Individual speech is a minimal system of language use and variation and yet, despite its theoretical interest, has been neglected; syntax (as against phonology) has been egregiously ignored. This article, stimulated by the work of Adam Parry and of Sapir, partly solves a thorny problem over two millennia old. Using total samples of Achilles and his interlocutors, the authors establish nine categories of discriminatory variables in rhetoric, discourse, and syntax; ‘expressive rhetoric’, asyndeton, and particles are particularly revealing. The speech of Achilles is related to the personality which it symbolizes. Our conclusions concern three major open questions in the study of individual variation.

Utterances are housed not in paragraphs, but in turns at talk—occasions implying a temporary taking of the floor, as well as an alternation of takers. Turns themselves are naturally coupled into two-party interchanges. Interchanges are linked in runs marked off by some sort of topicality. One or more of these topical runs make up the body of a conversation. This interactionist view assumes that every utterance is a statement establishing the next speaker's words as a reply, or a reply to what the prior speaker has just established, or a mixture of both. Utterances, then, do not stand by themselves—indeed, they often make no sense when so heard—but are constructed and timed to support the close social collaboration of speech turn-taking. In nature the spoken word is only found in verbal interplay, being integrally designed for such collective habitats. However, this paper considers some roguish utterances that appear to violate this interdependence, entering the stream of behavior at peculiar and unnatural places, producing communicative effects but no dialog. The paper begins with a special class of spoken sentences and ends with a special class of vocalizations—the first failing to qualify as communication, the second failing not to.

The English intonation often referred to as a calling contour—a stepping-down sequence of two level tones—is not inherently associated with calling, but rather conveys the implication that an utterance is in some way stereotyped or stylized. Vivid and quite precise nuances in specific usages can be accounted for by the abstract meaning ‘stylized’. This meaning is not restricted to the stepping-down contour, but is a more general phenomenon: at least three contours ending in level pitch are ‘stylized’ modifications of ‘plain’ contours ending in rising or falling pitch. The relationship of stylized contours to plain contours provides some evidence for preferring British-style ‘nuclear tones’ to whole-sentence ‘tunes’ as units of analysis. More importantly, it clearly demonstrates the inadequacy of any approach to English intonation which treats contours as sequences of significant pitch levels.

‘Apical displacement’ is the name given to a set of sound changes in the Dravidian family, whereby alveolar and retroflex consonants which occur as Cj in Proto-Dravidian stems of the type *(Ci)VCj-V ... shift their position to produce structures of the type *(Ci)CjV- ... in a well-defined subgroup of languages, viz. Telugu, Gondi, Koṇḍa, Kui, Kuvi, Pengo, and Manḍa. With the help of a computer analysis of relevant etymologies, it has been shown that apical displacement affected less than a dozen items at a common stage of the above subgroup. The rules gradually spread to the rest of the lexicon over the following two millennia, and the change is still in progress in some languages of this subgroup. It has been demonstrated that, of the items which fulfill the structural conditions of the change, 72% are covered by it in Kui; about 63% in Kuvi, Pengo, and Manḍa; but only about 20% in Gondi and Koṇḍa. A chronological layering of lexical items is established in terms of particular combinations of languages which share the cognates-with-change. Areal diffusion is characterized as the gradual lexical spread of an inherited rule—as opposed to the traditional notion of shared innovation, which is marked by shared rules in shared innovative cognates. A large class of exceptions to sound change at any given point of time can arise when the change has not yet affected the entire eligible lexicon.

This paper presents an inventory of the features that are necessary to describe vowel systems in the languages of the world. The relationship between the features and their articulatory and acoustic correlates is explored. Some vowel features, like High and Back, are accounted for in both articulatory and acoustic terms. Others, like Peripheral, are best described with reference to the acoustic domain. When the number of contrasts of each feature is considered, some features turn out to be multivalued.

