An essential part of Bloomfield's definition of linguistic forms and constructions is the attachment to them of stimulus-reaction features, which are his definition of meaning. The linguistic scholar is still bedeviled by the many problems involved in talking about meaning, and he still lacks a body of dogma to which he can refer when meaning is talked about. This paper is an attempt to explore one of the problems and to establish a postulate which may be added to Bloomfield's Set of Postulates.

As early as 1886, Hermann Paul pointed out that all borrowing by one language from another is predicated on some minimum of bilingual mastery of the two languages. For any large-scale borrowing a considerable group of bilinguals has to be assumed. The analysis of borrowing must therefore begin with an analysis of the behavior of bilingual speakers. A vast literature has come into being on the subject of borrowing, particularly in the historical studies of individual languages; but there is still room for discussion of the relationship between the observed behavior of bilingual speakers and the results of borrowing as detected by linguists. Any light that can be thrown on the question by a study of bilingual speakers should be welcome to all students interested in borrowing and in the general linguistic problems associated with this process. In the present article an effort will be made to define more precisely the terminology used in the linguistic analysis of borrowing, and to set up certain hypotheses concerning the process of borrowing. It should then be possible to test these by their usefulness of application to particular studies of bilingualism and borrowing.

In comparative Germanic grammar it is a commonplace assumption that IE ē first became æ in Proto-Germanic and then developed into ā in the parent forms of both North and West Germanic. Prokosch, for example, remarks, Two changes [affecting IE long vowels] are generally ascribed to Primitive Germanic: that of ā to ō and of ē to ǣ. The latter is largely a “Phonetic Interpolation”, i.e., the assumption of a transitional stage between ē and ā. In Gothic, ǣ reverts to ē by a different process of tensing (raising and fronting); in North and West Germanic, ā results; this develops secondarily into ǣ in Old English, and ē in Frisian.'

The present study is an attempt to describe, in terms of form, the position of the actor expression in the colloquial Spanish of present-day Mexico. Regional, social, and chronological differences are disregarded, provided the material observed belongs, in the writers' opinion, to the colloquial form of speech.

Procedure. The material was collected during a stay in Mexico, from June 1948 to February 1949.1 We gathered literary examples from nine colloquial texts, representing different dialects and different social strata. This literary material we checked and enlarged with the help of informants, again from different regions and different strata. The bulk of the examples on which the investigation is based were secured from the informants, rather than from the texts: the language of even colloquial literature is often too artificial or too folksy to represent normal usage.

Students of dialect geography recognize, in general, three types of speechareas. A FOCAL AREA is one whose economic, cultural, or political prestige has caused its speech-forms to spread into surrounding areas. A RELIC AREA is one whose geographic or cultural isolation has permitted the preservation of older forms that have been lost elsewhere and has prevented the spread of local terms. A TRANSITION AREA is one which has undergone influence from two or more directions, so that competing forms exist in it side by side. Focal areas are studied because they set the patterns for standard types of speech; relic areas because they are able to throw light on earlier stages of the language; transition areas because they may help us to see what happens when population spreads from an area of early settlement to one of later settlement, or when arteries of communication are developed between areas of different cultural backgrounds. The speech patterns of a transition area are likely to be more complex than those of the other two types. For this reason there have been comparatively few studies of transition areas; this paper is a preliminary study of such an area. It attempts to find out what problems a linguist may expect to encounter in investigating transition areas, and to suggest what further studies might be desirable.