The split of IE *VRs and *VsR into VRR in Lesbian and Thessalian and VR in the other dialects cuts a striking isogloss through ancient Greece. This split may be related to other developments of Greek by applying Jakobson's feature system to four Greek sound changes, all of them in essence well known and widely accepted. It is then shown that this suffices to solve, with no modification of the rules, the problem of the reflexes of IE *ws and *sy in Greek, and accounts for such hitherto ill-explained developments as *awsōs > Doric āwṓs, Lesbian aúōs ‘dawn’; *awsēr > Ionic āḗr, Lesbian aúēr ‘lower atmosphere’; *dewsomai > Attic déomai, Lesbian and Thessalian deúomai ‘need’; *dhusyō > Ionic thūō, Aeolic thuíō ‘rage’; and gen. *-osyo > Attic and Ionic *-ōo > -ō, Aeolic -oio.

The following article is, first, an algorithm or set of rules for deriving the phonology of Proto-Germanic from that of Indo-European. The input to this set of rules consists of individual IE lexical items specified completely (i.e. allophonically) in terms of Jakobsonian distinctive features; the output consists of the corresponding lexical items of Proto-Germanic. Second, the article gives a criterion of simplicity for the construction of a similar algorithm describing phonological change from a prior stage of a language to a later one. The claim made for such a set of optimally written rules is that if one orders the rules so that the fewest possible feature specifications are used in their formulation, the order in which the rules occur reflects the historical chronology of the sound changes.

According to the conventional formula, IE /e/ is expected to appear in Gothic as ai /e/ only when bearing primary or secondary stress and occurring before one of the consonants h h r. This formula per se fails to explain Go. ai in reduplicating syllables of preterits like fai-falþ, sai-so, lai-lot, which contain no h, h or r. The evidence presented below suggests that ai in all Gothic reduplicating syllables reflects an exactly definable process of assimilation. The same may well be true of au /o/ in aufto ‘perhaps’.

The problem here is to determine whether the OLF i-umlaut reflexes of PGmc. */u ū ō aw/ were phonemically distinct from their non-umlaut reflexes. This is interesting because: (1) the OLF orthography offers no consistent evidence for phonemic contrast between umlaut reflexes of these sounds and their non-umlaut counterparts; (2) Middle Low Franconian (Middle Limburgic) does show phonemic contrasts here; yet (3) there was apparently no factor present in Old Low Franconian that would have led to the phonemic splits implied by the Middle Limburgic contrasts. The present paper makes the assumption that a consistently applied orthographic distinction implies a phonemic contrast, and points out some obvious limitations of this assumption. The vowels of weakly stressed final syllables are discussed, and it is suggested that previously distinct vowels had merged in a single vowel in this position. It is finally concluded that the OLF reflexes of PGmc. */u ū ō aw/ in umlaut position were phonemically distinct from the reflexes of those sounds in other positions.

The following description of Old English weak-verb morphophonemics is predicated on a constituent-structure analysis which differs in some respects from that implied in traditional grammars of Old English—particularly in the treatment of the gemination of final stem-consonants of verbs of the first class and the -i- element of verbs of the second class. A system of morphonemes, represented as a matrix of distinctive features, is posited for Old English, and the rules are cast in terms of these features. The resulting description emphasizes the underlying structural regularities of the weak-verb system, and is suggestive of relationships between ordered synchronic rules and linguistic change.

A semantic analysis of the linguistic correlates of interrogation and declaration in modern English; a transformational presentation of the results; and an appendix showing the generation of a few illustrative sentences. The data for the most part are presented as sets of sentences constituting a dialogue between two speakers, and it is seen that a given sentence's characterization along the linguistic dimensions examined is in large measure a function of the immediate interlocutory context. Sentential and nominal valence are postulated as the formal variables carrying most of the functional load for the systems studied. The results of the analysis are briefly compared with those of Katz and Postal's solution to similar questions in their Integrated theory of linguistic descriptions. Finally, the transformational model employed deviates from customary models in certain respects, especially in that transformations are implemented in terms of geometric, rather than linear, structure indices.

A basic theoretical distinction must be made between lexicon and grammar: the lexicon is the cultural system of reference, i.e. the system of reference to the various basic types of phenomena distinguished by the culture; the grammar is the structure of discourse in that language, i.e. the structure of the spontaneous utterances produced by the native speakers of that language. The methodological discussion in this paper concerns primarily the units of the lexicon: what types there are, how they can be identified and collected. They fall into two major categories: minimal units and non-minimal units. On the basis of extensive lexicographic work, the author has found it necessary to posit one category of minimal units and two categories of non-minimal ones. The former are unitary lexemes, the latter are lexeme clusters and lexeme conjuncts. A procedure for the identification and collection of these three categories of units is described in detail.

This paper examines the use of second person pronouns, the relationships between speaker and addressee, the information conveyed by the choice of pronoun, and some of the implications that can be drawn from such linguistic data for Serbo-Croatian as spoken in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. It is based on my study of the language in Belgrade from 1962 to 1965, and in particular on the results of questionnaires and interviews obtained during the spring of 1965.