The traditional assumption of a cognate relationship between the Gothic 4th class of weak verbs and the Sanskrit athematic 9th class necessitates heavy dependence on analogical leveling in deriving the Gothic present indicative paradigm. Saussure and Benveniste have shown that Sanskrit 9th-class stems reflect ‘form 2‘ verbal roots with nasal infix and laryngeal suffix. This results in the stem-final sequence IE *-nVH-, where V stands for the ablaut alternation e ~ o ~ ϕ. In Sanskrit and other Indo-European languages, the zero grade of these stems can also appear with thematic conjugation. If such a thematic conjugation is posited for Germanic as well, the Gothic present can be derived without recourse to analogical leveling. The Gothic preterit is equally regular if the full grade is posited for V of *-nVH-.

English aspiration in initial and medial position is shown to be part of a larger phenomenon of tense and lax consonant alternations. The alternations are accounted for in the context of a set of syllabication rules. These rules precede rules that tense initial consonants of stressed syllables, assimilate tautosyllabic consonants, and lengthen final vowels.

Pre-16th century Portuguese had a slight raising of post-stress /e o/ to [ẹ ọ] (but not to [i u]) in pre-pause position, and a full raising of /e/ to [i] under nasalization in initial position. The first of these developments is based on a decrease in average energy of articulation after the final stress of a breath group, while the second depends on several layers of confusion of prefixes. Later changes found in several geographically separate dialects are explicated in terms of the pre-16th century situation and various aspects of the process of grammar construction, including several formal mechanisms of generalization. For the back vowels, Continental Portuguese and Brazilian share one innovation, but differ in that the former shows a generalization to mirror-image form. Ceylon Portuguese goes one step further by generalizing this raising to front vowels as well; but in the first two dialects, raising of the front series is a result of the pre-16th century confusion of prefixes, generalized in an interesting way.

The initial section of this paper states some basic assumptions about distinctive features, and describes the ten features of Tarascan and their combination into 32 morphophonemes. The second part treats six special problems of phonetic-phonological interpretation. The third demonstrates an intersection between sets defined by distinctive oppositions and sets defined by distributional criteria, leading to a taxonomy that is characterized by internally motivated relations of class inclusion. Finally, the discussion turns to the theoretical implications of such intersections and, by analogy, of other patterning which is not essential to inventories of units or linear orderings of rules.

An alternation of shwa with zero which is characteristic of a wide variety of morphemes is shown to support a generative phonological treatment of Hindi-Urdu in which aspirated consonants are analysed as units, while nasalized vowels are derived from underlying sequences of vowel plus nasal consonant. Some observations concerning the distribution of nasal segments at the level of systematic phonetics provide the basis for rules by which the five nasal consonants [m n ṇ ɲ ŋ] can be derived from underlying representations in which only two nasal segments are distinguished.

Through a detailed study of the reflexive and emphatic particles in Persian and some comparison with other languages, it is suggested that the reflexive and emphatic, although homonymous in many languages, have quite distinct syntactic and semantic underlying structures. On the basis of this, a proposal for further exploration is presented for the study of the particle self in English, within the scope of generative-transformational theory.

In the history of Portuguese, unstressed mid vowels in hiatus become high, while certain other hiatus groups evidence a complex process of assimilation. A binary system for representation of tongue height in vowels permits the formulation of explanatorily correct rules to describe these diachronic phenomena, while an n-ary system fails on several accounts.

The notions ‘taxonomy’ and ‘semantic contrast’ have played an important role in ethnographic semantics, but they are not so simple as is sometimes supposed. In particular, ‘level of contrast’ is an ill-defined and misleading term. When one formulates the notion ‘taxonomy’ in a precise way, as is done here, light is shed on several questions of lexical semantics involving the notion of semantic contrast. For example, several different types of semantic contrast relation, all appearing to have empirical reality, can be formally defined.

This paper uses data from eight Polynesian languages to sketch the typological characteristics of this group of related languages by means of statistical methods. In addition to specific problems of Polynesian phonotactics, two points of theoretical interest are discussed. First, an attempt is made to distinguish universal phonotactic features of morph structure from specifically Polynesian ones; and second, similarity sequences checked for statistical significance are suggested as a device leading from the set of similarity coefficients to a reliable typological classification.

Classical Mandaic manifests two types of systematic metathesis, both of which have interesting repercussions for Semitic and general linguistics. (1) t of the reflexive prefix metathesizes with an immediately following sibilant; e.g. *ˀitsamika > éstәmex ‘he was reassured’. Though this change must be posited to have occurred in Common NW Semitic, there is evidence that it recurred centuries later in Mandaic. (2) h as third radical metathesizes with an immediately preceding simple consonant, and then optionally undergoes total assimilation to that consonant; e.g. *mišhit > méhšeθ ~ méššeθ ‘I anointed’. But if these changes are posited as having been somewhat more general, a natural explanation is suggested for certain instances of vowel length, not only in Mandaic but perhaps also in Akkadian. This nexus of developments is strikingly similar to a complex of changes posited by Kiparsky 1967 for Greek.

The holophrastic nature of children's one-word utterances has long been recognized by linguists. The child will use gesture, intonation, and a single word to convey a variety of messages. Syntactic models of grammar, however, are not equipped to capture adequately this early stage of language development. Fillmore's case grammar comes closer, but is still based on the syntactic category of verb in the deep structure. It is suggested that Fillmore's model can be adapted to account for this early stage if verb is replaced by a semantic category. This category is semantic transitivity, which designates a proposition as communicating either an act or a state. With this adaptation made, it is also suggested how gestures and intonation can be formally included in the semantic model for representing one-word utterances. An analysis is then presented of the one-word utterances recorded by Leopold. The results show that children's early one-word utterances convey states, while later ones refer to actions.

A taxonomic phonemic analysis of Sarcee, an Athapaskan language of Canada, has recognized two length phonemes which may co-occur with any of four vowels—a, i, u, and o. The phonemic inventory has also included six inflected tones besides three level tones. The present generative analysis recognizes only one underlying vowel length and three level tones as distinctive. Tones are further classified into three functional categories: lexical, paradigmatic, and syntagmatic. The syntagmatic tone, which is parallel to the terrace-level tone of Bantu languages, can be predicted by some general rules. The generative account of this tone, however, presents a case which contradicts an empirical assumption. Also noted is the step-up feature of Sarcee which is comparable to the step-down feature of Xhosa and other Bantu languages.

Since at least the time of Ferdinand de Saussure, most linguists have insisted that language is a system of exclusively symbolic—that is, arbitrary—signs. There is, however, growing evidence that language contains many elements which are iconic—that is, imitative of non-linguistic reality.