A grammar of almost any Bantu language will attest a morpheme α in a variety of constructions involving association, usually of a preceding noun with a following noun or pronoun. In many Bantu languages a second morpheme, with the shape ka or something similar, is used in some similar constructions. These morphemes have frequently been labelled ‘possessive’, with reference to one of their more obvious uses, or genitive, with the implication that more than literal possession may be involved; the variety of constructions in which they are found makes the more neutral term ‘associative’ preferable.

The phonetic features of Arabic conventionally referred to by European and American scholars simply and collectively as emphasis, and identified by Arab grammarians as ?iṭbāq ‘spreading and raising of the tongue’, ?isti9lā? ‘elevation of the dorsum’, and tafxīm ‘thickness, heaviness’, have been attested in all known modern dialects of Arabic except Maltese. Early Arab grammarians recognized three pairs of contrasting emphatic and plain (i.e. nonemphatic) consonants— /.t d/, /./, and /.s s/, four other consonants as emphatic but unpaired— /.dqx γ/, and in certain environments emphatic variants of /1/ and /r/. That these were not the only consonants occurring with emphasis, at least in some environments, can be inferred from the proscriptions of such pronunciations in the Quranic orthoepy literature; but whether such consonants occurred in contrasting pairs, or only had emphatic positional or free variants, is less certain. In various modern dialects, restrictions on the distribution of emphasis and the number of contrasting emphatic and plain consonants differ considerably. All dialects have preserved the contrasting pairs listed above, or their reflexes. And as a result of sound change as well as borrowing and analogy, all dialects have acquired additional contrasting pairs; the following occur in all of the major dialects: /.t t/, /.d d/, /.s s/, /.z z/, /.l 1/, /.r r/, and, generally only in peninsular dialects, /./. Furthermore, most of these dialects exhibit additional contrasting pairs, especially in the labial series.

1. The most distinctive feature of the verbal system of a Slavic language is undoubtedly its verbal aspect. Stated simply, a particular Slavic verb has either perfective (P) aspect, which mean that a commitment as to completion has been added to the verb's basic meaning, or it has imperfective (I) aspect, in which is no such implication. To express the meaning ‘to write’ in Russian, a choice has to be made between the two aspectual partners pisat' I 'to write, to be in the process of writing' and napisat' P to write, to get written, to complete the writing (of)'. There are also morphological implications to aspect, in that in certain constructs the selection of a verb form of a particular aspect is obligatory; for example, the periphrastic future of Russian permits only the use of an I verb, as in ja budu pisat' 'I will write, I will be writing' (*ja budu napisat' does not occur). Exceptions to this typical aspectual pairing, such as Russian obeščat' 'to promise', which functions as either an I or a P verb, testify by their very oddity to the pervasiveness of the aspectual dichotomy.

The syntactic form classes or parts of speech include verbs, nouns, adjuncts and particles. The single verbs, nouns, adjuncts and particles, and the sequences that substitute for them in constructions, belong respectively to the verbal, nominal, adjunctive and relational classes. Members of these classes are called, respectively, verbals, nominals, adjunctives and relationals.

Thus the noun, and nominal,? astzání 'woman' occurs in several contexts, for example sharing the constructional meaning 'topic is attended by comment' with a following verbal, as in ?astzání 1 ?ałtší 'the woman has children' (?altSi is a verb meaning 'she has children'). In tii 2 ?astzání 1 ?ałtší 'this woman has children', the constituents of the construction tii 2 ?astzání 'this woman' are a demonstrative, and nominal, tii 'this' and a following noun, and nominal, ?astzání 'woman' sharing the constructional meaning 'indexive character relates to axis'; this construction occurs as a constituent in construction with a following verbal and shares with it the constructional meaning 'topic is attended by comment'. Since the sequence tii ?astzání 'this woman' substi tutes for a noun in a construction, it is a nominal.

In this part of the study are listed attested arrangements of representatives of the foregoing classes, in nominal, verbal, adjunctive, and relational constructions.

Nominals stand in construction with verbals, nominals, adjunctives, and relationals, in a number of major construction groups, as follows.

In a recent review Henry M. Hoenigswald brought into conjunction two facts of ancient Greek phonology which have in the past been considered separately. He did not, however, state categorically that they represent two facets of the same development, but merely suggested that they might. I hope to show in this paper that they are indeed connected, and that by treating them together we can clarify the phonology of the sequence /wo/ in Greek. The two facts are that the allomorph /a/ of the morpheme {negative prefix} occurs more frequently before /o/ and /o:/ than before any other vowel where one would expect the allomorph /an/; and that ‘prosodical digamma’ is absent in Homer before /o/ and /o:/, though it does occur before /oi/.

At the outset I make an assumption: if it can be shown that there is a dependence between the function of language as a means of communication and the regularity of phonetic change, then we are permitted to construct a hypothesis that this function of language explains the regularity of phonetic change and not the reverse. It would be more reasonable to say, if it is true, that the use of language as a means of communication forces regularity on phonetic change than to say that the regularity of phonetic change facilitates communication between speakers of a language.

The Shasta language of northern California and southern Oregon has a long history of relevance for Hokan studies. In 1905 R. B. Dixon presented evidence to show that J. W. Powell's Palaihnihan family (1891), comprising Achumawi (Achomawi) and Atsugewi, was related to a group of Shasta dialects, some of which had been newly discovered by him. A. S. Gatschet had come to the same conclusion much earlier, as reported by Powell (1891.98), but did not present his evidence.

In my article ‘The lexicostatistical classification of the Malayopolynesian languages’, a procedure for lexicostatistical classification on the basis of percentages of probable cognates in a standard list of basic vocabulary was set forth which had these elements for determining primary groups (i.e. groups with only languages as members) :

Walter Henzen, in his Deutsche Wortbildung, makes the following statement in the section ‘Ableitung durch Suffixe’:

1. Certain conclusions about the nature of linguistic change and genetic relationship are implied in the work over the past fifteen years in the area now known as lexicostatistics. This paper attempts a critical examination of some of these conclusions.

The availability of electronic computers for text analysis makes it possible to consider logical and statistical operations on a scale far beyond what has been practical before. This paper will propose a form of statistical semantic analysis applicable to either a written or a spoken corpus, and, with suitable modifications, to conversation.