Bad luck with biological models has left historical linguistics with such a heritage of confusion and specious explanations as to condition linguists to reject or ignore all putative parallels between languages and living organisms. Traditional textbooks for the history of the English language, though they show vestiges of biology-patterned language history, make regular protests that a language, after all, is not really an organism. Sapir charged ‘the evolutionary prejudice’ with being ‘probably the most powerful deterrent of all to clear thinking’, and offered a devastating, memorable comparison: 'A linguist that insists on talking about the Latin type of morphology as though it were necessarily the high-water mark of linguistic development is like the zoölogist that sees in the organic world a huge conspiracy to evolve the race-horse or the Jersey cow.' A few years ago Charles F. Hockett attacked the shoddy terminology of historical linguistics, demonstrating that, from both the pedagogical and the professional point of view, ' “evolution” and “progress” certainly ought to be avoided', that ‘law’, a longtime troublemaker, was distorted by deterministic biology as well as by physics, and that the use of kinship terms ‘must be modified in order to render them fit for use in discussing language’. Henry M. Hoenigswald's Language change and linguistic reconstruction treats language so unbiologically that the few traditional terms employed for language relationships—‘ancestor’, ‘daughter’, and 'sister'—are as startling as if they were bold, fresh metaphors. Quite recently Winfred P. Lehmann declared on behalf of historical linguists: 'We now view language as a set of social conventions so complex that a simple biological or geometrical model is totally inadequate. Rather than force one on language, we attempt to understand it in its complexity.'

1. Introduction and summary. A phrase-structure grammar has been written which generates exactly the set of sentences generated by a fairly large transformational grammar written by Noam Chomsky. The phrase structure version of Chomsky's grammar is included in the appendix. It is written in an abbreviated notation which is explained below.

Students of infants and of language have long wondered over the fact that a structure of such enormous formal complexity as language is so readily learned by organisms whose available intellectual resources appear in other respects quite limited. While a certain amount of work has been done on phonological development, and there has been much speculation about the acquisition of ‘meanings’, development at the morphological and syntactic levels has been relatively little studied. Yet it is perhaps the development at these levels that is the most striking and puzzling.

In this paper I discuss some diagrammatic representations of syntactic structure. I introduce the concept of syntactic ‘distance’ as an aid to depict the ‘degree of grammatical relatedness’ and show that this concept leads to a kind of equivalence among several methods of representation.

Though I sometimes speak only of relatedness, I assume that grammatical relatedness and degree of grammatical relatedness are the same thing. Suppose that the concept of relatedness is defined implicitly, at least to the extent that it is possible not only to make statements about which parts of sentences are related to other parts, but also to make judgments about the relative degree of relatedness. If A, B, and C are parts of a sentence we can say, for example, that A is more closely related to B than C is to B.

Frisk, GEW s.v. hézomai, states: 'Der Aorist heîsa, hês(s)ai aus idg. *e-sed-s-ṃ (mit sekundärer Aspiration), *sed-sai stimmt zum aind. Konj. ní … ṣátsat “er möge sich niederlassen” (RV 10,53,1).' This view is also found, for example, in Brugmann, Grdr. 2.2.1172 (§812), and in Brugmann-Thumb, Griech. Gramm. 362. To be sure, Gk. heîsa is not generally considered a PIE inheritance. Meillet, Mélanges de Saussure 86, says of Brugmann's list of PIE sigmatic aorists: '… la plupart des exemples sont dépourvues de toute valeur probante pour établir l'existence indo-européenne de telle ou telle forme.' Specht, KZ 62.50–1 (1934–5), considers heîsa a Greek innovation, and Schwyzer 1.755–6 lists it among such aorists as éstēsa 'set', ébēsa ‘brought’, which are clearly secondary when compared to the intransitive root aorists éstēn, ébēn; cf. Meillet, loc.cit, 94, None of these authors, however, directly considers Skt. sátsat in his discussion of heîsa. Since, moreover, the comparison of these two forms as the basis for a PIE sigmatic aorist of *sed is accepted in what is now the standard etymological dictionary of Greek, it seems worthwhile to summarize briefly and more explicitly than has previously been done the evidence against this equation. I do this as a preliminary to demonstrating that sátsat is clearly an independent creation of Indic.

The cluster *ns appears to have had a varied development in Hittite. Forms occur which indicate that *n was lost before s, while in others the outcome was almost certainly [nts] (written nz). No one has yet succeeded in satisfactorily determining the conditions of the distinction or distinctions which apparently must be made. In its entirety the problem is quite complex, for analogy is likely to have played a part in producing the attested results, and the number of otherwise reliable etymologies is so small that the forms may be divided on more than one basis depending on which of several conceivable instances of analogy one prefers to accept. However, one group of forms containing *ns about which it is apparently possible to make a specific statement at present is that in which the combination arose secondarily through derivation within Hittite.

