This paper proposes a theory of the lexicon consistent with the Lexicalist Hypothesis of Chomsky's ‘Remarks on nominalization’ (1970). The crucial problem is to develop a notion of lexical redundancy rules which permits an adequate description of the partial relations and idiosyncrasy characteristic of the lexicon. Two lexicalist theories of redundancy rules, each equipped with an evaluation measure, are compared on the basis of their accounts of nominalizations; the superior one, the FULL-ENTRY THEORY, is then applied to a range of further well-known examples such as causative verbs, nominal compounds, and idioms.

The use of the transformational cycle in phonology was first proposed by Halle 1963 in his treatment of Transitive softening in Russian conjugation. In this paper, we provide an analysis of transitive softening that does not require such a powerful device as the transformational cycle. In addition, the analysis proposed here appropriately characterizes productive and non-productive verb classes in Russian.

French phonology and morphology (Schane 1968, henceforth FPM) presents a tightly integrated set of arguments for an abstract morphophonemic stress rule in Modern French. This rule depends crucially on an underlying tense-lax distinction in the vowel system, and on various morphological restrictions. However, the FPM rule can be modified and restricted, within Schane's framework, to give a more accurate picture of stress assignment on a morphophonemic level. Such a reformulation leads to a synchronic rule in Modern French that is very similar to the Latin stress rule, thus providing a potential case where a particular generative phonological approach leads to a historically accurate synchronic grammar.

Kiparsky 1973 presents evidence that the treatment of disjunctive ordering in The sound pattern of English is inadequate, and proposes an alternative set of general principles collectively referred to as the Elsewhere Condition. The purpose of the present article is to evaluate the adequacy of the Elsewhere Condition on the basis of (1) a review of the evidence given in its favor, and (2) an examination of some of its implications. It is concluded that there is little evidence to warrant the incorporation of the Elsewhere Condition into linguistic theory, and good reason to doubt its validity.

It is argued here that the syntactic relations between active, passive, and ‘middle’ sentences in Russian cannot be stated in their most general form as long as the grammar of Russian contains a Passive transformation. We propose a theory that defines Voice as the relationship between a verb's subcategorization feature and the surface form of the sentence in which it occurs. This relationship may be optionally expressed by a Voice morpheme on the verb. Languages differ in the number and function of the Voice morphemes they employ: but Russian, we argue, contains only one such morpheme, and its occurrence signals a marked realization of a verb's subcategorization feature.

Kiparsky 1973b proposes a number of constraints on global rules. All his examples are of the type where derived strings become separated, in terms of their behavior, from otherwise identical underlying strings. This paper will argue for cases of global rules that do not meet Kiparsky's conditions. In fact, the two cases discussed violate Kiparsky's conditions by applying to underlying rather than derived strings. The inescapable conclusion is that Kiparsky's constraints are not valid for grammars.

The syntax of the relative clause in the Saraswat Brahmin dialect of Konkani, an Indo-Aryan language, has been virtually Dravidianized because of the impact of the Dravidian Kannada language, operating through bilingual speakers. Konkani has two versions of the relative clause—a native Indo-Aryan type, and a borrowed Kannada type; the latter is gaining predominance at the cost of the former, which has come under various kinds of constraints. The mechanism of this syntactic change is examined here. The peculiar features of the Konkani–Kannada bilingual situation are described, and an attempt is made to provide an explanatory account of the syntactic change in Konkani.

People frequently comment about wine when drinking it; but to what extent do they mean the same things by the words they use ? A structural analysis of the wine vocabulary used by wine experts is given. Experiments involving typical wine drinkers show that there is little consensus in how the words are applied to wines. Moreover, communication tasks show that the sender and receiver of messages about wine perform little better than chance.

Evidence from a comparison of the usage of 20 morphemes in each of 43 languages suggests that when morphemes are borrowed from a socially dominant language into a pidgin, and extended in usage as in a creole, the major factor determining the direction of such extension is the linguistic background of the speakers of languages other than the dominant one. Features inherent in pidginization and creolization themselves play only a subsidiary role. The role of semantic universals appears to be even less significant. Monogenetic hypotheses of the origin of pidgins and creoles are not supported by the evidence.

Indo-European offers a wide variety of infinitive formations, many of which are shared by several of the dialects, and all of which appear to reflect earlier verbal nouns. The literature includes considerable discussion on the etymological origins of individual infinitive endings, but little on intermediate developments which may account for the disparate systems of the historical languages. This paper suggests that at least two separate classes of infinitives are to be noted among the infinitive types which occur cross-dialectally, and that these two classes reflect chronologically distinct occurrences in the history of IE infinitival development. This distinction is most clearly demonstrable in Vedic, but parallel evidence exists in several other dialects.

