The paper which follows is an attempt to compare the analytical procedures of the greatest of British structuralists, the late J. R. Firth, with the procedures of one American linguist. At present, there is rather more than usual confusion and disunity among linguists in this country, so that I feel that the only course open to me is to speak for myself alone, though obviously I must also acknowledge that the great majority of the techniques, concepts, and entities which I use have originated with other linguists. I have been motivated by the belief that when there are two differing approaches to the same body of phenomena, with important differences in analysis and conclusions, the most useful discussion is detailed comparison to discover where there are agreements and what sort of disagreements there are, and, if possible, to remove some of the disagreements by showing that they are merely verbal rather than factual.

In spite of the common practice of speaking of ‘pronominal inflection’ in explaining the origin of certain case endings in various Indo-European languages, and, in particular, when discussing the declension of adjectives in Germanic, it is generally recognized that the inflection of the pronoun, of all the categories of forms with which we have to deal in Indo-European grammar, is the most disparate and least tractable to reconstruction by the comparative method. It is indeed probable that there was no fixed pronominal declension in the parent speech—fixed, that is, to the same extent as the declension of the nouns. This too is generally recognized, especially in the instance of the personal pronouns of the first and second persons. However, the same thing is only slightly less true of the demonstratives of the third person, and indeed of the demonstrative par excellence, Gk. ho, hē, tó, Skt. sa(s), sā, tad, Goth, sa, sō, þata. The lack of agreement between the stems of the oblique cases of this pronoun in these three languages, especially between Greek on the one hand and Sanskrit or Gothic on the other, would seem to indicate clearly enough the striking lack of a settled inflection without need for further evidence—for example, the dative singular feminine, Gk. têi (<tâi), Skt. tasyāi, Goth, þizai. The case endings, to be sure, are in agreement (and also with the fem. ā-stem noun, for that matter), but the stem is t-/tosy-/tes-. Even within such a unified dialectal group as Germanic it is often impossible to reconstruct a Proto-Germanic form which will satisfy the testimony of the different historical forms, e.g. the dative singular masc. and neut. Goth, þamma with -mm- but OHG demu, OSax. themu with -m-; or OE þm, OIcel. þeim with a diphthongal stem, PGmc. ai, vs. the simple e of the former.

There is a construction, ‘a man X in name’, with the word for ‘name’ apparently an accusative, which is met in a number of Indo-European languages, and with particular frequency in Hittite, Indo-Iranian, and Greek. The supposed accusative is regularly explained as an accusative of specification, and viewed as an inheritance from Indo-European. A few typical examples follow.

The use of synonyms in pairs or series is a familiar and much discussed literary device. While there may be many psychological and cultural reasons for the use of pairs of synonyms, and while classical Latin writers employed such pairs or series, the device seems to have mushroomed in the early Middle Ages, where it can be traced through the medieval Latin rhetorics and texts, as well as the early vernacular literatures. Quite recently several detailed studies have been devoted to the problem of the use of pairs or series of synonyms. Most prominent among the authors of these studies are Elwert and Pellegrini and a circle of scholars associated with the latter.

In a recent article Hans Kurath has admirably stated the importance of a ‘careful consideration of the phonic character and range of the several phonemes’ in historical linguistics, even if the phonemic point of view is also essential there. Indeed, the primary material of a historical linguist consists of the written reflexes of languages as transmitted to us, and all synchronic and diachronic analyses have to be based on them. Phonetic interpretation is feasible but the obvious impossibility of direct observation or instrumental recording seems to preclude phonetic analysis in the study of a ‘dead language’. Is then historical phonetics without scientific value and significance? This judgment would be erroneous, since, after all, we cannot conceive of phonemes without their phonetic variants or allophones, and, what is even more important, we see the origin of phonemic change in the development of such allophones. Phonemic changes are the main events in the phonological history of a language; but they cannot be explained or fully described without postulating specific phonetic values. Thus there cannot be any historical phonemics without historical phonetics. Phonetic identification of phonemes and their variants is an important task in historical linguistics, and the methods used as well as the results achieved deserve a more detailed investigation.