Hermann Hirt, Idg. Gr. 1.336–7 (1927), in a treatment of initial consonant variation, presented eight sets of examples as evidence for an alternation gw [sic] : w. In general the etymological relationship of so much as lies to the left of the colon (e.g. Gk. bía, Skt. jayati, jināti) or to the right of the colon (e.g. Gk. s, Lat. vīs) is admitted by the standard etymological dictionaries. Relationship between forms lying on the left and on the right is naturally not admitted, since Hirt did not develop his material to a point at which alternations of the kind in question could be used in support of new etymologies. We have in fact no right to take such equations for granted, though I hope in this article to show some reasons for regarding it as credible that certain forms with reflexes of /gw/ and of /w/ had an identical origin. In connection with the Latin forms it is well to mention that v, being a reflex of both IE /gw/ and /w/, cannot be used as unambiguous evidence for either. In §§2–9 I take up Hirt's equations in order, with brief discussion.

This paper does not attempt to present a semantic theory of a natural language, but rather to characterize the form of such a theory. A semantic theory of a natural language is part of a linguistic description of that language. Our problem, on the other hand, is part of the general theory of language, fully on a par with the problem of characterizing the structure of grammars of natural languages. A characterization of the abstract form of a semantic theory is given by a metatheory which answers such questions as these: What is the domain of a semantic theory? What are the descriptive and explanatory goals of a semantic theory? What mechanisms are employed in pursuit of these goals? What are the empirical and methodological constraints upon a semantic theory?

Most contemporary handbooks of English recognize a class of so-called ‘function-words’ with special inflection, called pronouns, together sometimes with a wider class of words which are said to replace pronouns in certain environments and are called perhaps ‘pronominale’; all are often classified as a subset of nouns. More or less attention may be given to the peculiarities of English pronominal inflection, but important regularities among obligatory choices of pronoun are usually avoided, no doubt because all previous discussions of this subject in older texts have had to resort heavily to semantic notions. In fact, the strong implication of most contemporary treatments is that the choice of pronominals is dictated, if at all, purely by the intended meaning of the sentence.

It is commonly assumed that one can write a generative grammar while adhering to three methodological restrictions: (1) that neither semantics nor statistics enter into either the statement or the evaluation criteria of the grammar; (2) that the grammar be finite; and (3) that the grammar generate strings of morphemes, or, equivalently, that the last rules of the grammar be of the form X → a, b, c,…, where X is some grammatical abstraction (such as ‘noun‘) and a, b, c, … are morphemes or words (man, thing, happiness.) I shall attempt to demonstrate that it is not possible to write a grammar while strictly adhering to all these restrictions, and advance some arguments in favor of eliminating the last.

The Scandinavian, or Nordic, languages, generally considered to be a separate, independent branch of the Germanic language family, and therefore to be the modern representatives of a single relatively uniform or homogeneous common ancestor—Proto-Scandinavian or Proto-Nordic—have, during the past millennium or so, developed rather differently. This has led to an ever increasing differentiation and diversity, the result being that, even if these languages are still, to a greater or lesser extent, mutually intelligible, they now differ from each other on a number of points, some of fundamental structural significance, some of more limited consequence.

In his article ‘Problems of Armenian phonology III’, Lg. 38.254–62 (1962), Werner Winter treats the metathesis of IE consonant clusters in Old Armenian. To his example for the development of initial IE *tr-, Arm. erek' 'three' : Lat. trēs, I should like to add Arm. ert'am ‘go’ : Lat. in-trā-re ‘go in, enter’, trā-ns ‘across’; Skt. tr-ya-te ‘rescue’, cf. tára-ti ‘pass’; Gk. trā-ns ‘piercing’; from IE *trā-. Morphologically, erVam parallels other Arm. -am verbs, as gam ‘come’ < *- : Lat. vā-dō ‘go’, OHG. wa-tan ‘wade’ and perhaps ham ‘stand’ < * : Skt. aor. á-gā-t ‘went’.

In a previous article I showed how matrix theory could be used to present some features of the relations between well-defined constructions. I claimed there that a traditional paradigm illustrates one kind of matrix on a word level but that matrix theory provides the basis for paradigms on syntactic levels as well.

Here I wish to give one small syntactic paradigm to illustrate this point. For structural data, I chose an article by James C. Dean. It has the advantage of brevity, so that re-statement of its essential components can be fairly complete without being tedious. In addition, it represents a Philippine structure so different from Indo-European—or, for that matter, from American Indian languages—and so little understood by those who are not specialists in Malayo-Polynesian, that any light thrown on its structure is likely to be welcome.