language, we attempt to understand it in its complexity.'

This paper does not attempt to present a semantic theory of a natural language, but rather to characterize the form of such a theory. A semantic theory of a natural language is part of a linguistic description of that language. Our problem, on the other hand, is part of the general theory of language, fully on a par with the problem of characterizing the structure of grammars of natural languages. A characterization of the abstract form of a semantic theory is given by a metatheory which answers such questions as these: What is the domain of a semantic theory? What are the descriptive and explanatory goals of a semantic theory? What mechanisms are employed in pursuit of these goals? What are the empirical and methodological constraints upon a semantic theory?

It is commonly assumed that one can write a generative grammar while adhering to three methodological restrictions: (1) that neither semantics nor statistics enter into either the statement or the evaluation criteria of the grammar; (2) that the grammar be finite; and (3) that the grammar generate strings of morphemes, or, equivalently, that the last rules of the grammar be of the form X → a, b, c,…, where X is some grammatical abstraction (such as ‘noun‘) and a, b, c, … are morphemes or words (man, thing, happiness.) I shall attempt to demonstrate that it is not possible to write a grammar while strictly adhering to all these restrictions, and advance some arguments in favor of eliminating the last.

In a previous article I showed how matrix theory could be used to present some features of the relations between well-defined constructions. I claimed there that a traditional paradigm illustrates one kind of matrix on a word level but that matrix theory provides the basis for paradigms on syntactic levels as well.

Here I wish to give one small syntactic paradigm to illustrate this point. For structural data, I chose an article by James C. Dean. It has the advantage of brevity, so that re-statement of its essential components can be fairly complete without being tedious. In addition, it represents a Philippine structure so different from Indo-European—or, for that matter, from American Indian languages—and so little understood by those who are not specialists in Malayo-Polynesian, that any light thrown on its structure is likely to be welcome.

In a recent review Henry M. Hoenigswald brought into conjunction two facts of ancient Greek phonology which have in the past been considered separately. He did not, however, state categorically that they represent two facets of the same development, but merely suggested that they might. I hope to show in this paper that they are indeed connected, and that by treating them together we can clarify the phonology of the sequence /wo/ in Greek. The two facts are that the allomorph /a/ of the morpheme {negative prefix} occurs more frequently before /o/ and /o:/ than before any other vowel where one would expect the allomorph /an/; and that ‘prosodical digamma’ is absent in Homer before /o/ and /o:/, though it does occur before /oi/.

Walter Henzen, in his Deutsche Wortbildung, makes the following statement in the section ‘Ableitung durch Suffixe’: