‘Homers Sprache ist nicht panhellenisch. Sie kann nur solches Sprachgut enthalten, das bei den Stämmen, die das Epos pflegten, lebendig war.’ Thus Wackernagel, SUH 222. On that principle a word limited to the Ionic dialect—'auf den ionischen Dialekt beschränkt', to use a phrase of Bechtel's—cannot gain entrance to the epos until the epos is being produced by speakers of Ionic. I present two examples: ϵ ὗντϵ, already a high-class word, doomed to early obsolescence, that could appear in poetry unchanged; and , for which an Aeolic-looking dress seemed more appropriate.

The objections of Kuhn and Quirk to various reinterpretations of Old English digraph spellings, including our own, have made it clear that extensive discussion of single structure points in the overall frame of the Old English phonological system is a wasteful procedure. The system and the minimal oppositions which make up the system are coexistent and difficult to discuss intelligibly without going through the circular but internally consistent process of describing the one in terms of the other. Taking our departure from a pattern whose outlines were implicit but largely unstated, we attempted to deal with one point of the structure in detail. This kind of presentation seems to have been a mistake, and to have led to some of Kuhn and Quirk's misunderstanding of OP 4. The correction of our error of judgment about presentation must, however, await further research and publication, undertaken not to prove a thesis but to arrive at the most complete, consistent, and economical interpretation of the total evidence. The present article, therefore, only points out some matters of fact and clarifies the basic disagreements.

In The structure of English (New York, 1952), Charles C. Fries describes a small group of intensifiers, which he labels Group D and identifies as words that pattern like very. The group is established (92) with the following frame: The (A) concert (1) may (B) not (C) be (2) very (D) good (3) then (4). Substituting in this frame, he gets, as members of Group D, very, quite, really, real, pretty, fairly, rather, awfully, awful, any, too, more, most. We are not told that these are the only members in the corpus examined by Fries; but the implication is that if the group extends beyond this list, it doesn't extend far.

In 1944 I published an article, The verb morphology of spoken French (Lg. 20.131-41). Leonard Bloomfield then published On describing inflection, Monatshefte für deutschen Unterricht 37.8-13 (1945), calling it a ‘less rigorous statement ... which can be compared with G. Trager's rigorous account.‘ In 1947 Robert A. Hall Jr. published Colloquial French verb inflection (Romance philology 1.39-50), and included the same analysis in his French (Lg. Mon. 24, 1948). Since then there have appeared Th. de Félice's Eléments de grammaire morphologique (Paris, 1950), reviewed by me in Lg. 27.200-1 (1951), and K. Togeby's Structure immanente de la langue française (Copenhagen, 1951); these two works are not limited to verbs.

The word trík is a modern loanword in Greek, of uncertain date though probably not older than the beginning of this century. According to the definition in the Mega lexikon tēs hellēnikës glōssēs of D. Dēmētrakos (Vol. 9; Athens, 1951), this is a word of the spoken language which means ‘device, deceptive manner, artful strategem’; in short, it has some of the meanings of the English word trick. Since the last war, however, trík has been used in another sense which is fairly remote from the range of meanings just given and, as far as I know, has not yet been recorded in the dictionaries. It is employed colloquially to denote a small slip of paper bearing a printed slogan or short text suitable for distribution in the course of parades or political demonstrations. The question arises whether this word is identical with the trik just mentioned or is another word entirely.

The traditional interpretation of [y] and [w] in Spanish forms like bien ‘well’ and bueno ‘good’ has been to assign them to the phonemes /i/ and /u/. The semivowel allophone of each of these vowel phonemes is stated to occur in the following positions: SV, VSV, CSV, VSC, VS; examples (from Chavarría-Aguilar): huerta, Tehuantepec, puerta, jaula, hoy. All analysts, however, agree that there are still other allophones that cannot be assigned to /i/ and /u/, but must be assigned to a phoneme /y/ (variously transcribed as /j, y, ž/), though with the exception of King they do not describe any allophones that must be assigned to /w/ and therefore set up no such phoneme. The assignment of [y] and [w] to /i/ and /u/ therefore achieves at best only the economy that results from having no /w/ in the phoneme inventory. Other possible advantages, such as those of pattern congruity, will be examined hereafter by comparison with the analysis to be suggested here.