This paper argues against syntactic derivation of deverbatives from forms marked for tense. It is shown, first, that Khalkha Mongolian deverbatives have categories completely different from those of finite verbs; second, that the facts of the English perfect are falsified by such derivation; and, third, that neutralization of underlying tense in Greek deverbatives results in a paradox involving primacy relations. It is concluded that deverbatives need not be marked for tense underlyingly, since tense is a ‘main clause phenomenon’ serving pragmatic functions of discourse. The surface actualization of underlying categories depends in part on such pragmatic functions.

The six-month period following the first use of words by Jessie L. was dominated by two one-word utterances, cat and mama. A near-total record of her use of these words, along with several minor lexical items, is the basis of a detailed analysis of her acquisition of phonetic and phonological capacities. The apparent plateau of the second year is a site of intensive language-learning, which is not reflected in the growth of vocabulary or mean length of utterance.

This paper maintains that some of the historical rules of consonant deletion, vowel deletion, nasalization, and initial h-deletion—all recapitulated synchronically within the transformational generative accounts of French linking—have undergone morphologization in the form of inversion, and that h-aspiré words have been assigned the feature [– vowel]. This revision is supported by substantive evidence from colloquial trends, which can only be explained by the loss of consonantal epenthesis, vocalic epenthesis, denasalization, and the integration of h-words into the vowel-initial category. It is demonstrated that the extant analysis fails in dealing with the dynamics of change for two reasons: (1) all rules are phonological, with no expectation of loss; and (2) even if rules are lost, incorrect predictions would be made.

This paper introduces selected concepts from a theory of linguistic structure called space grammar, and employs these concepts to seek an integrated account of the form and meaning of the English auxiliary. It is argued that the form of the auxiliary, apart from certain morphological adjustments, reflects each step of the conceptual path leading from the speaker to the objective situation described by the main verb. Observations are made on the nature of auxiliary status, classes of predicates, and the semantic value of individual auxiliary elements. The analysis enables one to explain many properties of simple and complex sentences.

There-sentences in English fall into two types: EXISTENTIAL and LIST. ‘Existential’ there-sentences typically allow only indefinite NP arguments, while ‘list’ there-sentences accept both definites and indefinites. The reason for this difference is that the argument of an existential there-sentence is the NP itself; but the argument of a list there-sentence is the list, not the individual members comprising that list. Once this distinction is noted, only one restriction remains on the arguments of all there-sentences, namely that they be non-anaphoric in the sense discussed in this article.

Evidence from vowel alternations in Spanish is presented which bears on two theories of regular but non-automatic morphophonological alternations. On the ‘disjunction’ theory, alternating substrings of lexical entries are represented as disjunctions of surface alternants. The appropriate alternants are selected by rules triggered by the lexical disjunctions. On the ‘rule-feature’ theory, rule features are attached lexically to segments that have surface alternants. These features trigger rules that apply only to forms bearing the corresponding rule feature. Though similar, the two theories are empirically distinguishable. A particular analysis of the Spanish data provided by the rule-feature theory is descriptively superior to one provided by the rival theory. The inadequacies of the disjunction analysis are direct consequences of properties of that descriptive apparatus. The Spanish evidence thus supports the rule-feature theory.

Conditional clauses and topics are marked identically in a number of unrelated languages. This is a surprising fact, since they are not usually considered to be related categories. Nevertheless, if formal similarity reflects similarity in meaning, they must indeed be related. A review of analyses of conditionals (in the philosophical literature) and of topics (primarily in linguistics) reveals that, in fact, their definitions are very similar. Moreover, it is possible to motivate revisions to these definitions by which they become virtually identical. This paper thus justifies the method of basing semantic analysis of a construction on a cross-linguistic examination of its superficial form.

The history of pidgin Portuguese is divided into two temporally and geographically distinct phases: first, the period of formation in Europe, beginning around the 1440's, and second, the period of transfer and establishment in West Africa of the resultant ‘acquired code’, beginning around 1500. In the first period, pidginization did not occur as a result of the initial contacts between ocean traders and Africans; rather, native speakers of West African languages were captured and taken to Portugal—where, at the orders of Prince Henry the Navigator, they were taught Portuguese so that they could be used as translators on future voyages.