A technique has been developed for observing the translation of cognitive input into language in a spontaneous, practiced speech event: descriptions of the lay-outs of apartments.

The great majority of such lay-outs are imaginary tours which transform spatial lay outs into temporally organized narratives. The set of discourse rules which govern these speech events is given, and the rules which determine a number of features of sentence grammar are- outlined. This study represents an initial description of the links between cognitive input, discourse rules, and the rules of sentence grammar.

Several syntactic rules in English are sensitive to the difference between pronouns and full NP's, and they sometimes must apply before anaphora relations can be determined. If anaphoric pronouns and their antecedents are derived from identical underlying forms (such as variables), then these rules cannot apply correctly, because they will be unable to distinguish between anaphors and antecedents. This argument does not depend crucially on the usual ordering assumptions. No such argument applies, however, to a theory in which pronouns are present in deep structure and are associated with antecedents by means of an interpretive rule.

The study of sign language reveals the effect of the modality of communication on the language system. This paper presents a comprehensive description and discussion of the manifestation of time, space, and person reference in American Sign Language. It is in this area that the effect of the modality on information transmission appears most clearly. Various aspects of space, time, and person are discussed: the manner in which visual language allows for deictic and anaphoric locative, temporal, and ‘pronominal’ reference, the surface manifestation of the conceptualization of time, the specialized use of the dominant and non-dominant articulators, the contrast between the ‘segmental’ nature of oral-language spatial terms and the continuous nature of locative expressions in ASL, and the manner in which verbs may incorporate agent and/or patient and manner adverbials.

Grammarians since Saussure have insisted that language symbols are arbitrary, though conventionalized, in form. Sign languages in general, however, and American Sign Language (ASL) in particular, have been noted for their pantomimic or iconic nature. This paper examines some historical processes in ASL, and shows that there is a strong tendency for signs to change in the direction of arbitrariness, rather than maintaining a level of iconicity. Changes at the formational level can be seen as contributing to language-internal consistency, at the expense of transparency.

This investigation shows that a non-English portion of the universal initial-cluster hierarchy is cognitively represented in monolingual English-speaking children and adolescents. Since the representation is stronger in adolescents, the universal structure of the hierarchy may be due to a universal acquisition process rather than to innate linguistic content.

+CCVC+ syllables were developed representing seven types of initial non-English consonant clusters, from a universal hierarchical ordering of the type IF +WX IS AN INITIAL CONSONANT CLUSTER IN A LANGUAGE, THEN + YZ IS ALSO AN INITIAL CONSONANT CLUSTER IN THAT LANGUAGE (Greenberg 1965), for which markedness matrices have been developed (Cairns 1969). Children (N = 40) and adolescents (N = 40) listened to a tape and read a corresponding written representation of twenty-four pairs of syllables which differed only in their initial cluster. Subjects were to decide which syllable in each pair probably occurs in more languages. Both adolescents and children were able to reconstruct that portion of the phonological hierarchy which was tested, although adolescents did so significantly better than children. The effect of psychological distance from English (Greenberg & Jenkins 1964) was demonstrated on the same subjects with separate materials, but did not account for the hierarchy effects, since the syllables were controlled for that variable.

Finally, responses of subjects confirmed a theoretical error in previous works, suggesting an alternate arrangement of part of the phonological hierarchy.

In current transformational theory, the active–passive relation is not accounted for by the Passive transformation. Furthermore, transformational accounts of passive sentences run into serious problems with respect to the derivation of truncated passives. It is demonstrated here that the active–passive relation can be captured in the lexicon without a Passive transformation, and that such a solution does not involve the problems created by a transformational account. An interpretive rule for handling the synonymy of actives and passives—necessary whether or not passives are transformationally derived—is proposed. Lastly, it is shown how passives may be directly generated by the phrase-structure rules; this analysis is not susceptible to the criticisms given by Chomsky 1957 for a phrase-structure account of passives.

Different kinds of predicate—nominal, adjectival, verbal etc.—may behave differently under predicate agreement when there is a difference between underlying and superficial subject. Data from a number of languages (Slavic, Romance, Modern Greek) concerning predicate agreement with the polite plural (semantically singular, but plural in surface structure) suggest that more verb-like predicates tend to agree with features of the surface subject, while more noun-like predicates tend to agree with the underlying subject. The pattern that emerges across languages is of a continuum from VERB to NOUN, with individual languages having different specific categories along this continuum. Other possible solutions, more traditional within transformational theory, are examined—the view that adjectives are verbs; feature analysis of major categories; rule-ordering—but these prove unable to characterize adequately the kind of data under discussion.