While it was once uncontroversial to refer to a ‘Chomskyan revolution’ in linguistics, a number of commentators have recently questioned whether generativist theory truly represents a revolutionary departure from earlier approaches. This paper defends the view that a Chomskyan revolution has indeed occurred—a revolution which began with the publication of Syntactic structures (1957) and which has had profound effects, both intellectually for the study of language and sociologically for the field of linguistics. Paradoxically, however, the revolutionary success of generative grammarians has not resulted in their achieving ADMINISTRATIVE power in the field—a fact which is both documented and explained.

The recurrent features of a ‘prestige language’ are broadly reviewed. The prevailing socio-political constellation provides motivations for its rise, the ways of acquiring it, the domains it transmits, and the causes of its decline. The process of its nativization can be analysed synchronically in terms of creolization, and diachronically in terms of stratigraphy. The linking of a native language to the dominant culture results in either substratum or superstratum influences. Nativization may be overt—as lexemic, morphosyntactic or phonological borrowing—or it may be covert, expressing itself in style, calques, and metaphors. The lasting impact of the prestige language consists in standardization, the creation of a sprachbund, and a relatively stable culture of bilingualism.

The historical relation between Hiberno-English and New World Black English is a fruitful research site for exploring the interplay of internal and external factors in linguistic diffusion. A recent hypothesis that NWBE habitual be derives from HE is first assessed through attention to the history of Irish/African contact in colonial America and the Caribbean, and then critically evaluated against six alternatives. On the basis of internal and external considerations, a hypothesis which involves decreolization from creole does (be), but incorporates possible influences from Hibernian and British varieties of English, is regarded as the single most viable hypothesis. Directions for further research on this issue are indicated, and relevance to larger theoretical concerns is identified.

Agreement and government can give rise to syntactic feature conflicts; e.g., a verb may have to agree in gender with a coördinate NP composed of NP's of differing genders. The resolution of such conflicts is to some extent determined by general semantic or syntactic principles (‘principled resolution‘). In addition, the existence of a governed or agreeing form that is neutral with respect to the features in question always permits a conflict to be resolved. There is idiolectal variation as to when principled resolution occurs, and also as to which neutral forms appear in the lexicon. But there are also cases (examples are provided from English, Xhosa, and German) in which resolution is permitted on the basis of a purely phonological resemblance; i.e., the fact that the conflicting morphosyntactic requirements lead accidentally to similar phonological consequences is sufficient to prevent the conflict from causing ungrammaticality.

Four major claims are made here about the phenomenon of phonological resolution. First, it does not imply that there can be language-particular phonological conditions on syntactic rules; a universal statement is involved. Second, phonological identity cannot compensate for syntactic feature distinctness in general, even in those languages that clearly exemplify phonological resolution; the conflicting items must also differ only in syntactically imposed features. Third, it is not the underlying phonological form of an item that determines whether it can count as phonologically identical to another item in cases of true phonological resolution; these items must be identical at a more superficial level (conjectured to be identical to the ‘lexical stratum’ of lexical phonology). Fourth, a small sampling of data (from Icelandic and Finnish, as well as the languages already listed) suggests variation with respect to the number of syntactic feature differences that can be surmounted in phonological resolution.

Old Spanish clitics or weak pronominals differ from modern Romance clitics in their syntactic properties. They are NP's or PP's, share the distribution of other phrasal complements, and undergo the same movement rules.

In Old Spanish (ca. 1200–1450), weak pronominals encliticize in Phonetic Form, after syntactic and stylistic rules have applied; i.e. they are phonological clitics.

In doubling constructions, including the resumptive pronoun strategy, the pronominal/clitic is the phrase in Argument-position; the doubling phrase is a topic or focus constituent, base-generated as a left or right adjunct of one of the maximal projections (i.e. VP, S, S′, S″).

