Lat. uespillo ‘undertaker for the poorest classes’ is cognate with Hitt, wašpaš ‘clothes’, both showing a stem form *wosp- with further IE cognates. Close analysis of a variety of texts in both languages demonstrates the important position in Roman funerary practice of the ritual of dressing the corpse (performed by the undertaker), and the specific use of the Hittite term in the Old Kingdom as ‘clothes for the dead’. This collocation provides the semantic point of contact between the two lexical items: the matching of semantic mark necessary for a satisfactory etymology.

For no apparent reason, Germanic may reflect a pre-Germanic /p/ where a reflex of IE /kw/ might be expected. The appearance of the /p/-reflexes is sporadic, inconsistent, and wholly unpredictable. All attempts to explain them in terms of phonologically definable processes are flatly contradicted by the reflexes themselves. It is suggested that the problem raised by their apparently capricious behavior is not a matter of phonology per se. Rather, they are due partly to borrowing (which is by nature sporadic, inconsistent, and unpredictable), and partly to contamination.

Rigvedic words beginning with a single consonant followed by a light first syllable (a short vowel plus a single prevocalic consonant, e.g. kárati, pr̥thú, etc.) are found to occur only rarely in positions where they follow a word ending with a light syllable. Scholars have been struck by this patterning when it has turned up in seeming instances of Sievers-Edgerton phenomena, for instance gámati ‘he will go’ < *gwm̥meti; the distribution of these words has been interpreted as a significant relic of the original distribution of Proto-Indo-European semivowel alternants. But it is pointed out here that metrical configuration alone is sufficient to account for all the facts, and that most (or perhaps all) of the original gámati types of data are insignificant as evidence supporting the Sievers-Edgerton theory.

In two of the language families of India, Dravidian and Indo-Aryan, there is a common pattern of onomatopoetics, in their formation and also in part in their syntactic use, with proliferation of items in most of the languages for which there is adequate information. Comparison, based on the etymological dictionaries of the two families, yields some forty areal etymologies, i.e. overlapping which provides what within a single family would be considered clusters of etyma. Since the Indo-Aryan family seems not to inherit the pattern from Indo-European, diffusion is postulated from Dravidian both for the pattern and for some etymological items.

The use of phonons in stratificational phonology is compared with the use of marked vs. unmarked features by transformationalists. In connection with a Bulgarian vowel alternation, the simplicity of the total description is taken as a basis for preferring one possible assignment of markedness over another within the stratificational view. The assignment of markedness preferred here runs counter to that taken as universal in recent transformational discussion. At the same time, it allows an analysis which agrees with some basic intuitions of classical phonemics. Markedness, it is concluded, is not necessarily universal; and its implications for simplicity must also be considered.

This paper describes an investigation regarding the degree of awareness of a number of different morpheme structure conditions in Turkish displayed by native speakers of that language. It appears that not all the morpheme structure conditions that can be formulated on the basis of the regularities observable in Turkish lexical items are internalized by native speakers; the test results indicate, rather, that with respect to their awareness of certain morpheme structure conditions, native speakers fall into two main groups, neither one of which can be said to know the relevant conditions in precisely their ‘correct’ form. These results support the view that speakers may well be only very imperfectly aware of regularities that do not fall within the system of fully productive rules of their language.

This study reports an experiment concerning the spontaneous responses of young children to commands differing in structural format and semantic content. The results indicate that syntactic comprehension exceeds production in ‘telegraphic’ speakers. Based on these results, conjectures are offered about the techniques which a child might use in coping with his linguistic environment.