The present interest in verbal aspect is largely due to the research of the Slavicists of the last century. Although many other languages (IE or not) have something which bears a strong resemblance to the categories of punctual, iterative, and durative as they appear in the Slavic languages, there are but few in which such a distinction is so clearly a part of the grammatical, nonlexical structure. Nevertheless, Slavic verb aspect has attracted the attention of some linguists to comparable semantic categories in other languages. This concept has been particularly fruitful for IE linguistics. In PIE the aspectual meanings are most particularly expressed by verbal themes, i.e. elements between the root and the ending; this process is described by Meillet and Vendryes (Traité de grammaire comparée §257) as expressing ‘les modalités de la durée, suivant que l'on considère le procès dans un point ou dans l'ensemble de son développement, dans son début ou dans son terme, suivant qu'on le suppose inachevé ou achevé, limité à lui-même ou prolongé sans un résultat, etc.‘

The first question to be considered here is whether the traditional view concerning the positional restriction of the phoneme /h/ in Modern English has been successfully challenged or not. Before considering the evidence and the arguments advanced in favor of a new doctrine, we shall give an outline of the traditional view in structural terms and point out the factual basis on which it rests. In doing so, we shall have occasion to call attention to structural facts in support of the traditional view that have either been overlooked or underrated.

The position of stress is generally recognized as contrastive in modern Persian, and examples of minimal contrast are often cited, such as máhi ‘a month’ : mahí ‘fish’. But grammars of Persian fail to give a complete account of the distribution of stress and most dictionaries give either sporadic and unreliable indication of stress or none at all. The primary purpose of this paper is to examine in some detail the position of word stress and its role in Persian morphology; but it will be necessary in addition to describe the phonological status of stress and to offer some preliminary observations on patterns of sentence stress and their role in the syntax of spoken Persian. Finally, some comparative and historical notes are appended.

In recent years there have appeared in linguistic publications a number of explicit references to the methodology and concepts of mathematical logic. In the abstract of one provocative article, Martin Joos writes, 'Physicists describe speech with continuous mathematics, such as Fourier analysis or the autocorrelation function. Linguists describe language instead, using a discontinuous or discrete mathematics called “linguistics”.' Joos spells out what he means by the identification 'linguistics—discrete mathematics' at a number of points in his article. ‘Ordinary mathematical techniques fall mostly into two classes, the continuous (e.g. the infinitesimal calculus) and the discrete or discontinuous (e.g. finite group theory). Now it will turn out that the mathematics called “linguistics” belongs in the second class. It does not even make any compromise with continuity as does statistics, or infinite-group theory. Linguistics is a quantum mechanics in the most extreme sense. All continuity, all possibilities of infinitesimal gradation, are shoved outside of linguistics in one direction or the other’ (702).