This paper examines John Lyons' version of the widely postulated theory that existential there derives synchronically from a locative adverbial. It is argued that Lyons' hypothesis (and by implication other synchronic locative-based analyses of existential there) is false. An alternative analysis is offered, in which it is claimed that existential there is an NP, inserted for syntactic and pragmatic reasons. Diachronic and crosslinguistic evidence is cited in support of this view.

The meaning of the word lie (‘prevaricate‘) consists in a cognitive prototype to which various real or imagined events may correspond in varying degrees. This view contrasts with the familiar one in which word meanings consist of sets of necessary and sufficient conditions, and distinguish discretely between instances and non-instances. The relevance of the notions of prototype and gradience in semantics has previously been established in physical and sensory lexical domains. The present paper shows that these notions are also relevant in abstract and social domains. Results are reported from an experiment which supports this view.

The narrative is a naturally bound unit of discourse in which both formal and functional aspects of grammatical variation can be examined in a controlled and systematic way. This paper is a quantitative analysis of the past and the historical-present tenses as alternative ways of referring to past events in narrative. It shows how the organization of narrative delimits the area in which the historical present can occur, and how various structural and functional constraints restrict (or favor) switching between the two tenses. It also shows that the historical present evaluates narrative events because it is a use of the present tense, and that switching out of the historical present separates narrative events from each other.

This paper proposes a model of syntactic change based on a quantitative study of the rule of subject/verb agreement in spoken Brazilian Portuguese. Among speakers of the lower socio-economic levels, this rule is currently undergoing a process of elimination from the grammar. The model postulates that syntactic change starts at a point where surface differentiation between the old and new systems is zero (or nearly so); later it spreads throughout the language in inverse proportion to the degree of saliency of the surface differences between these systems in each particular environment. Thus ‘natural’ clusters of linguistic features arise only gradually.

Since the 6th century B.C., Jews have created unique variants of many coterritorial non-Jewish languages with which they came in contact; Aramaic, Greek, Arabic, Spanish, Persian, and German are just a few examples. Widespread shifts to non-Jewish languages throughout the world and to revived spoken Hebrew in Israel are now resulting in the obsolescence of contemporary Jewish languages and putting an end to 2600 years of Jewish language creation. The present paper proposes a typology of Jewish language phenomena, explores the common linguistic components and processes attending their genesis and development, formulates urgent research tasks in comparative Jewish in-terlinguistics, and assesses the contribution of Jewish language study to general linguistics.