[In the first part of the 17th century the normal French pattern was je le veux voir; but after Molière the pattern became je veux le voir. Syntax had little influence on the change: it was due partly to logical and phonetic causes, but was retarded in the popular language by analogy.]

Haplology—the term was coined by Maurice Bloomfield—within a word is a familiar phenomenon. ‘Very many examples,’ says Sturtevant (An Introduction to Linguistic Science §130.5), 'might be cited, but a few will suffice.'

[Greek ἐννἐα and Latin quattuor have proved difficult to explain. After an examination of the explanations offered hitherto, the theory is advanced that the -vv- and -tt- of these words are instances of lengthening caused by the analogy of other numbers used in series with them.]

The purpose of this paper is to describe a highly developed but little known type of communication as practised by the Mazateco Indians of Oaxaca, Mexico. The texts presented show the importance of tone in the language, and indicate that conversation can be carried on with a very wide range of lexical possibilities without the segmental phonemes of normal speech.

With the development of the sound spectrograph there is evidence of renewed interest on the part of linguists in the possibilities of defining in physical terms the elements that linguistics sets up by essentially different criteria. The spectrograph has many obvious advantages over other instruments at the disposal of the investigator of speech. It yields a continuous picture of the frequency–intensity relations over a time interval of about 2.4 seconds, and performs this analysis in well under five minutes. Moreover, it obviates the necessity of relying on the results of laborious and time-consuming analyses of speech sounds originally produced subject to various ‘unnatural’ conditions. The rapidity with which the instrument operates makes it possible to deal with large quantities of analyzed material, while its ability to handle rapidly changing sounds makes it unnecessary to restrict one's study to sung or artificially prolonged vowels, or to regulate the level of pitch or intensity (loudness) at which the sounds to be studied are produced.

1. The principle of descriptive analysis of constructions on the basis of immediate constituents has been recognized by most descriptive linguists, and most of them have employed immediate constituents in analytical procedures, though in some instances not directly so. Linguists have also recognized that there are certain significant features about such constituent elements of constructions. Bloomfield formally treated some of these features and called them taxemes. But not all the significant features of constructions were presented by Bloom-field, and not all the interrelationships of these features have been adequately handled. For example, Bloomfield's four taxemes are not of coordinate value in the description and classification of constituent units.

The expression ‘Classical Chinese’ (wen-li) refers to the literary language of China, more or less homogeneous in syntax, but with considerable variation in vocabulary and style throughout the temporal range of its use, from the earliest times down to the present. In order to give a certain unity to the present study, I have taken a sample set of texts, bound together by a single writer of the T'ang Dynasty (a.d. 618–906) into a single book, as a kind of laboratory specimen of Chinese, as one might limit the study of a modern dialect to a single speaker, family, or village. The book in question is the Yu-yang tsa-tsu of Tuan Ch'eng-shih (died 863). This work comprises the most diversified material, from historical anecdotes of all kinds to religious and quasi-scientific data. It is expected that the results obtained will hold in general for the classical language of every period. Although some variation is to be expected in the specific classifiers used, little if any change would be looked for in the manner of their use.

[Reexamination of the problem of taboo on animal names, with special reference to the IE names for the bear. Addition of the Dravidian words for ‘tiger’. The hypothesis of mere avoidance of animal names by hunters does not explain; it is probable that in almost all cases a religious attitude is to be looked for.]

The expression ‘nuclear structures’ has become, in our day, a term to conjure with; but the concept is not new in linguistics. It is mentioned or implied in contemporary discussions under the terms ‘immediate constituents’, ‘rank’, and ‘endocentric phrases’; in the older literature it is referred to as ‘modification’, ‘attribution’, or ‘subordination’. An assumption of different ranks is implicit in such word-pairs as stem-affix, head–attribute, noun-adjective, substantive–modifier, verb–adverb, principal-subordinate.

Recent developments and publications concerning the analysis and classification of morphemes have been of great importance: they have provided a variety of new approaches to old problems, refined the statements of relationships, demonstrated the applicability of the method to a number of languages, emphasized the importance of distributional criteria, and pointed out a number of unsolved or perhaps only partially solved problems. All this has been a genuine gain. Nevertheless, a close examination of some of these developments is rather disturbing, and certain rather basic objections can be raised. For one thing, the term morpheme has come to be used by Hockett, and to a somewhat lesser extent by others, as a designation for forms which are related almost wholly in terms of distribution. I do not wish to deny the significance of tactics in linguistic structure; but when the primary criterion for the choosing of alternative possibilities is stated by Hockett as being ‘tactical simplicity’, I am inclined to doubt the validity of quite so much stress being laid upon distributional characteristics, especially when such a choice leads to the conclusions which Hockett has described. In both Bloch's and Hockett's recent papers on morphemic problems there is a conspicuous tendency to make covert distinctions more important than overt ones, though the treatment is quite different as regards detail.

The phonemes of Russian are as follows:

Consonants:

1. Plain and palatalized counterparts regardless of the following sound:

p pj b bj m mj f fj v vj

t tj d dj n nj s sj z zj

1 lj r rj

2. Plain or palatalized depending on the following sound: k g x

3. Plain only:

c š ž

4. Palatalized only:

c šč y žĵ

It seems fitting, in a number of LANGUAGE dedicated to Leonard Bloomfield, to apply the technique of phonemic analysis to one of the Germanic languages with which he has so long been associated. The present study attempts to analyze the segmental phonemes of Gothic, as far as the written evidence allows us to; and to sketch the changes between Proto-Germanic and Gothic.

The linguistic structure of an utterance is presumed to be fully stated by a list of the morphemes which constitute it, and by their order. The difference between two utterances is expressed by the difference in morphemic constituency between them. Frequently, however, we find that there is a set of morphemes in a language, such that each morpheme in the set is identified by its contrast with all the others in the set. Such morphemes are often arranged in paradigms, and the various crisscrossing relationships among the morphemes of the paradigm are often called categories. Thus there are such Latin morphemes as -us, -um, -ī, -ōs which are defined by their membership in a paradigm, and which are considered as expressing, within the paradigm, such categories as case and number.