In addition to the familiar outline organization of discourse in terms of coördination and subordination, some languages of Brazil and New Guinea (including Pidgin) have an overlay organization. It involves the near repetition of substantial stretches of speech in such a way that the repeated elements are placed in prominence. These languages also use repetition in ways that are distinguishable from overlay organization. The nature of overlays puts into a new context the question of reference in linguistic theory.

The syllable is an important phonological unit that must be formally defined within generative phonology. Evidence from Spanish, German, and other languages shows that a syllable boundary is necessary to designate the domain of certain phonological rules. The syllable can be formally and universally defined by a rule which inserts such syllable boundaries between certain sequences of segments. This rule must apply persistently throughout the phonological component, changing the position of the syllable boundaries as the sequences of segments change.

In line with recent claims, it is argued here that no rules in a transformational grammar should be extrinsically ordered. This claim is examined with respect to four well-known syntactic rules. Arguments which purport to establish that these rules must be extrinsically ordered are shown to be false, and solutions consistent with unordered rules are proposed as alternative explanations to the ordering hypothesis.

This paper discusses and explains some irregular Vedic imperatives in -dhi built with full-grade stem formants. Some archaic features of the aorist system are described in §§3–4.

In the northern Greek dialect of Samothraki, historical /r/ is reflected by zero intervocalically, by loss with compensatory lengthening between word boundary or consonant and a following vowel, by [ī] initially before consonant, by [i] between vowel and consonant, and by [r] finally. There is evidence that epenthesis of [i] occurred between /r/ and a following consonant, that /r/ was then lost with compensatory lengthening of the following vowel by a common rule, and that this long vowel was then reduced adjacent to another vowel by an equally natural rule. These simple assumptions account for the known facts.

The group of sentences called existential sentences in Chinese, containing the main verbs shì ‘to be’, zài ‘to exist, be present’, and yǒu ‘to have’ are examined. Their relatedness in syntax and semantics is explored, as revealed by the kinds of noun phrases which occur in these sentences and by the co-occurrence conditions of the three verbs. Six general observations on the properties of these sentences are substantiated. It is clear that the occurrence of the three verbs is closely related to the status and position of the NP's. The verbs are also individually selectable and transformationally introducible into these existential sentences. It is finally proposed that the three verbs are variant representations of a single Chinese verb in such sentences. The NP's in these sentences are also discussed in terms of their syntactic functions and characteristics such as definiteness and anaphoricness.

While the cyclic application of a phonological rule hinges upon the erasure of inner labeled brackets or phrase boundaries, the late (or post-cyclic) pitch assignment rules of Japanese crucially depend on the information provided by the inner phrase boundaries. Thus we find a basic incompatibility between the principle of the transformational cycle and the nature of Japanese accentuation. This paper first points out a serious flaw in McCawley's cyclic analysis of the accentual system of Japanese, and then offers a non-cyclic re-analysis. Since English is being decycled by a number of people, what follows helps to further weaken the theory of the transformational cycle in phonology.

[Part I of this article appeared in the preceding issue of Language.]

The form of English sentences presents a great contrast to the incorporating Chinook. But also the grammar which produces English sentences is very different. In particular, the kinds of transformational operations give contrasting treatments for semantic processes—reflexivization, etc.—dependent on underlying structural features which may be more or less comparable across the linguistic boundaries. However, the underlying base forms of English show that there is a difference in the grammars at the most fundamental stage—the repartition of the sentence into the predicate and its adjuncts, based upon syntactic evidence of a comparable sort. We will take up the implications of this below. Immediately below I want to sketch some of the features of English as they contrast with those of Chinook proper, to prepare for an analysis of their confrontation in Chinook Jargon.

The phenomenon of ‘non-restrictive’ use of reason adverbials is discussed, and evidence is presented that an account based on the performative hypothesis is defective in crucial respects. An alternative concept of the interpretation of because which is consistent with other facts is proposed and defended. Some possible objections are considered and general methodological implications discussed.

The Chomsky-Halle Nuclear Stress Rule and its modification by Bresnan, and to some extent the criticisms that have been leveled at it, have in common an attempt to account for accent in terms of syntax. Instead, accent should be viewed as independent, directly reflecting the speaker's intent and only indirectly the syntax. Accented words are points of information focus.