The American Heritage dictionary, in calling on a ‘Usage panel’ to give opinions on matters of disputed usage, has developed a technique close to that of jury testing, with juries made up of naïve expert speakers, as used by linguists. The Heritage points the way to satisfying public demand for adherence to standards of correctness, so-called. The technique, however, needs to be more rigorously and consistently applied. Jury testing can also be used on a same-different basis to determine whether sequences of sounds which are identical are instances of the same or different words. The sequence suit, in ‘He brought a suit’, is one form in a context of legal action, but another in a context of clothing.

The concept head (of a phrase) is frequently invoked in transformational theory, but it has not been formalized and is perhaps not formalizable within the framework of a phrase-structure categorial component. However, if dependency rules generate the structured strings of categories, a head or governor is formally specified for each phrase, thus supplying additional information needed to determine the applicability of some transformations. Moreover, the problem of pruning inappropriately labeled or vacuous non-terminal nodes, which arises when transformations are applied to structures generated by phrase-structure rules, does not arise when they are applied to dependency structures. Although dependency rules are not well-adapted to generating structure-sensitive sets of strings, there is evidence that the structure-sensitive properties of language are more appropriately accounted for by transformational rules, leaving the catégorial component both context-free and structure-free.

Evidence is presented that the superficial Subject-Verb-Object word order of English arises by a transformation from an underlying constituent order in which clauses begin with verbs—or more correctly, predicates: the representation in question here is a semantic one in which noun, verb, adjective, conjunction, etc. are undifferentiated.

A small set of English verbs may take the inflections -ed or -t for preterit and past participle. The hypothesis that forms in divided usage are not randomly distributed was tested on groups of British and American subjects by presenting these forms in ‘forced-choice’ selection tests. Despite the well-known difference between American and British usage in preferring one or the other of the inflections, the -t forms were predominantly selected in participial use and for preterits in contexts suggestive of non-durative (‘effective’) aspect.

A theory has been proposed (Lieberman 1967) that accounts for some aspects of intonation in terms of two phonologic features, the breath-group and prominence. Acoustic and physiologic correlates of these features were derived by experimental procedures that made use of subglottal air pressure and flow measurements as well as acoustic analysis. Perceptual data indicated that listeners ‘decoded’ certain intonational signals by means of ‘motor theory perception’ structured in terms of the ‘archetypal’, i.e., primary, articulatory correlates of these features. In the present study this theory was tested by recording the electrical activity of the crico-thyroid muscle of the larynx for a set of 480 short statements and yes-no questions that sometimes had non-terminal [+prominent] syllables. Independently derived data of Fromkin & Ohala 1968 also were examined, and were found to be consistent with the theory proposed by Lieberman except that [+prominent] syllables in unmarked breath-groups had cricothyroid activity. In yes-no questions where the crico-thyroid was active at the end of the marked breath-group, non-terminal [+prominent] syllables had no crico-thyroid activity. The archetypal articulatory correlate of the marked breath-group is an increase in laryngeal tension; [+prominence] involves an increase in subglottal air pressure as well as increases in vowel duration and generally heightened muscular activity. Implementation rules relate the phonologic features to their archetypal and secondary articulatory correlates.

Schane 1968 proposes that non-uniqueness of underlying phonological representations be deleted from linguistic description by an application of the markedness principle. The present paper expresses disagreement with Schane’s proposal (§2), adduces Mandaic data interpretable as counter-evidence to that proposal (§3), and discusses alternative solutions (§4). Another type of phonological nonuniqueness is briefly examined in the appendix.

In this study an attempt is made to show that, upon close examination, certain phonemic alternations in Mandarin Chinese, which hitherto have been regarded as due to dialectal mixing, can be established as being internal evidence for some old phonological distinctions. The study examines various cases of dissimilation among pre-vocalic (or post-vocalic) segments which post-vocalic (or pre-vocalic) segments have conditioned within syllables during the history of the Chinese language. The discussion is focused specifically on the phonological factors conditioning the alternation of velar vs. palatal initial consonants, and of velar vs. dental final consonants. These alternations are interpreted as a special type of dissimilation—that of medials conditioned by final palatal nasal and stop, which can be reconstructed on the basis of quite independent external evidence. This leads to the reconstruction of a four-way distinction among Ancient Chinese ending consonants: labial, dental, palatal, and velar.

Constraints on pronoun-antecedent relationships in complex, coordinate, and simplex structures of Samoan are investigated. Three modifications of linguistic theory are proposed to account for the Samoan data. Fillmore’s ‘case grammar’ model is used for the descriptive framework.

This article deals with some semantic categories of shape as coded in grammar. An analysis is given of three patterns in Tarascan grammar: the ‘numeral classifiers’, the covertly ‘classificatory verbs’, and the suffixes of locative space—particularly the semantically complex imagery of the so-called ‘body part suffixes’; the ‘edge-orifice’ suffix is interpreted in considerable detail. The three semantically intersecting patterns are shown to mediate between abstract geometrical features and a concrete map of reference. A brief global survey indicates that many Old and New World languages have similar patterns, and raises questions about the universality of shape categories and their role in abstract thought and metaphor.

Assuming a semantic deep structure that relates to a grammatical surface structure provides a basis for the study of discourse forms in Saramaccan. The common travel narrative, for example, shows a surface organization into paragraphs and sentences with systematic omission of information in some places. To account for this organization we assume a deep structure relation among events, event settings, the narrative setting, the identification of participants in the events, collateral information, and background information.

This paper examines the speech of three English-speaking children at the age of two years. The first case studied illustrates the use of substitution analysis; the second, the use of phonological analysis; the third combines these with phonetic detail.