Grammarians tend to be occupied primarily with the establishment and description of allowed patterns and with the rejection of whatever falls outside these. Some way of looking at language in which a distinction is made between grammar and lexis seems to be necessary if the patternings are to be economically stated or defined. For there is a difference between speaking about the eligibility of a particular class of unit in some place or places in the grammatical structure of a language and about the eligibility of exponents of that class of unit in such a place or places in a particular sentence. And we can only preserve the simplicity of our grammatical description if we are prepared from the start to let it be understood that there are lexical factors, factors of collocational eligibility, which (in different ways to be considered later) tend to rule out of actual use a large number of ‘sentences’ (and smaller units) even though these seem to conform to all the rules of grammatical pattern. Grammarians do not, generally speaking, much concern themselves with the rejection of such ‘sentences’ as these, for whatever shortcomings they may have are considered to be grammatically irrelevant and more a matter for the lexicologist. There are of course marginal cases in the judgment of which the grammarian may feel doubtful whether he has or has not a claim to be involved; this is a difficult matter, to which I call attention but which I do not care to pursue.

The paper which follows is an attempt to compare the analytical procedures of the greatest of British structuralists, the late J. R. Firth, with the procedures of one American linguist. At present, there is rather more than usual confusion and disunity among linguists in this country, so that I feel that the only course open to me is to speak for myself alone, though obviously I must also acknowledge that the great majority of the techniques, concepts, and entities which I use have originated with other linguists. I have been motivated by the belief that when there are two differing approaches to the same body of phenomena, with important differences in analysis and conclusions, the most useful discussion is detailed comparison to discover where there are agreements and what sort of disagreements there are, and, if possible, to remove some of the disagreements by showing that they are merely verbal rather than factual.

Alfred Louis Kroeber died in Paris in the early morning of Wednesday, 5 October 1960, in his eighty-fifth year. He was a member of the Linguistic Society of America from its beginning, a Signer of the Call that led to its founding, and its president in 1940.

Most linguists agree on the existence, or at least on the inescapable utility, of two kinds of basic elements in a language: morphemes and phonemes. The relation between them, however, is conceived of in various ways. In this paper we survey some of these ways, and then extend the discussion to some other aspects of language design and of linguistic method and theory.

In spite of the common practice of speaking of ‘pronominal inflection’ in explaining the origin of certain case endings in various Indo-European languages, and, in particular, when discussing the declension of adjectives in Germanic, it is generally recognized that the inflection of the pronoun, of all the categories of forms with which we have to deal in Indo-European grammar, is the most disparate and least tractable to reconstruction by the comparative method. It is indeed probable that there was no fixed pronominal declension in the parent speech—fixed, that is, to the same extent as the declension of the nouns. This too is generally recognized, especially in the instance of the personal pronouns of the first and second persons. However, the same thing is only slightly less true of the demonstratives of the third person, and indeed of the demonstrative par excellence, Gk. ho, hē, tó, Skt. sa(s), sā, tad, Goth, sa, sō, þata. The lack of agreement between the stems of the oblique cases of this pronoun in these three languages, especially between Greek on the one hand and Sanskrit or Gothic on the other, would seem to indicate clearly enough the striking lack of a settled inflection without need for further evidence—for example, the dative singular feminine, Gk. têi (<tâi), Skt. tasyāi, Goth, þizai. The case endings, to be sure, are in agreement (and also with the fem. ā-stem noun, for that matter), but the stem is t-/tosy-/tes-. Even within such a unified dialectal group as Germanic it is often impossible to reconstruct a Proto-Germanic form which will satisfy the testimony of the different historical forms, e.g. the dative singular masc. and neut. Goth, þamma with -mm- but OHG demu, OSax. themu with -m-; or OE þm, OIcel. þeim with a diphthongal stem, PGmc. ai, vs. the simple e of the former.

Verbal sequences in Marathi are worth studying not only because of the crucial role they play in the sentence structure, but also because of the typological interest which attaches to them and to similar phenomena in other modern Indian languages, both Indo-Aryan and Dravidian. A recent article by I. M. P. Raeside provides a system for the classification of the Marathi verbal sequences in terms of their internal limitations, but does not consider the limitations obtaining between these sequences themselves and the other elements with which they co-occur in complete utterances. The purpose of the present article is to examine these sequences from the point of view of their sentence co-occurrents and to indicate the different types of roles which verbal sequences play in Marathi sentence structure.

