A fairly common phenomenon of inflection is morphological haplology, in which an affix or clitic is absent when the adjacent part of the stem is homophonous to it, e.g. Eng. poss. pl. boys', not boys's. Data are adduced from numerous affixes and clitics in eleven languages. Haplology may be a major or minor rule; it may show lexical diffusion; and it is subject to various specifications on how similar the ‘homophonous’ part of the stem must be, including degrees of phonological similarity and whether it too is a morpheme. These data are traditionally handled with a rule of deletion or haplology. Such an analysis is undesirable because of the false step required—the fact that deletion does no more than recover the input form; it does not explain why it is always the affix that is deleted, rather than part of the stem. It also does not explain why a haplologized clitic must always dominate the other morpheme/phonological sequence. The alternative is not to add the affix/clitic at all. This is best viewed as a case of vacuous rule application, where the rule may take the input as already satisfying the conditions of the output. Such a proposal can be made only within a morphology that stresses the prosodic nature of morphemes, as in autosegmental morphology. The origins of this phenomenon in child language and in language change are discussed.

Recent investigations of the history of Chinese have given new support to the view that sound change diffuses gradually across the lexicon. Yet instrumental studies of sound change in progress support the Neogrammarian position that change affects all words that include the sound according to their phonetic environment. The paradox can be resolved by distinguishing abstract phonological change from change in low-level output rules. Both types of rules can be observed in recent studies of sound change in progress in Philadelphia: the lexical split of short a shows lexical diffusion in progress, while raising, lowering, fronting, and backing rules show Neogrammarian regularity. A review of the literature on completed changes and other changes in progress tends to support the relevance of a hierarchy of abstractness in determining the nature of the transition from one stage to the other.

Aside from a few incidental references to ‘drift’, Sapir used this word in three significant contexts (once as a chapter heading in his 1921 book. Language); one discovers certain discrepancies among the scopes he attached to this key word on those separate occasions. Most of the doubts and dissensions among Sapir's contemporaries and successors are traceable to the fact that the discussants have not discriminated among those three pronouncements. The keenest critic was Sapir himself who, in 1933, divested the substance of Chap. 7 in his book of any residual mystique—and, by implication, completely abandoned some of the ideas added at the beginning of Chap. 8.

This paper examines John Lyons' version of the widely postulated theory that existential there derives synchronically from a locative adverbial. It is argued that Lyons' hypothesis (and by implication other synchronic locative-based analyses of existential there) is false. An alternative analysis is offered, in which it is claimed that existential there is an NP, inserted for syntactic and pragmatic reasons. Diachronic and crosslinguistic evidence is cited in support of this view.

A number of Australian Aboriginal languages have syntactic mechanisms which can be analysed as instances of ‘switch-reference’. These languages have verb suffixes indicating whether or not the subjects of syntactically-related main and subordinate clauses are referentially the same or different. The distribution of switch-reference in various subordinate clause types is examined here, and its formal and functional characteristics are described in detail for a number of language groups. The languages which have switch-reference are all geographically adjacent, but are not obviously related genetically. When the geographical spread of certain formal features such as the association between locative case and some ‘relative clause’ types is discussed, a number of general conclusions can be drawn, among them the suggestion that the syntactic mechanism of switch-reference has been subject to indirect functional diffusion between language groups. It is further suggested that careful attention to the precise nature of syntactic similarities is necessary if any attempts to reconstruct the syntax of proto-languages in Australia are to be undertaken. This paper provides further evidence of the importance of linguistic diffusion in Australia, and raises a number of issues relevant to studies of areal features elsewhere in the world.

This paper examines the claims in Natural Generative Phonology (NGP) that phonetically conditioned rules do not make reference to word boundaries, and that sandhi rules constitute a type of rule ‘intermediate between P-rules and MP-rules’. It is concluded that sandhi rules without (other) morphosyntactic information are like P-rules except for the presence of a word boundary, supposedly a non-phonological boundary. If this is the only reason for separating these sandhi rules from P-rules, then the difference is merely one of definition; and the claim that P-rules may not be conditioned by word boundaries is vacuous, since it is true by definition. The reason that proponents of NGP insist upon the exclusion of word boundaries from P-rules is their adherence to a requirement that no non-phonological information play a part in phonological generalizations. If it can be demonstrated that word boundaries do indeed play a part in P-rules—and if, further, the definition of ‘P-rule’ can be established without circularity (i.e. without including or excluding word boundaries by definition)—then one of the major distinguishing tenets of NGP is shown to be without basis, since it is clear that word boundaries are indeed not purely phonological.

