The Old Persian construction type tya manā krtam ‘what I have done’, in which a genitive form of a nominal (manā), used to denote an agent, occurs construed with a participial form (krtam), has exact counterparts in Avestan and in Indic. The Old Persian construction is generally considered a possessive construction. This view is shown to be unacceptable; the Old Persian data require that manā krtam be classed as a passive construction, which accords with the facts of Avestan and Indic. It is also shown that the construction Ir. mana krtam, Ind. mama krtam arose through contact between nominal and verbal syntactic patterns as a variant of an older Indo-Iranian construction in which agent was denoted by an instrumental nominal form. The developments discussed have close parallels in Latin.

The declension of vocalic stems in Sanskrit as taught in Pāṇini’s grammar is presented here in such a way as to highlight those sections of the grammar that function in the formation of the declensional paradigm. Conclusions are drawn about the operation of a hypothetical grammar in which rules are ordered at random and in which the only significant principle of ordering is the context of the constituents in the base form.

The use of the Russian indefinites in -to and -nibud’ is analysed from the viewpoint of generative semantics. It is argued that the choice between the two suffixes is determined by the underlying structure of the sentence, where the ordering of quantifiers is of primary importance. The relative positions of quantifiers is also shown to be relevant for the semantic difference between the English pronouns any and every.

Almost all known varieties of vernacular Arabic are characterized by a functional and formal split of the old dual morpheme -ayn. It serves as a dual marker when appended to some nouns, as a plural marker with others; the two functions entail morphophonemic, sometimes also phonetic and syntactic, differences. Some of the features studied can be traced back to the ninth century; others are later developments.

This paper presents evidence for abstract phonology—that is, a phonology that recognizes underlying segments which are not realized phonetically. Two underlying vowel segments /ᴐ/ and /ε/ are posited for Nupe (a Kwa language of Central Nigeria), both of which are realized as [a], therefore merging (‘absolutely neutralizing’) with /a/. Arguments based on pattern congruity, naturalness, and a ‘weak’ form of alternation are brought forth in support of this solution. Central, however, is the demonstration of the psychological reality of these two segments. In addition, various alternate solutions are shown to be inadequate. Finally, implications of the abstract Nupe solution are discussed.

In Maxakalí, some etically disyllabic sequences of the shape [CVCV] are interpreted as emic monosyllables of the shape /CVC/: e.g. [taγӘT] /tat/ ‘to carry’. This paper (a) describes the phonemic system of Maxakalí, with special attention to the unorthodox variants of the consonants; (b) presents the psycholinguistic evidence supporting the analysis; and (c) discusses it in relation to the principle of phonetic similarity.

This paper presents and motivates a novel ‘epenthesis’ theory of Spanish plural formation as opposed to a recently proposed ‘apocope’ theory. Whereas the apocope theory provides a lexical explanation adding to the complexity of the lexicon and adds a rule, the epenthesis theory provides a phonetic explanation of the phenomenon by generalizing the independently needed rule of prothesis without adding any new rules to the grammar. Simplicity considerations appear to support the epenthesis solution, synchronically as well as diachronically.

Certain examples of English subordinate clauses are introduced in §1, together with the assumptions and evidence used in claiming that a problem, for which the examples are crucial, does in fact exist. §2 contains a brief description of J. R. Ross’s performative sentence hypothesis. §3 shows how Ross’s schema might be modified in order to account for the special problems posed by reason adverbials. §4 is concerned with the derivation of though clauses within a declarative sentence framework. §5 extends the discussion to other types of adverbials.