The following report presents some of the findings of several years’ research on the relations between standard English and the non-standard English used by Negro speakers in various urban ghetto areas. The immediate subject is the status of the copula and auxiliary be in Negro non-standard English. The approach to the problem combines the methods of generative grammar and phonology with techniques for the quantitative analysis of systematic variation. The notion ‘rule of grammar’ is enlarged to include the formal treatment of inherent variation as a part of linguistic structure. Furthermore, a model is presented for the decisive solution of abstract questions of rule form and rule relations, based upon the direct study of linguistic behavior.

The Negro dialect, Black English, has a distinctive use of be as a main verb, expressing iteration rather than instantaneous or constant states. Although the Standard English phrases will be and would be can have a meaning similar to Black English be, phonological deletion of these modals cannot account for all occurrences of be in Black English. It is argued that the best analysis is one which recognizes only one verb to be, which can occur without tense.

The distinction between ‘full verbs’ and ‘auxiliaries’ is not relevant to tense: criteria of compatibility with temporal adverbs etc. suggest that separate tense selections are associated with the modal and aspectual auxiliaries, which are accordingly analysed as main verbs in deep structure. Deep tense, a ternary system, is contrasted with the binary surface-tense system: deep tense is marked by conjunctions, by temporal specifiers, and by the class of the preceding verb, as well as by surface tense inflections; while surface tense marks the axis of orientation and unreality as well as deep tense proper. Co-occurrence relations between tenses and temporal specifiers are examined; the last section deals with the realunreal contrast in if clauses.

Over the last eight centuries the morphophonemic rules relevant to prefixes in Ukrainian have undergone a number of changes which are here defined and dated relative to one another. The changes are then categorized typologically, and the mechanism of change involved in two of the types is discussed in detail. It is shown that the direction of change in morphophonemics is determined by different synchronic relations between rules and marked lexical items. The changes analysed permit important inferences about the abstractness of phonological representations.

Fallacious reasoning has led transformationalists to conclude that natural language cannot be produced by a finite state device. An alternate argument is proposed, based on a distinction between two types of generative mechanisms: iteration and recursion to a depth of one. A device which employs these mechanisms is a finite state device; and this paper contends that such a device is adequate to describe the data of natural language, including English embedded relative clauses. The proposed solution also handles multiple-branching constructions such as are found in coordination, and describes the intonation pattern of sentences containing strings of relative clauses.

In Part I (§§1-2) of this paper, previously published, it was argued that a ‘mirror image’ convention must be incorporated into linguistic metatheory in order to account for various syntactic phenomena in the most insightful way. This convention may be interpreted as a notational device serving to collapse rules that are, in a special sense, mirror images of one another. Here, in Part II, it is shown that there is also lexical and phonological motivation for such a convention.

This paper examines ideas basic to the Praguean concepts of markedness and neutralization in the light of problems which arise in contemporary phonological theory. The partial reformulation of phonological theory suggested here goes beyond proposals by previous authors in that it provides a plausible explanation for a number of universais concerning stem-initial consonant clusters. The present proposal includes the claim that there is a universal, ordered set of redundancy rules—in the form of neutralization rules—which place constraints on the distribution of marked features in the lexicon. It is suggested that at least some of these universals are due to limitations of the peripheral speech production and perception systems.