[§1: Constituent, string, and transformational analyses compared. §2: A revised formulation of transformations as an equivalence relation among sentences. §3: Sketch of a set of transformations sufficient to characterize English sentences. §4: Properties of the set of sentences under transformation; derived well-formedness condition for derived sentences, composition rule for obtaining sentences from elementary sentences, normal form, informational correlations. §5: Properties of the set of transformations; elementary operations, and a derivation rule for obtaining transformations from them. §5.2: Appendix on zeroing. §6: Some properties of the set of sentences under the elementary operation.]

1. The problem. The objectives of diachronic linguistics have always been to reconstruct the particular steps by which a language changes, and also to hypothesize about processes of language change in general. Recent discussion of the latter problem has frequently involved five closely related proposals. First, language changes by means of a series of individual innovations. These innovations consist primarily in the addition of single rules to the grammar of the adult speaker. Second, these innovations usually occur at some point of break in a grammar; for example, ‘before the first morphophonemic rule involving immediate constituent structure of the utterance … before the phonological rules that eliminate boundary markers from the representation’. Third, these innovations are passed on to the next generation when the child imitates the adult. A child may internalize the adult's grammar; or, more probably, he will simplify it. This is because children have an ability, not shared by most adults, to construct by induction from the utterances to which they have been exposed, the simplest grammar capable of generating sentences. The simplification will give rise to a discontinuity in transmission from generation to generation. In the interests of preserving intelligibility, this discontinuity will be minimal. Fourth, whenever the discontinuity results in radical changes such as restructuring, a mutation occurs. Finally, these mutations, which affect the overall simplicity of the grammar, are rare.

1. 1. OE gycer ‘acre‘ seems to be attested only once. In the Leiden Glossary, gycer is used to translate the lemma of the gloss iugeres · unius diei opus aratoris.

2. 2. This gloss occurs in the section entitled ‘De Eusebio’, and has been traced to the Rufinus translation of Eusebius' Church History, where landed property is described in the following terms: nec haec sibi in pecunia subsistere, sed in aestimatione terrae, quae eis esset in quadraginta minus uno iugeribus constituta, quam suis manibus excolentes uel ipsi alerentur uel tributa dependerent.

1.1. The problem. This paper deals with regional variations in one aspect of German grammar—the case inflection of nominal parts of speech. In German dialects, as in Standard German, case is a category of every noun phrase, determined by its function in the sentence. Of the several constituents of a noun phrase, the noun itself is least often inflected for case. More frequently, the case of the noun phrase is exhibited by the determiners and such adjectives as may be contained in it. Noun phrase substitutes—the pronouns—are particularly sensitive indicators of the case of a phrase. Inflection for case in the determiners and adjectives is accomplished by means of suffixes; in the pronouns, by suppletion. The markers of case are almost always portmanteau morphs that are also involved in expressing other categories (number, gender, and determination) of the noun phrase.

1. In many languages there are clause types characterized by the presence of a subject and complement without an element of predication such as a verb ‘to be’. Clauses of this kind, which may be termed equational, display a number of similarities across languages. Frequently there is a special negative copula; in tenses other than the present, a verb ‘to be’ is sometimes required; word order may differ from that of nonequational clauses.

The purpose of this paper is to compare some aspects of the quantity systems of two related languages, Finnish and Estonian.

Finnish and Estonian belong to the Balto-Finnic branch of the Finno-Ugric language family. They have almost identical segmental phoneme inventories. Superficially it also seems that they have very similar word structures. Often Finnish and Estonian words can be matched morpheme for morpheme or even phoneme for phoneme. Both languages have fixed primary stress on the first syllable of a word. In principle, both are quantity languages: oppositions between short and long phonemes permeate the phonological structure of both. Upon closer scrutiny, however, the quantity systems of the two languages show far-reaching differences.

Introduction. In this study I present the solution to a well-known problem of aspect markers in Mandarin. The problem involves several seeming irregularities in the formation of negative sentences and of the so-called A-not-A questions. Essentially, my solution of the problem consists of the identification of the morph -y⊖u (as in méiy⊖u) and the aspect marker -le as suppletive alternants of the same morpheme. In the light of this identification, it will be seen that the relations among declarative, negative, and A-not-A sentences are both simple and regular.

The phonological description of Amuzgo will be presented in two parts. The present paper treats the syllable dynamics in relation to tones and segmental phonemes. A later paper will present an exhaustive catalog of vowel and consonant clusters.

On page 72 of his Syntactic structures, Noam Chomsky writes:

One of the nominalizing transformations will be the transformation TAdj which operates on any string of the form

and converts it into the corresponding noun phrase of the form T + Adj + N. Thus, it converts “the boy is tall” into “the tall boy,” etc. It is not difficult to show that this transformation simplifies the grammar considerably, and that it must go in this, not the opposite direction. When we formulate this transformation properly, we find that it enables us to drop all adjective-noun combinations from the kernel, reintroducing them by TAdj.