As early as the eighteenth century, grammars of the English language included judgments on the grammatical status of historical developments in the syntax of the inflected forms of the interrogative and personal pronouns. At present, the use of who for whom as the so-called object form of the relative and interrogative pronoun is generally accepted, at least in the United States, as standard colloquial speech. Similarly, the defense of It is me against It is I has a lengthy history. Finally, constructions like Him and me are staying, while not accepted as standard English, have been acknowledged as forming as much a part of a natural and consistent linguistic system (so-called vulgar English) as their socially more acceptable kin. The changing syntax of the pronouns is, of course, basically a historical phenomenon. Because of the normative approach and conservatism of the schools, as well as to the strong formative influence of literary tradition, many educated speakers of American English have, as more or less distinct styles of speech, the different syntactic subsystems characterizing these usages.

On the basis of Varro's etymology ‘uncia ab uno’ (LL 5.171), it has been said that Lat. uncia ‘ of anything, esp. as a weight ( of a pound) and monetary unit ( of an as)‘ represents an earlier *oiniciā. There are two possibilities of development: *oiniciā > *ōnciā > *ŏnciā > uncia, or *oiniciā > *ūnciā > uncia. The first requires a change known only in nōn < noenum (provided this etymology of nōn is accepted) and three regular changes—syncope, shortening of a long vowel before nasal plus consonant, and ŏ > ŭ before /η/. The second is not debatable, for oi > ū and shortening of the long vowel are both regular; given the etymon, therefore, it is the preferable development.

Comparison of ten Rhaeto-Romance dialects reveals that, in addition to Western Romance consonant lenition, the phonological innovations which characterize Proto-Rhaeto-Romance as against its source, Proto-Italo-Western, are the following: phonemic vowel length, posttonic syllabic consonants, a phoneme , a fronted /a/, the conditioned split of PItW , and a central rounded vowel series. From these innovations it is clear that the RR dialects are so closely related to French as to make attractive the detailed comparison of the two stocks. In this article it will be assumed that a linguistic stock x, the ancestral form of French and Rhaeto-Romance, became distinct after the beginning of the Christian era, that the six innovations arose in this stock to the exclusion of the rest of the Romance-speaking world, and that the Germanic invasions ultimately broke its unity by driving the two substocks territorially apart and out of communication with each other.

Traditionally, the Old Church Slavonic verb is considered to be capable of forming three types of aorist. The so-called root aorist is presumably formed by adding personal endings directly to the stem (Diels §114.1), as in the forms of the verb ‘to fall with the basic stem in pad- : 1st sg. 2d and 3d sg. pade, 1st du. padově, 2d du. padeta, 3d du. padete, 1st pl. 2d pl. padete, 3d pl. The so-called s-aorist (Diels §114.2) is presumably formed by adding the element s (which under certain conditions alternates with x) directly to the stem, as in the respective forms of ved- ‘lead’ and rek- ‘speak’: , vede, věsově, věsta, věste, , věste, , and , reče, rěxově, rěsta, rěste, , rěste, . The so-called x-aorist (Diels §114.3) is formed by adding the element ox, as in the x-aorist forms of ved- : , vede, vedoxově, vedosta, vedoste, , vedoste, and . In addition to automatic changes (such as x to š before a front vowel), it must be noted that the second and third persons singular are always formed on the root-aorist pattern; and that the third person plural ends in in the root aorist but in in the s- and x-aorists, as in the forms (root aor.), (s-aor.), and (x-aor.). The distribution of the various types of aorist among stem classes is the following: class 1.1 (cf. Diels §105–6) has all three types in stems that end in an obstruent, as in the forms and stems of class 1.1 that end in a sonorant take s-aorist only; stems of class 2.1 take either the root aorist or the s-aorist; stems of class 2.2 and 3–6 take the s-aorist; and stems of class 7 (irregular) require individual disposition.

This paper will discuss some ramifications of the rules for producing noun modifiers in English. Most noun modifiers can be accounted for in a generative grammar by three transformational rules. The first of these adjoins a sentence to a noun as a relative clause, and the other two form post-nominal and prenominal modifiers by the operations of deletion and order change respectively. These three transformations will be referred to as embedding rules. They are applied once, in order, to a given sentence, and adjoin that sentence to a noun phrase as modifier. Not every noun phrase can accept a relative clause, however; for the embedding rules to work properly the grammar must include certain constraints on their application. The determiner of the noun phrase is the decisive element in the acceptance of relative clauses.

The Semitic imperfect as represented by Arabic has three patterns with respect to the vowel of the 2nd radical: (ya)ktal, (ya)ktul, (ya)ktil; thus, yašrabu ‘he drinks’, yaktubu ‘he writes’, yanzilu ‘he descends’. In Hebrew, these patterns are (yi)ktal, (yi)ktol, (yi)ktel, with the vowels a, o, e respectively; thus, ‘he will study’, yišmor ‘he will watch’, ‘he will sit’. In the Ethiopian group, Geez (or Old Ethiopie) is known as the only language that had two patterns, namely corresponding to yaktal of Semitic, and going back to Semitic yaktul and yaktil, with the reduction of the short u and i of the 2nd radical to . These forms, however, are those of the jussive, not the imperfect indicative as in the other Semitic languages. The Geez jussive goes back to a perfect kätlä, the jussive to a perfect kätälä; thus, perfect läbsä ‘he put on a dress’, jussive perfect nägärä ‘he said’, jussive .

Linguists have discussed the question whether certain of the Bantu languages employ consonant clusters, or whether all the syllables of those languages are of the pattern (C)V, with some of the consonants being phonetically complex. In order to have a neutral term which favors neither interpretation, I shall use Hockett's word onset to cover any and all consonantal material which precedes the vowel of a syllable.

A previous paper focused on a process of affixation operating on the Mezquital Otomi verb-root-initial consonant. In brief, this process involves a series of glottal elements (?, h, and voicing) fused with root-initial stops, and a series of palatal elements (y, ñ, and t) fused with root-initial glottal consonants, ? and h. The present paper describes other simulfixes to complete the discussion. Two other processes, prefixation and suffixation, are also described in relation to the verb nucleus.