In The pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States (Ann Arbor, 1961), Hans Kurath and his collaborator, Raven I. McDavid Jr., have given us the first detailed study in structural dialectology that has ever been made of a large geographical area. In the present article, offered in Kurath's honor, I shall try to make a similar contribution in miniature: a structural analysis of the vowel of a single pair of words, involving part of the short-vowel system of part of German-speaking Switzerland. Following Kurath's example, I shall examine the vowel phonically, phonemically, and historically.

Das Ergebnis des Zusammenstoβes der östlichen und westlichen deutschen Sprechweisen am Ende des Krieges war im groβen und ganzen nicht eine Mischung der einheimischen und der zugewanderten Sprachformen, sondern ein verstärkter Rückgang im Gebrauch der beiderseitigen Mundarten zugunsten der gemeinsamen hochdeutschen Umgangssprache, wie ich früher dargelegt habe.

The phonemic system of Old English has become a matter of increasing interest to linguists in recent years. Twenty years ago, structural linguists seldom concerned themselves with the phonemes of a ‘dead’ language, while traditional linguists and philologists generally regarded phonemes as something exotic, something outside the purview of normal language activities and studies. Since 1939, however, we have seen a fair number of publications dealing with the Old English phonemic system or portions of it, written either from a structural viewpoint or in a manner which indicates an awareness of the structural problems of the language.

The above passage in Chaucer's well-known poem has been variously interpreted. In the glossary to the Aldine edition, revised by Richard Morris, the word embosed is defined as ‘sheltered in a wood’. In Robert Bell's edition, somewhat revised by Skeat in 1878, there is a note: ‘Embosed is a technical term applied to a deer when so hard pressed as to foam at the mouth, and hang out the tongue.‘ These were the two most widely used editions prior to the publication of the Oxford Chaucer, freshly edited by Skeat in 1894, and both were several times reprinted. They also represent the two alternative explanations of embosed.

This study is intended to illuminate the highly recessive nature of the ‘New England Short o.‘ The varying stability of the feature from word to word and from region to region and the extent of divided and unsettled usage from community to community and speaker to speaker provide an unusual glimpse of a linguistic phenomenon long recognized but never adequately documented.

As has been pointed out on several occasions, varieties of American English spoken in the Pacific Northwest are largely derived from eastern sources. A good deal of information is already available on the geographical distribution of vocabulary throughout the United States, so that dialectologists now have a fairly clear idea of lexical continuity in the vast areas of western settlement. For this reason it has become standard procedure to identify dialectal types within these areas in accordance with the criteria presented by Hans Kurath in his Word geography of the eastern United States (Ann Arbor, 1949). A monumental work by Kurath and McDavid on the pronunciation of English in the Atlantic States has now been published, and new comparisons of dialect distribution east and west are therefore in order.

In the introduction to their recent book on eastern American dialects, Kurath and McDavid have a short section headed ‘Vowels in Unstressed and Weakly Stressed Syllables’. The first sentence is: ‘All dialects of American English have a free vowel /ə/ that occurs only in unstressed syllables.‘ The question here is whether or not it is proper or advantageous or both to include in a phonemic inventory of English such a vowel or possibly more than one. The alternative to something like /ə/ restricted to occurrence in unaccented syllables is of course identification of every vowel appearing in an unaccented syllable with one or another of the vowels appearing in accented syllables.

The identification of the morphemes and morpheme classes of a language frequently presents difficulties. Some of these involve problems in morphemic theory itself. This is true of two problems in Ocaina, one concerning morphemic segmentation and fusion, and the other concerning morphemic compounding as it distorts morpheme distribution classes. The data are presented and interpreted in §§1–2. The theoretical implications are summarized in §3, where it is pointed out that the interlocking of the lexical and grammatical hierarchies must be distinguished from effects of the interlocking of the lexical and phonological hierarchies.