The following description of Old English weak-verb morphophonemics is predicated on a constituent-structure analysis which differs in some respects from that implied in traditional grammars of Old English—particularly in the treatment of the gemination of final stem-consonants of verbs of the first class and the -i- element of verbs of the second class. A system of morphonemes, represented as a matrix of distinctive features, is posited for Old English, and the rules are cast in terms of these features. The resulting description emphasizes the underlying structural regularities of the weak-verb system, and is suggestive of relationships between ordered synchronic rules and linguistic change.

The Wu dialects of China are a group of dialects spoken in the southeastern part of Kiangsu province and in most of the province of Chekiang. The most characteristic feature of these dialects is the tripartite division of initial stops into voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated, and voiced aspirated, a feature which constitutes a defining differentia of Wu. Within Wu, the voiced initials of Chekiang are more fully voiced than in Kiangsu, and there is less double reading because of borrowing from Mandarin. Another intra-Wu contrast discussed is the fronting of diphthongs cognate with Mandarin ou along the Grand Canal.

The interchange of / and v (u) in German spelling is found in the oldest written records of the Old High German period. The reason for the introduction of v (u) as a symbol for /f/ in Old High German lay in the Latin spelling practices of the Merovingian period, and in the Vulgar Latin features which they reflected.

A re-analysis of English syntax is proposed, in which the forms have and be in their use as ‘main verbs’ are eliminated from the base and reintroduced by transformational rules. The rules are shown to be minor additions to rules required on independent grounds. Syntactic arguments are given first, then answers to possible semantic objections. It is further suggested that the use of these forms as auxiliaries can be explained in the same way. The resulting base rules are shown to be somewhat closer to a reasonable set of universal base rules than the corresponding rules of earlier analyses. The paper concludes with a discussion of analogous constructions in a number of different languages.

As the study of phonology has progressed, within the framework of generative grammar, certain principles have emerged governing the form and organization of phonological rules, and the manner in which these rules are to be interpreted. Several such principles are presented, with illustrative examples, from English, indicating the kind of evidence that supports them. Some possible alternatives are also discussed. Certain of these principles are quite abstract, and impose fairly heavy restrictions on the form and interpretation of grammars. If correct, they restrict the class of ‘possible human languages’ in non-trivial ways. The broader context in which these principles might have more general relevance is briefly touched on.

The grammarian, having delimited the range of data he suspects to be related, seeks to express this relatedness (= regularity = generalization) in the simplest and clearest (= most revealing) way. For example, examining some English phrases, he may notice:

1. (1) the man I do business with

2. (2) the man that I do business with

3. (3) the man who(m) I do business with

4. (4) the man with whom I do business

5. (5) the man to do business with

6. (6) the man with whom to do business

and would, perhaps, like to state the manner in which certain clauses and clauselike sequences are attached to a noun to form a complex nominal; he would be especially pleased if he could reflect the unity of the mechanism in a single statement. Most of the time, the data do not lend themselves to such elegant summary, and the grammarian must settle for a major statement backed up by one or two qualifying ‘remarks’ (as the older handbooks say). But he does not ‘settle’ easily.

A semantic analysis of the linguistic correlates of interrogation and declaration in modern English; a transformational presentation of the results; and an appendix showing the generation of a few illustrative sentences. The data for the most part are presented as sets of sentences constituting a dialogue between two speakers, and it is seen that a given sentence's characterization along the linguistic dimensions examined is in large measure a function of the immediate interlocutory context. Sentential and nominal valence are postulated as the formal variables carrying most of the functional load for the systems studied. The results of the analysis are briefly compared with those of Katz and Postal's solution to similar questions in their Integrated theory of linguistic descriptions. Finally, the transformational model employed deviates from customary models in certain respects, especially in that transformations are implemented in terms of geometric, rather than linear, structure indices.

PIE intervocalic *w is preserved in the Primitive Irish of the earliest Ogam inscriptions, but is lost by the time of the Old Irish sources. The details of the loss are described here, with special attention to cases of interaction with the processes of vowel loss. It is shown that a number of problems can be resolved by the assumption that *w before *e and *i was palatalized to [w'], with subsequent unrounding to [i].

Look and see are semantically and syntactically related, being similar in some respects and complementary in others. Their relationship can be elucidated by reference to the underlying strings into which they are inserted. Both these verbs appear to be verbs of motion of some sort: in the underlying strings, the set of prepositions specifically used in the verb phrase of a verb of motion may be generated. The aspectual complementarity between look and see follows naturally from the fact that they require mutually disjoint subsets of this set of prepositions.

A basic theoretical distinction must be made between lexicon and grammar: the lexicon is the cultural system of reference, i.e. the system of reference to the various basic types of phenomena distinguished by the culture; the grammar is the structure of discourse in that language, i.e. the structure of the spontaneous utterances produced by the native speakers of that language. The methodological discussion in this paper concerns primarily the units of the lexicon: what types there are, how they can be identified and collected. They fall into two major categories: minimal units and non-minimal units. On the basis of extensive lexicographic work, the author has found it necessary to posit one category of minimal units and two categories of non-minimal ones. The former are unitary lexemes, the latter are lexeme clusters and lexeme conjuncts. A procedure for the identification and collection of these three categories of units is described in detail.

The establishment of abstract underlying forms, along with the recognition of certain basic rules such as contraction of successive identical segments, apocope, etc., greatly simplifies the formation of Spanish plurals, as well as accounting for divers other phenomena such as stress position and word-final assibilation.

This paper examines the use of second person pronouns, the relationships between speaker and addressee, the information conveyed by the choice of pronoun, and some of the implications that can be drawn from such linguistic data for Serbo-Croatian as spoken in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. It is based on my study of the language in Belgrade from 1962 to 1965, and in particular on the results of questionnaires and interviews obtained during the spring of 1965.

Several linguists have contended that categorical perception is a central or even a defining property of language. The statements of this ‘polarity principle’ for language usually imply descriptions of two kinds of behaviors: detecting that two speech sounds are different, and identifying each of them. This article spells out the implied descriptions, then presents evidence that they are valid. It also shows, however, how categorical perception can be obtained for various non-speech continua, including hue, loudness, and azimuth. Thus, it casts doubt upon a popular theory that attributes categorical perception of speech to articulation. Instead, the article concludes that the description of language provided by the polarity principle is, under certain conditions, equally valid as a description of any behavior, human or infra-human—in other words, that the polarity principle is merely the formulation in the domain of language of some very general laws concerning the behavior of organisms.

A system of day-names, indicating the sex and the day of the week on which a child was born, was carried from Africa to Jamaica in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As personal names, they are now obsolete and almost extinct. All fourteen, however, survive as pejorative common nouns, retaining certain syntactic features (e.g. gender), but losing the purely semantic week-day feature. The series of historical changes, conditioned both by social influences and by the syntactic and semantic structure of the system, gives support to the subordination of semantic features to syntactic ones in modern linguistic theory.

Preliminary estimates of language divergence and word retention have been obtained by means of a log log transform from data consisting of the determinations of cognations in the lexicostatistical lists of Austronesian languages. Corrections have been obtained to the preliminary estimates by a maximum likelihood estimation method which assigns appropriate scores to represent the weight of evidence contributed by each determination of cognation.

In certain spoken Tibetan compounds, there is a medial p which does not occur with either member of these compounds in isolation. This raises several questions which we attempt to answer in this article: (1) Are there descriptive grounds for assigning this p to one of the member morphemes? (2) Written Tibetan represents to some degree a much earlier stage of Tibetan. Does Written Tibetan support the reconstruction of morphemes in p? (3) Is there evidence outside Tibetan to support such reconstructions?