The following discussion grew out of my attempt to fulfill a request from the Editor of Language to review the late R. H. Stetson's Motor phonetics: A study of speech movements in action, 2d edition (pp. xi, 212, with 122 figures in the text; Amsterdam: North-Holland Publishing Company [for Oberlin College], 1951), hereafter referred to as Mot. Phon. The routine reviewing procedures did not work out. Much of Stetson's material seemed unlikely to interest readers of Language; many matters which might interest them, and which Stetson's topic might seem to bear on, are either not discussed at all or are only obliquely hinted at in Mot. Phon. Further, Stetson's expository style, with its idiosyncratic terminology, its peculiar structure of repetitions and unsignaled transitions, its unlabeled analogies, its mixture of polemic and report, requires a paraphrase before discussion.

This is an attempt to suggest briefly a systematic approach to a number of desiderative or future formations in various IE languages. Taking laryngeals into consideration, I hope to show their possible inclusion under a single formula. No exhaustive study of all variants or subtypes is intended, and no attempt is made to trace the working of analogy which was certainly involved in formations of this kind. The main object is, however, to disqualify some of the more awkward appeals to analogy which have seemed necessary so far.

Certain Old Norse secondary formations were discussed in Lg. 29.26-33 (1953). Here I shall continue the discussion by adding examples which at the time of my previous article I had not yet investigated.

The republication of Benjamin L. Whorf's articles on what Trager calls metalinguistics has aroused a new interest in this country in the problem of the relationship that a particular language may have to its speakers' cognitive processes. Does the structure of a given language affect the thoughts (or thought potential), the memory, the perception, the learning ability of those who speak that language? These questions have often been asked and many attempts have been made to answer them. The present paper is an attempt to lay bare the logical structure of this type of investigation.