Verbal sequences in Marathi are worth studying not only because of the crucial role they play in the sentence structure, but also because of the typological interest which attaches to them and to similar phenomena in other modern Indian languages, both Indo-Aryan and Dravidian. A recent article by I. M. P. Raeside provides a system for the classification of the Marathi verbal sequences in terms of their internal limitations, but does not consider the limitations obtaining between these sequences themselves and the other elements with which they co-occur in complete utterances. The purpose of the present article is to examine these sequences from the point of view of their sentence co-occurrents and to indicate the different types of roles which verbal sequences play in Marathi sentence structure.

Whatever our interpretation of the exact nature of the language of Latin documents and inscriptions of the centuries preceding the emergence of written Romance may be, there seems little doubt that the deviations from Classical or standard Latin which are found in these written materials are due to interference coming from the speech of their writers. Thus, ever since Diez and Schuchardt, Romanists have turned to the mistakes found in Vulgar Latin writings in order to find corroborating evidence for developments which took place in spoken Romance. Recent studies have shown that the mistakes made by the Late Latin writers and scribes follow consistent patterns which reveal the developments and even the underlying dialectal trends of their speech. The real problem of interpreting Late Latin documents and perhaps the real crux of the controversy connected with those documents is, strangely enough, not the interpretation of consistent deviations from Classical standards, but the evaluation of patterns of consistent conformity with that standard.

1.1. A realistic reinterpretation of the Old English spellings ea, eo, io has been suggested by Charles F. Hockett, who approached the problem de novo by investigating the evidence in the Vespasian Psalter and Hymns (Anglian dialect of the first half of the 9th century) and by interpreting this evidence in the light of modern descriptive techniques. Hockett finds that the three digraphs in question represented independent phonemes (not allophones of /æ/, /e/, /i/) at a time prior to the writing of the VP, although ‘Sound change and dialect mixture had probably led to a state of affairs in which every form pronounced with io had a by-form pronounced with eo (though not conversely), and in which every form pronounced with ea had a by-form pronounced with a or with eo (though again not conversely). These conclusions account both for the spelling habits which the Vespasian Scribe inherited and for the particular way in which he modified and varied those habits’ (590).

The analysis of tone phonemes, or tonemes, like that of segmental phonemes, necessarily involves considerations of phonetic similarity—necessarily, because there is no other basis upon which tones occurring in noncontrastive distribution can be phonemically identified with one another. But how is ‘phonetic similarity’ to be understood in the case of tones? Not, certainly, in the sense in which it is understood in the case of segmental phones, where it denotes some objective similarity in the articulatory or acoustic characteristics of the phones themselves. To be sure, even in this case phonetic similarity is a rather elastic criterion; but at least it can be shown, for example, that two vocalic phones have a common tongue position, or two consonantal phones certain common distinctive features. No such objective similarity is demonstrable in the case of tones—at least, of level tones; for, since it is relative rather than absolute pitch that is involved in tonemic systems, a given toneme may occur at virtually any pitch of which the voice is capable. Variants of a man's high tonemes may be acoustically similar to those of a woman's low tonemes; and in the speech of a single speaker a given level of pitch in two utterances or even within one utterance may represent variants of several different tonemes. The possibilities of phonemic overlapping of level tonemes are virtually unlimited.

Reduplication is considered as affix and morpheme, in connection with the assumption that verbal distortions have structural correlates, in order to raise a question of descriptive method.

In the Introduction to his Anleitung zu phonologischen Beschreibungen (1935)' Trubetzkoy speaks about the methodological differences between phonetics in its physical and physiological and also, perhaps, psychological aspects, and the other part of linguistics (Sprachlehre), and then makes the following statement (here translated) :