Despite recent claims to the contrary, noun incorporation has an undeniable syntactic reality in some languages. In Greenlandic Eskimo and Southern Tiwa, the incorporated nominal displays many syntactic, semantic, and discourse-functional features of independent nominals—features which much recent work would lead us to doubt could characterize proper subparts of words. Linguistic theory must therefore allow for some limited interpenetration of the two modules of syntax and morphology.

Do languages die gradually or abruptly? Spontaneous speech samples were elicited from 40 speakers of Trinidad Bhojpuri in rural Caroni, Trinidad, ranging in age from 95 to 26. The oldest 28 subjects were representative of their age group; the youngest 10 were distinctly unrepresentative. Data corpora were pro-rated to equal length, and the errors and test features in each corpus were counted to distinguish statistically between native and non-native competence. Speakers formed two internally age-independent competence clusters—with the 10 youngest speakers and one older speaker a group apart, signaling a discontinuity between native and post-native competence.

Clark & Carlson 1982 claim that ‘every traditional illocutionary act is performed by means of an informative’; they therefore propose an additional initial informative illocution to every speech act analysis envisaged by previous theories. I show that C&C's analysis is unjustified; they apparently confuse perlocutionary effects of utterances or coöperative expectations from participants—and even the communicative presumption—with speakers' illocutionary intentions.

In Clark & Carlson 1982a, it was noted that traditional theories of speech acts cannot account for what is said to whom when a person speaks to more than one hearer at a time. The proposal was to add a new type of illocutionary act, the informative, in what was called the informative analysis. Allan 1986 has offered a critique of that proposal. This rejoinder considers the major defects in that critique: the fallacious use of illocutionary points and of the so-called communicative presumption; an unprincipled notion of addressee; a misreading of Clark & Carlson on participants; and a tacit confirmation of the informative analysis of certain indirect illocutionary acts. It is argued that these defects are fundamental, and thus Allan's critique collapses.

Geminate consonants and long vowels frequently resist the application of rules that would a-priori be expected to apply to them; i.e., they are frequently ‘inalterable’. This article argues that, by invoking the theory of CV Phonology, it is often possible to predict which phonological rules are unable to affect long segments. The prediction follows from rather minimal assumptions about how rules apply to forms.

Languages differ as to whether they are accusative or ergative. In other words, grammatical rules in some languages are sensitive to the distinction between Subjects and Objects; in others, to the distinction between ergatives and absolutives. The central thesis of this paper is that, similarly, rules in some languages are sensitive to the distinction between Direct Objects and Indirect Objects; but in others, they are sensitive to a distinction between Primary and Secondary Objects. A Primary Object is an Indirect Object in a ditransitive clause or a Direct Object in a monotransitive clause, while a Secondary Object is a Direct Object in a ditransitive clause.

It has been suggested by Sadock 1986 that certain constructions in Greenlandic Eskimo and Southern Tiwa provide evidence against proposals of Mithun 1984 concerning the nature of noun incorporation. These objections are discussed, along with issues concerning the discourse salience, reference, and semantic interpretation of incorporated nouns.

In autosegmental phonology, a sequence of adjacent identical tones can be represented (a) as a single tone mapped onto multiple vowels, (b) as a one-to-one mapping between multiple tones and vowels, or (c) as a combination of these extremes. The Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP) has been proposed as a constraint which restricts tonal representations to a one-to-many mapping between tones and vowels. It is argued here that the strongest form of the OCP is falsified by a number of languages which distinguish single vs. multiple tones associated with a sequence of vowels. The language-particular violations of the OCP constitute a strong argument for the full power of autosegmental phonology.

The ‘stepping-stone’ model has been used to study genetic similarity of peoples as a function of the geographical distances separating them. A gene is represented by one of several alleles, much as a meaning is represented by one of many words. Based on this parallel, the stepping-stone model is here applied to a body of linguistic data from a chain of Micronesian islands. The logarithm of the lexical similarity, when plotted against geographical distance, shows a pronounced upper concavity not found in the genetic investigations. This deviation from linearity is largely caused by non-homogeneity of replacement rates in the words studied. Another contributing factor is that the effect of distance on lexical similarity is much greater for the eastern islands in the group.