The psycholinguistic approach to certain linguistic phenomena is based on two general assumptions, which most structural linguists would probably accept but would probably consider irrelevant: first, that language as a form of learned behavior is subject to the general principles which govern all learned behavior; second, that to determine what these principles are and how they function, the relative frequency of phenomena may be significant. In his description of the phonology of a language, the structural linguist has usually limited his analysis to a presentation of those sequences of phonemes which occur in a language, without noting the relative frequencies of these combinations. It is true that several studies have offered systematic statements of distribution and clustering, pointing out for example that in English a phone of the /ŋ/ phoneme does not appear in word-initial position, or that /str-/ is an initial cluster but /sθr-/ is not. But the greater-than-chance occurrence of some sequences and the less-than-chance occurrence of others has usually gone unmentioned. The contribution of a psycholinguistic analysis is to suggest that these deviations from chance are not random, but are governed by some ‘lawful’ principle.

In his article on Huichol phonemes, McIntosh notes a stylistic relationship between r and l, which he regards as phonemically separate: ‘The voiced alveolar lateral 1 is a specialized symbolic phoneme, stylistically alter-[nat]ing with r in words of endearment or diminutives. ... The alveolar flap r is varied by children to the alveolar lateral 1 and is varied to the same phoneme by adults in songs and when they talk baby talk’ (fnn. 3, 4). A similar stylistic relationship is noted between z and s, which he considers allophones of one phoneme: ‘z is varied to a nonretroflex voiceless variant by children and by adults talking baby talk and also in songs’ (fn. 2). Further examination of the language indicates that a similar stylistic alternation occurs for all alveolar phonemes. The purpose of the present paper is to interpret this alternation in terms of the concept that language is systematic; specifically, to assign the stylistic features to a definite place in the structure of Huichol. The data upon which the interpretation is based will be given in detail, and several alternative treatments will be discussed, before describing the preferred interpretation.

In determining Polish inflectional categories it is not enough to consider the differences in shape between paradigmatic forms. On the one hand, some phonemically different endings have the same function; e.g. the endings of list-u letter', kot-a ‘cat’, ćeśl-i ‘carpenter’, seńź-ego ‘judge’ all have the function of the Gen. Sg. On the other hand, some phonemically similar endings have different functions; e.g. dom-u ‘house’ functions as both Gen. and Loc. Sg., miš-i ‘mouse’ functions as Gen., Dat., and Loc. Sg. and as Nom., Gen., and Acc. Pl. It is obvious therefore that the factors determining the function of an inflectional ending must be sought outside the form itself.

This paper discusses methods for presenting syntactic information in the form of a calculus, and for measuring its goodness of fit to a language.

The relation between linguistics and logic has been discussed in a recent paper by Bar-Hillel, where it is argued that a disregard for work in logical syntax and semantics has caused linguists to limit themselves too narrowly in their inquiries, and to fall into several errors. In particular, Bar-Hillel asserts, they have attempted to derive relations of synonymy and so-called ‘rules of transformation’, such as the active-passive relation, from distributional studies alone, and they have hesitated to rely on considerations of meaning in linguistic analysis. No one can quarrel with the suggestion that linguists interest themselves in meaning or transformation rules, but the relevance of logical syntax and semantics (at least as we now know them) to this study is very dubious. I think that a closer investigation of the assumptions and concerns of logical syntax and semantics will show that the hope of applying the results which have been achieved in these fields to the solution of linguistic problems is illusory.

Students of language have in general placed primary emphasis upon the generating mechanisms of speech. For example, it is common to classify the sounds of speech in physiological terms; phonetic tables and charts usually show organic position or mechanism in one dimension and method of production in the other. There has also been considerable interest in the acoustical effects or results of speech production. Von Kempelen was among the first to promote a serious interest in this subject, with a volume published in 1791. The literature on the subject is far more distinguished and extensive than most linguists realize; but it cannot compare with the much more voluminous literature on physiological phonetics and voice production. Within the past ten years, great impetus has been given to the study of acoustic phonetics by developments in electro-acoustical instrumentation and by the new, important, and challenging problems which have come upon the field of communication engineering.