The question examined here is how a linguistic change takes place in the behavior of the individual speaker. Examples are chosen primarily from lexical change, though phonological and semantic changes are also mentioned. The opinion is expressed that every speaker has a (usually unconscious) norm against which variants operate, change taking place in two steps: (1) when one variant is promoted to tolerated deviation, (2) when a tolerated deviation replaces the earlier norm (called here KYRIOLEXIA in the case of lexical change). The topic of gradual change is also touched upon.

Sentential aspect presents a situation (event, state etc.) from a particular point of view: it represents the speaker's choice of perspective on the situation. In this article, a speaker-based approach to aspect is proposed which crucially invokes abstraction, namely the idealization of different types of situations. A speaker relates an actual situation to an idealized type by using the linguistic forms associated with that type.

Speakers may choose an unusual way of presenting a situation, as with a progressive stative such as I'm really loving this walk. Here a state is presented as an event. Analysis of stative sentences in English shows that they have a unique aspectual interpretation, and allows for the interpretation of progressive statives.

Two components of sentential aspect are recognized. SITUATION ASPECT involves type of situation, e.g. event or state; VIEWPOINT ASPECT involves type of perspective, e.g. simple or progressive. Separating these two components leads to a unified account of simple aspect in English.

The most productive class of strong verbs in English is that exemplified by the verb string/strung. Both historical and experimental evidence show that the class is phonologically defined. However, the members do not share a single set of phonological features. Rather, the class is organized around a prototypical member (in the sense of Rosch 1978), to which the other members stand in a family-resemblance relation (in the sense of Wittgenstein 1953). The defining attributes of the class include the final consonants as well as the initial consonants and consonant clusters, and to a lesser extent the vowel of the base verb. The organization of the formal aspects of linguistic units is shown to follow the same principles as the organization of the content of the linguistic units. The phonological shapes of verbs in morphological classes can be organized into natural categories, like other natural and cultural objects.

A new model of intonational phonology is here developed, based primarily on the ‘tone sequence’ approaches of Bruce & Gårding 1978 and Pierrehumbert 1980. As in those works, contours are seen as sequences of pitch accents composed of high and low tones. Unlike those works, this model uses cross-classifying features to represent the scaling (height) of tones, and the alignment of tones in time relative to their associated syllables. This form of representation permits both the specification of phonetic detail and the formulation of phonological generalizations. Three features—[delayed peak], [down-step], and [raised peak]—are introduced; to illustrate the type of description they make possible, largely familiar data from English, Dutch, Hungarian, and Rumanian are re-analysed in these terms.

The absolute construction exemplified by with the bus drivers on strike consists of with plus a constituent that possesses all the characteristics typical of embedded S's, except for having to contain a verb: it serves as a domain for cyclic application of transformations, it serves as a scope for quantifiers and negatives, and its elements do not command elements of the main clause. An analysis of these constituents as underlying S's, subject to optional deletion of be (or of possessional have and its subject) explains why this construction allows adverbs as adjuncts to constituents that normally do not support adverbs. Peculiarities of the distribution of adverbs in the construction support the contention that the NP in with NP PP is an underlying subject of be in some cases, an underlying object of have in others.

Labov 1981 argues that, in principle, sound changes may be implemented in two ways: through lexical diffusion (when the change is phonetically discrete), or by gradual sound change. It is contended here that although lexical diffusion is an important process, one must also account for discrete sound changes without such diffusion. The mode of progress of such changes is shown to involve an interplay between the production and the perception of the language user. Further, it is demonstrated that gradual sound change can be studied in perception, and that the relation between production and perception in gradual change is in some ways similar to that in discrete change. In both cases, the change in production norm is crucial.

Two types of bound morphemes—clitics and inflectional affixes—are found attached to (free) words in many languages. At least six lines of evidence separate the clear cases on each side: the degree of selection between the dependent morpheme and the word to which it is attached; arbitrary lexical gaps; phonological idiosyncrasies; semantic idiosyncrasies; syntactic operations affecting the combinations; and restrictions on the combinability of clitics with inflectional affixes. These criteria all indicate that English contracted auxiliaries (She's gone) are clitics, but that the English contracted negative (She hasn't gone) is an inflectional affix—a rather surprising conclusion that turns out to have satisfying consequences.

This quantitative and qualitative study of the distribution of tense and aspect in oral Spanish narrative shows that the meaning of certain verb forms is in part delimited by the narrative structural context in which they occur. The historical present/preterit alternation, an issue that has attracted recent controversy (Wolfson 1979, Schiffrin 1981) is examined, and the results show that the Spanish historical present functions as an internal evaluation mechanism.

The Saipan dialect of Chamorro displays certain transderivational relationships that hold optionally between complex words and the non-complex forms from which they are derived. These relationships are examined, and it is argued that phonological theory must either allow optionally-cyclic rule application, or else recognize a class of transderivational phenomena for which the cycle cannot account.

This is a systematic lexical study of a little-documented phenomenon, viz. the syntactic properties of the English verbs that can appear in sentence pairs such as Bees are swarming in the garden and The garden is swarming with bees. The result is more than a list of such verbs. Various phenomena have been uncovered related to a hitherto unnoticed phenomenon of sentence productivity: the verbs in these sentences can be replaced by others derived from them by metaphorical extension. These groups of verbs then form open classes, whose size at any given moment cannot be measured, and into which new verbs enter in a regular and productive way. Such new uses of existing sentence forms (not only of new word derivations) permit an explicit description of what is intuitively and loosely meant by productivity.

