The term semantic structure is one that is often encountered these days. Some very rewarding effort has gone into the study of phenomena embraced by this term, but there is still no clear picture of the relationship between semantic structure, whatever it is, and language structure as we know it. One view, and probably the most explicit, has been that ‘semology’ constitutes a third subdivision of language, on a par with phonology and grammar (or ‘morphology‘). I am going to present here a somewhat different view, based on a proposed parallelism between phonology and grammar and their respective ties to the nonlinguistic universe. If this view is found to have some validity, it may serve to help us in our understanding of the interrelationships of all three of the phenomena listed in the title above.

The approach to language study represented by postulates and corollaries was once the basis of Bloomfieldian linguistics, yet it is now somewhat out of fashion. Sets of postulates have a tendency to grow in number and unwieldiness, and transformational investigators favor a more operational analysis and statement. Yet transformational study itself rests upon a postulate which is at present implicit. Stated without setting it into the Euclidian language and style favored by Bloomfield, it is that the relations between utterances are capable of being stated in the form of manipulations. Such an approach to utterances forces us to assume that all utterances contain items in combination, and that all items can appear in other utterances, which are then new combinations.

It is now nearly twenty years since my paper ‘The Indo-European semivowels’ was published in Lg. 19.83–124 (1943). Some recent publications, to be cited in §§15 ff. below, have suggested to me that a brief restatement of what I was trying to do there is needed.

The Arabic verbal stem is a complex of two interdigitated discontinuous morphemes, a consonantal root with lexical content and a vocalic pattern with the content of voice (passive vs. nonpassive), which may be augmented by one or two morphemes having roughly aspectual content, or which may be unaugmented. The verbal stem plus a verbal paradigm expressing the subject constitute the verb. If the paradigm is a set of gender suffixes alone, the form is an imperative; the imperative plus a set of personal prefixes constitutes the jussive, a command or conditional form; the jussive plus a modal morpheme forms the future, either an independent ‘indicative’ or a dependent ‘subjunctive’, depending on the modal morpheme; a variant of the jussive, the ‘energicus’, is formed by adding another modal suffix. Finally, the verbal stem with another set of endings, a fusion of personal and gender morphemes, constitutes the past tense. Another set of suffixes may be added to any of these finite forms to express the pronominal direct object.

The present study is an attempt to account for the variety in which Ancient Chinese (AC) syllables ending in -p, -t, and -k develop tones in the Peking dialect (P) that are identical to the tones carried by P reflexes of other AC syllables. AC syllables ending in -p, -t, and -k belong to a category traditionally known as ju4 sheng1 ‘Entering Tone’; other syllables belong to any of the three other tone categories, called p'ing2 sheng1 ‘Level Tone’, shang3 sheng1 ‘Rising Tone’, or ch'ü4 sheng1 'Departing Tone'. Entering Tone syllables neutralize the tonal distinctions which apply to syllables in other tone categories.

This paper is not designed as a survey of the field of language data processing. My views on this are set forth in some detail elsewhere. Rather, the purpose of this paper is to consider the varying extent to which a computer program can be integrated into the process of linguistic research itself. I am here limiting myself to descriptive linguistics.