Culture, to employ Tylor's well known definition, is ‘that complex whole which includes knowledge, beliefs, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.’ It is clear that language is a part of culture: it is one of the many ‘capabilities acquired by man as a member of society.’

[A large part of the Slavic ne-presents, probably all imperfectives, have replaced older je-presents, a number of which are still preserved in Old Church Slavic and Later Church Slavic, especially Old Russian.]

Syntactical juncture, the pronunciation of words in a close-knit phrase with the allophones appropriate to the pronunciation of a single word, is a characteristic and well-known phenomenon in Spanish. However, so far as we know, there is no precise or extensive statement about which elements of an utterance are usually connected by close juncture. Tomás Navarro Tomás, it is true, has written on the subject: El grupo fónico como unidad melódica, Revista de Filología Hispánica 1.3–19 (1939); Manual de entonación española 41–59 (New York, 1944); Estudios de fonología española 77–101 (Syracuse, 1946); and his remarks, stimulating and valuable as always, will be considered later. But his approach to the phenomenon in question differs from ours. We should like to suggest a special technique, the application of objective criteria to the Spanish phrase system, and to supply some basic conclusions.

With the development of the sound spectrograph there is evidence of renewed interest on the part of linguists in the possibilities of defining in physical terms the elements that linguistics sets up by essentially different criteria. The spectrograph has many obvious advantages over other instruments at the disposal of the investigator of speech. It yields a continuous picture of the frequency–intensity relations over a time interval of about 2.4 seconds, and performs this analysis in well under five minutes. Moreover, it obviates the necessity of relying on the results of laborious and time-consuming analyses of speech sounds originally produced subject to various ‘unnatural’ conditions. The rapidity with which the instrument operates makes it possible to deal with large quantities of analyzed material, while its ability to handle rapidly changing sounds makes it unnecessary to restrict one's study to sung or artificially prolonged vowels, or to regulate the level of pitch or intensity (loudness) at which the sounds to be studied are produced.

The expression ‘Classical Chinese’ (wen-li) refers to the literary language of China, more or less homogeneous in syntax, but with considerable variation in vocabulary and style throughout the temporal range of its use, from the earliest times down to the present. In order to give a certain unity to the present study, I have taken a sample set of texts, bound together by a single writer of the T'ang Dynasty (a.d. 618–906) into a single book, as a kind of laboratory specimen of Chinese, as one might limit the study of a modern dialect to a single speaker, family, or village. The book in question is the Yu-yang tsa-tsu of Tuan Ch'eng-shih (died 863). This work comprises the most diversified material, from historical anecdotes of all kinds to religious and quasi-scientific data. It is expected that the results obtained will hold in general for the classical language of every period. Although some variation is to be expected in the specific classifiers used, little if any change would be looked for in the manner of their use.

Recent developments and publications concerning the analysis and classification of morphemes have been of great importance: they have provided a variety of new approaches to old problems, refined the statements of relationships, demonstrated the applicability of the method to a number of languages, emphasized the importance of distributional criteria, and pointed out a number of unsolved or perhaps only partially solved problems. All this has been a genuine gain. Nevertheless, a close examination of some of these developments is rather disturbing, and certain rather basic objections can be raised. For one thing, the term morpheme has come to be used by Hockett, and to a somewhat lesser extent by others, as a designation for forms which are related almost wholly in terms of distribution. I do not wish to deny the significance of tactics in linguistic structure; but when the primary criterion for the choosing of alternative possibilities is stated by Hockett as being ‘tactical simplicity’, I am inclined to doubt the validity of quite so much stress being laid upon distributional characteristics, especially when such a choice leads to the conclusions which Hockett has described. In both Bloch's and Hockett's recent papers on morphemic problems there is a conspicuous tendency to make covert distinctions more important than overt ones, though the treatment is quite different as regards detail.