The distance between linguistic expressions may be an iconically motivated index of the conceptual distance between the terms or events which they denote. But the length of an utterance may also correspond to the extent to which it conveys new or unfamiliar information. Reduced form may thus be an economically motivated index of familiarity. Much of the arbitrariness of grammatical structure arises where equally plausible motivations such as iconicity and economy are, in effect, competing for expression on the same linguistic dimension.

Two competing theories exist about the Proto-Germanic syllabication of and similar sequences: one proposes that the division was , the other, . Furthermore, three major phonological developments in Germanic groups have never received a satisfactory explanation: consonant gemination in West Germanic, vowel lengthening (with differential constraints) in North Germanic, and glide strengthening in Gothic. This paper proposes a uniform solution for all these problems, based on independently established principles of syllabic phonology: a preference (at least in the Germanic languages) for stressed syllables that have two morae (Prokosch 1939), and a universal preference for syllable onsets that are at least as strong as the preceding syllable offset (Hooper 1976). We provide various kinds of evidence for a Proto-Germanic syllabication which is in accordance with Prokosch's principle, but not with Hooper's; and we then explain subsequent developments as different ways of rebalancing the syllable structure to accord with both Prokosch's and Hooper's principles: in West Germanic; in North Germanic; and in Gothic.

A drastic restructuring of the Common Mayan system of pronouns resulted in the Modern Yucatecan pronominal system. This restructuring involved, first of all, a paradigmatic regularization of new, formerly non-existent grammatical categories.

The restructuring was internally constrained by the hierarchy of the pronominal system itself. The organizing laws which shaped the Mayan system are (a) the well-known theorem of Huntington 1904 that ‘the number of elements in every logical field must be 2m‘ and (b) a constraint on the theorem provided by the Peircean notion of SYMBOL (as against ICON). Grammatical systems of a more SYMBOLIC character formally distinguish relatively fewer 2m spaces. Common Mayan, which was a symbolic system, made fewer distinctions in the logical field of its pronominal system than do the modern, Yucatecan reflexes of that system.

Valid tests for metrical theories can be constructed by removing the effect of ‘poetic’ syntactic transformations and observing the metrical consequences: e.g. Thy edge should blunter be is converted to Thy edge should be blunter (a metrical violation). Applying this approach to the over 500 inversions in Hamlet and the Sonnets provides considerable support for the metrical theories developed by Halle–Keyser and Kiparsky, with K faring slightly better. However, inversions affecting words like divine and enough suggest that minor revisions may be needed in K's rules. As each such revision becomes necessary, the likelihood increases that the set of permissible iambic pentameter lines is ‘fuzzy’ rather than well-defined.

This paper addresses two current controversies about the nature and origin of Chinook Jargon. First, evidence is presented to support the claim that CJ is a true pidgin—rather than a jargon, in Silverstein's sense (1972) of a speech form without independent grammatical status. When structural features of CJ, as used by English (and French) speakers and by Indians, are compared with those of the speakers' native languages, we see that CJ possesses a grammatical norm that differs in non-simplificatory ways from the native languages. Second, the paper explores the implications of CJ structure for the older controversy as to whether CJ existed before Europeans set up permanent trading posts in the Northwest. The major point here is that phonological and syntactic features of CJ fit well with typological features of Northwest Amerindian languages, but they are markedly non-European. This weakens the case for a post-European origin, since it is hard to explain on the hypothesis that CJ arose from Indian–white communication.

If a sound change has lexically diffused without completing its course, one finds that among the lexical items qualified for the change, some have already changed (c), others have remained unchanged (u), and still others show variant forms (u/c). When such a change has affected a group of genetically related languages, the consequent comparative pattern u—u/c—c can be used to set up subrelations among languages. In this paper, we draw on data from six languages belonging to the South-Central subfamily of Dravidian, with reference to an atypical sound change called ‘apical displacement’. There are 63 etymologies which qualify for the study. A total of 945 possible binary-labeled trees fall into six types for the six languages under study. In terms of our postulates, that tree is the best which scores the lowest m, i.e. the minimum number of independent instances of change needed to account for the u-c-o (o = no cognate) pattern of a given entry. Each of the 63 entries has been applied to the possible 945 trees, and the trees have been scored for the value m by computer. The one tree which scored the lowest (71 points) is identical with the traditionally established tree for these languages. This paper shows that: (a) one shared innovation is sufficient to give genetic subrelations among languages, within the framework of the theory of lexical diffusion; (b) unchanged cognates are as important as changed cognates in giving differential scores for possible trees; and (c) the notion of shared innovation can be further refined within the theory of lexical diffusion.

The reduced forms of the auxiliaries is and has are excluded from many more constructions than have previously been noted. This article extends the range of ungrammatical reductions for which any theory of Auxiliary Reduction must account, and argues that many of them are already predicted under a liberal reading of earlier constraints on the context following the AUX. However, it is shown that the preceding context must also have a particular form. Auxiliary Reduction is a cliticization, and imposes a categorial restriction on the host which precedes the clitic: it must be an NP.