Rates of replacement in space, computed here, show a significant positive correlation with those in time, computed for a related language or for different groups of languages.*

Analysis has shown that discourse function is an essential facet of the meaning of grammatical elements; e.g. that perfective and imperfective aspect manifest discourse foregrounding and backgrounding. By focusing on the French S[imple] P[ast] and by analysing newspaper usage, we demonstrate that foregrounding is one result of two properties inherent to SP: DETACHMENT within a universe of discourse of a DIMENSIONALIZED FIGURE. But SP has other, quite different, discourse functions, in addition to important cognitive/referential, expressive, and pragmatic meanings—all of which are also attributable to detachment and dimensionalization. Thus SP (and, by extension, verbal grammatical categories in general) manifests a complex variety of functions which must be accounted for by any complete study. Discourse analysis should not supplant, but rather complement, more traditional semantic analysis.

That Meso-America constitutes a legitimate linguistic area has been questioned. To address this question, concepts of ‘areal linguistics’ are here surveyed and refined. Proposed Meso-American areal traits are reconsidered against these findings, and are compared with those of other established linguistic areas. Meso-America proves to be a particularly strong linguistic area. These results contribute both to the study of Meso-American languages and to an understanding of areal linguistics generally.

One component of D. Bickerton's Language Bioprogram Hypothesis is here empirically tested by reviewing studies of children's comprehension and production of articles. Seven studies reporting relevant data in English and French were reviewed. Two of them provide clear empirical support for the hypothesis that children are universally sensitive to the specific/non-specific distinction of referential meaning. Moreover, findings of all reviewed studies were generally consistent with a four-stage hypothesis of the acquisition of English and French articles, characterized by (a) the use of the indefinite and/or definite article(s) for specific referents, and zero article for both non-specific referents and naming; (b) the use of the indefinite article for non-specific referents, and the definite article for specific referents whether or not they are presupposed; (c) an increase in the correct use of the indefinite article for specific, non-presupposed referents, with a concomitant decrease in the correct use of the definite article for specific, presupposed referents; and (d) the correct use of the definite and indefinite articles.

Bickerton 1974, 1981, primarily in his work on Guyanese Creole, takes the position that an ordering Tense–Modal–Aspect is obligatory in creole languages. This paper shows that the situation is much more complex; reanalysis indicates that an ordering Modal–Tense–Aspect is more correct.

Although similarities and differences between speech and writing have often been studied, contradictory claims concerning the linguistic relationship between the two modes are still common. These contradictions can arise from basing global conclusions on restricted methodologies—such as assigning undue weight to individual linguistic features, or to choice of particular text samples and text types. The present study uses a ‘multi-feature/multi-dimension’ approach, which includes a broad range of linguistic features and text types in a single quantitative analysis, to provide a global description of similarities and differences among spoken/written text types in English. The distribution of 41 linguistic features in 545 text samples of approximately 2000 words each is subjected to factor analysis (a multivariate statistical technique). Three underlying textual dimensions are identified: Interactive vs. Edited Text, Abstract vs. Situated Content, and Reported vs. Immediate Style. To demonstrate the value of the multi-feature/multi-dimension approach, the specific findings of earlier studies are reconciled within the model proposed here.

Morphological marking of grammatical relations may appear on either the head or the dependent member of the constituent (or on both, or on neither). Grammatical relations—and whole languages—may be classified according to their propensity for using one of these types of marking. Implicational relations among various marking patterns can be stated: languages display a tendency to use one type consistently throughout their grammar. The difference in patterns provides a typological metric and a functional explanation for certain word-order preferences. For historical linguistics, it provides a diagnostically conservative feature and a clue to genetic relatedness. Although the head-marked pattern is cross-linguistically favored, grammatical theory is strongly biased toward the dependent-marked patterns that happen to dominate in Indo-European.