The Rigveda contains five occurrences of the 2nd sg. mid. śṛṇviṣé (accented once), a form of the fifth-class present (śṛṇóti) of the root śru ‘hear’ with the ending -iṣe, otherwise characteristic of the perfect. Whitney, Sanskrit grammar §699b, qualifies this form as ‘of anomalous and questionable character.‘ Oldenberg, Noten ad 4.42.7, and Renou, Gramm, de la langue véd. §319.1, attribute the creation of śṛṇviṣé to influence of the perfect.

The linguist is concerned with meaningful generalizations about language. In writing a generative grammar, an ordered set of rules that predicts the sentences of a given language, he looks for generalizations that can be translated into economical rules. Optimally a generative grammar uses a relatively small number of general rules to predict many different structures. This paper will focus on a particular group of sentences—those containing adjectives—and construct rules to generate them. The first section will be devoted to the formulation of rules that bring adjectives into containing sentences, and the second will discuss adjectival comparisons (some of which are covered by the earlier rules) in detail.

The classical Prakrit vowel system has been chosen as a starting point to study the history of the vowel system of Gujarati. The evidence for the intervening stages is supplied by documents, and it is proposed to show how many phonemic systems have to be postulated for these intervening stages. The changes in the phonemic systems have, in turn, been followed by significant changes in the grammatical systems, thus providing us with more reliable data on the stages in the history of the Gujarati language. Statements about changes in the consonants have been excluded mainly because they are relatively few, and do not play a significant role in the changes in the grammatical system. Where the changes in consonant and vowel systems are interdependent, statements about consonant changes have been made.

Whatever our interpretation of the exact nature of the language of Latin documents and inscriptions of the centuries preceding the emergence of written Romance may be, there seems little doubt that the deviations from Classical or standard Latin which are found in these written materials are due to interference coming from the speech of their writers. Thus, ever since Diez and Schuchardt, Romanists have turned to the mistakes found in Vulgar Latin writings in order to find corroborating evidence for developments which took place in spoken Romance. Recent studies have shown that the mistakes made by the Late Latin writers and scribes follow consistent patterns which reveal the developments and even the underlying dialectal trends of their speech. The real problem of interpreting Late Latin documents and perhaps the real crux of the controversy connected with those documents is, strangely enough, not the interpretation of consistent deviations from Classical standards, but the evaluation of patterns of consistent conformity with that standard.

There is a construction, ‘a man X in name’, with the word for ‘name’ apparently an accusative, which is met in a number of Indo-European languages, and with particular frequency in Hittite, Indo-Iranian, and Greek. The supposed accusative is regularly explained as an accusative of specification, and viewed as an inheritance from Indo-European. A few typical examples follow.

Explanations of transformational grammar are needed at a time when this vigorous new approach to syntax is exciting interest and winning converts. Too little is known about its procedures and terminology for some of its more advanced calculus to be intelligible to the average reader of linguistics; there are no texts designed for the complete uninitiate, and no published lists of terms or symbols. An article such as R. B. Lees's Multiply Ambiguous Adjectival Construction in English, with its outline of aims and its step-by-step analysis of some familiar constructions, is opportune and welcome.

1.1. A realistic reinterpretation of the Old English spellings ea, eo, io has been suggested by Charles F. Hockett, who approached the problem de novo by investigating the evidence in the Vespasian Psalter and Hymns (Anglian dialect of the first half of the 9th century) and by interpreting this evidence in the light of modern descriptive techniques. Hockett finds that the three digraphs in question represented independent phonemes (not allophones of /æ/, /e/, /i/) at a time prior to the writing of the VP, although ‘Sound change and dialect mixture had probably led to a state of affairs in which every form pronounced with io had a by-form pronounced with eo (though not conversely), and in which every form pronounced with ea had a by-form pronounced with a or with eo (though again not conversely). These conclusions account both for the spelling habits which the Vespasian Scribe inherited and for the particular way in which he modified and varied those habits’ (590).

It may seem obvious that when we set out to write a grammar of a language, the definition of that language is one of our first tasks. Further, that since we are dealing with language, the criteria used in our definition should be linguistic. These criteria should delimit the language geographically, that is, from other languages, and chronologically, that is, from earlier and later stages of the same language. Yet in spite of these minimum requirements for an adequate definition, our handbooks are not precise in their definitions or explicit in regard to criteria used for the definitions they give.

The use of synonyms in pairs or series is a familiar and much discussed literary device. While there may be many psychological and cultural reasons for the use of pairs of synonyms, and while classical Latin writers employed such pairs or series, the device seems to have mushroomed in the early Middle Ages, where it can be traced through the medieval Latin rhetorics and texts, as well as the early vernacular literatures. Quite recently several detailed studies have been devoted to the problem of the use of pairs or series of synonyms. Most prominent among the authors of these studies are Elwert and Pellegrini and a circle of scholars associated with the latter.