On 2 February 1786, in Calcutta, Sir William Jones delivered an address to The Asiatic Society, in which occurs a passage that has since repeatedly been hailed as the first clear statement of the fundamental assumption of the comparative method. We may justifiably take that event as the birth of modern linguistics. Between Sir William's address and the present Thirty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America there is a span of 178 years. Half of 178 is 89, a prime number. If we add that to 1786 we reach the year 1875, in which appeared Karl Verner's ‘Eine Ausnahme der ersten Lautverschiebung’. Thereafter, two successive steps of 41 years each—41 is also a prime number—bring us first to the posthumous publication of Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale and then to Noam Chomsky's Syntactic structures.

When the aims and methods of the Survey of English Usage were preliminarily drafted, analysis was envisaged as focussing upon ‘the plotting of variables’. The purpose of the present paper is to consider what types of variable need to be distinguished and what kinds of relevance the variables have for descriptive statement.

The relation between structuralism and dialectology has been the subject of occasional discussion among linguists. One extreme point of view apparently claims that since the elements of a system are defined only in terms of their relations to other elements, the systems as a whole are incommensurate. This view, which essentially legislates the problem of structural dialectology out of existence, has as a consequence the clearly untenable proposition that two dialects of English, for example, are no more similar than a dialect of English and a dialect of Chinese.

It is well known that ‘Pāṇini's work is exclusively concerned with defining (lakṣaya-) the procedures of word formation (saṃskāra)—anything else does not fall within its scope …‘ Though Pāṇini's description presupposes a phonologic analysis, the rules of the aṣṭadhyāyī are merely preceded by a list of sounds (śivasūtras) used in the following statements as the basis for morphophonemic formulations, and phonologic details of members of this list are not elaborated.

The plan of the present work is to describe first the simple sentence, and the phrases which enter into such sentences as constituents; then the principal types of sentences (clauses) incorporated into superordinate complex sentences; and finally, certain special syntactic problems (enclisis, negation, interrogation). Serbo-Coatian examples cited have been checked against the speech of one native informant, my wife.

The traditional definition of conjoining particles in English is this:

[i] Conjunction: A connective or connecting particle with the special function of joining together sentences, clauses, phrases or words.

Madurese, like some of its neighboring languages (Sundanese, Javanese, Balinese, and Sasak), has socially determined choices of words depending on the relations between speaker and addressee, and on the status of the subject of discourse (referee). There are two independent systems involved, though with overlap at some points.

Haas, in a recent article entitled ‘Shasta and Proto-Hokan’, presents evidence to suggest the changes PH *ama > Sh. /a·/ and PH *ima or *ami > Sh. /e·/. Her recognition and documentation of these changes are valuable contributions to Hokan studies.