I am designedly using the term ‘genetic’ rather than ‘historical’ in this context because, after having been for thirty years a devotee of the discipline conventionally labeled ‘historical linguistics’, I have at present grave misgivings about the unqualified suitability of the label and, far more important, I have become alert to the implications of its possible inappropriateness.

To begin with, the label ‘history’, like many terms of ancient scholarship, is fraught with imprecision. It refers to an analytical discipline concerned with the study of the past, but also with a segment of that past regardless of any analysis, as long as there exist any written records. Only thus can we explain the fact that prehistory designates, at least in normal usage, another, earlier segment along the time axis, whereas such terms as prelinguistics (which mayor may not have been coined) and prephilology (which has actually been toyed with on one occasion) could meaningfully refer only to a prescientific stage of a discipline; that is to say, to cognition itself, not to an object of cognition.

Previous expositions of Japanese accent have assumed that unaccented forms of inflected words are to be equated in basic accent type with atonic nouns; they also assume that verb and adjective bases display two accent types, to be equated respectively with the atonic class of nouns and with the several tonic classes. It is possible to simplify the description by assuming that the phonemically unaccented forms have a morphophonemic final accent, automatically lost before juncture (which, in turn, may disappear). This leads us to reconsider the adjective bases, for which neither of the traditional patterns turns out to be atonic; moreover, an examination of new data reveals four different patterns, instead of the traditional two, with some bases exhibiting ambivalent behavior.

Samuel E. Martin has recently, for the first time, unequivocally demonstrated the Korean-Japanese relationship, but his sound correspondences are in the main based on comparisons between Middle Korean and Modern Japanese cognates. The Japanese forms which enter into his reconstructions are phonologically ‘antiqued’ on the basis of the traditional (and largely historical) orthography, but they do not take full cognizance of our present knowledge of the phonology of Old Japanese. The problem is particularly critical because of the nature of the Old Japanese vocalism, which, in contrast to the modern five-vowel system of the standard language of Tokyo, can be shown to have been an eight-vowel system. The present paper collects the available Old Japanese evidence for those Japanese forms which enter into Martin's comparisons, with the particular aim of seeing what light Old Japanese phonology may cast upon his reconstructions for the proto-Korean-Japanese unity.

Some postulates concerning the length of sentences, as advanced by Noam Chomsky, are considered in the light not only of grammatical possibilities, but also of behavioral probabilities; and certain implications for linguistic theory are suggested.

The phonemic inventory (overall pattern) of a language must account for every contrast occurring in any idiolect. Utterances occur in the phonemes of an idiolect, and phonemes are therefore the ultimate units of lexical items. But a three-stratum, twenty-seven level model for linguistic analysis indicates structural units—the morphophones—between phoneme and morpheme. Morphophones are seen as the basic units of the morphemes, and are themselves composed of dialectally different phonemic variants, which are non-contrasting in the same lexical items. Further, there are systematic alternations between morphophones themselves—substitutions, alterations, and replacements.

A system of linguistic description is proposed which distinguishes semological and grammatical levels. The first consists of units organized in multi-dimensional structures; those units can be combined into rudimentary ‘sentences’, each of which is related to numerous surface structures which are all paraphrases of each other. Implications are drawn for descriptive theory, lexicography, cross-cultural studies, and historical semantics.