Extensive modifications, attested in contemporary sources, were introduced into their speech by the Portuguese in communicating with Africans; and this type of speech became known to the populace at large through popular plays, poems etc. Examination of 15th and 16th-century literary representations of this European pidgin shows that it had the familiar pidgin structural peculiarities. The modifications were not the result of imitation-of-error, tertiary hybridization, or substratum influences, although Eastern Sabir may have played a role as a model for them. Their ultimate origins, however, can be traced to an attempt by the base-language speakers to avoid accumulation of elements of meaning in surface units.

WH-clefts and it-clefts have long been claimed to be interchangeable. However, an examination of naturally-occurring discourse demonstrates that this claim is incorrect. The presupposed part (WH-clause) of a WH-cleft represents information that the speaker can assume the hearer is thinking about. In one variety of it-cleft, the presupposed part (that/WH-clause) represents information which the speaker assumes the hearer knows or can deduce, but is not presumably thinking about. In another variety of it-cleft, the presupposed part represents information which the speaker takes to be a known fact, though definitely NOT known to the hearer.

Simplification in structure, and also confluence between the local-language structure and the prestige-language structure, are usually predicted in language death as in pidginization. For a dying Scottish Gaelic dialect, speakers representing a broad proficiency continuum were tested in the two most excessively complex morphological structures the dialect offers, the noun plural and the gerund. The forms supplied by the semi-speakers at the bottom of the proficiency continuum show considerable simplification, as expected, but very much less than in ‘classical’ pidginization; confluence with English is also quite limited. Marked functional differences between this dying dialect and the typical pidgin are invoked to account for the difference in outcome.

Ambiguous questions like Why do they believe (that) she killed him?, where the interrogative word seems to refer to either clause, appear to offer counter-examples to the NP Ecology Constraint proposed in Cattell 1976. But sentences beginning with why are frequently not ambiguous in this way; and when they are ambiguous, they cannot always be explained by appeal to the theory that why has separate origins in the different clauses. Consequently, it is argued here that the derivation of why and other interrogative adverbs does not involve the movement of NP's, and therefore does not present counter-examples to the NP Ecology Constraint. An alternative explanation of why-questions is offered, which involves appeal to semantic and deictic criteria.

In Spanish, most inherited stative verbs belong to the 2nd conjugation—which is characterized by mid, never close, root-vowels. This condition is a result of the interaction of several morphological and phonetic factors in Latin, and a redistribution of 2nd and 3rd conjugation verbs according to root-vowel quality. Rates of lexical retention and loss reflect the degree to which verbs fit the developing morphophonemic and semantic patterns. A type of sound symbolism has thus influenced the composition of the modern vocabulary.

Mirror images in constituent order are found in a wide range of parallel clause types in Japanese and English. I propose three explanations for linear orderings, related to the following hypotheses: (a) all constituents may be classified as either nominal or verbal; (b) relative orderings of constituents derive from language-independent criteria for Verb-to-Complement constraints; and (c) constituents which bear higher degrees of contextually determined and semantic entailment with the verb will be closer to the verb. The evidence presented suggests that all three principles are operative in Japanese and English. Although not all orderings conform to these principles, it is argued that the three principles of ordering will form a necessary part of a theory of syntax which accounts for word order in a non-arbitrary fashion.

There are semantic universals in the domain of color; i.e. there are constraints on the types of possible basic color lexicons. These constraints arise from the structure and function of the visual system. Thus in the case of color at least, rather than language determining perception (cf. Sapir and Whorf), it is perception that determines language.

In deriving the semantic universals from properties of the visual system, one must employ a continuous rather than discrete mathematics, in particular the theory of fuzzy sets. The resulting model of color semantics thus conflicts with the discrete-feature concept of semantic primes shared by structuralists and generativists. It is argued on this basis that discrete-feature semantic theories are of limited accuracy.