The meaning of the word lie (‘prevaricate‘) consists in a cognitive prototype to which various real or imagined events may correspond in varying degrees. This view contrasts with the familiar one in which word meanings consist of sets of necessary and sufficient conditions, and distinguish discretely between instances and non-instances. The relevance of the notions of prototype and gradience in semantics has previously been established in physical and sensory lexical domains. The present paper shows that these notions are also relevant in abstract and social domains. Results are reported from an experiment which supports this view.

Relational Grammar and Invariant Ordering Grammar both take the linear order of constituents to be a superficial property of sentences which can be predicted by a set of so-called word-order or linearization rules. The constraints which these two theories have imposed on their respective linearization rules are examined, and are shown to make wrong predictions about the possible word orders that active and passive sentences exhibit across languages. Furthermore, it is shown that these constraints cannot be amended in any obvious way to give the desired results. To account for the facts in question, a new mechanism is introduced and briefly argued for.

The narrative is a naturally bound unit of discourse in which both formal and functional aspects of grammatical variation can be examined in a controlled and systematic way. This paper is a quantitative analysis of the past and the historical-present tenses as alternative ways of referring to past events in narrative. It shows how the organization of narrative delimits the area in which the historical present can occur, and how various structural and functional constraints restrict (or favor) switching between the two tenses. It also shows that the historical present evaluates narrative events because it is a use of the present tense, and that switching out of the historical present separates narrative events from each other.

The syntactic rule of Restructuring explains the syntactic properties of so-called ‘Clitic Climbing’ sentences in Italian. However, Restructuring alone fails to account for the semantic properties of such sentences. This paper argues that lexical governance of Restructuring is inadequate. Instead, a syntactic rule operating freely whenever its structural description is met, and followed by semantic interpretation rules, not only adequately but insightfully handles the data. A crucial claim is that the derived structure of the verbal complex in a restructured sentence is identical to that of a complex of auxiliary + past participle, so that the same semantic interpretation rules apply to both.

The languages of Arnhem Land, Australia, form a contiguous block and Sprachbund, despite a sharp genetic boundary. Thus in Ngandi and Ritharngu, which belong to different major genetic divisions, about half the total vocabulary is shared, virtually all because of recent diffusion. ‘Core’ vocabulary and highly inflected stems (verbs) are among the borrowed items, but linguistic structural factors affect the extent of diffusion. Extensive over-all borrowing is attributed to local demographic and cultural features: small size of ethnolinguistic group, absence of strong tribal organization, and extensive cross-linguistic marriage.

This paper presents an analysis of headed and free (headless) restrictive relative clauses in Catalan in the framework of the Extended Standard Theory. Rules of grammar are considered an aggregate of independent dimensions that belong either to core grammar or to peripheral grammar. The peripheral dimensions restrict the core aspect, but do not conflict with it.

The rules involved in the derivation of headed and free relatives are (a) WH-movement and (b) deletion of the WH-phrase in COMP. One filter blocks an empty COMP, and another blocks a doubly-filled COMP. Deletion in COMP has an obligatory character in standard Catalan; this is a peripheral dimension that is unproblematic for the language learner. Catalan deletes any category in COMP up to recoverability, including PP's; this is the core situation found in French, but it is restricted by addition of a peripheral dimension that allows only NP-deletion.

The interpretation of the core/periphery dichotomy developed in this paper may provide a fruitful framework for comparative grammar and historical research.

Friedrich & Redfield (in Lg. 54.263–88, 1978) have argued that Homer's heroes had their own idiolects. This view is untenable: it is inconsistent with the practices of oral poetry and with the classical doctrine of êthos. Their stylometric tests are unconvincing because of inadequate sampling, an unreliable textual tradition, and a defective rationale in applying stylistic criteria.

The mental basis of linguistic intuitions is obscure, as regards their relationship both to other aspects of language behavior, such as speaking and listening, and to an hypothesized epistemological structure, such as a ‘grammar’. In the present study, we show that experimentally manipulated differences in mental state can systematically alter the linguistic intuitions which speakers render about sentences. These results indicate that the processes underlying intuitions cannot be ignored when they are used as empirical data to test grammatical theories.

‘Inner perception ... constitutes the ultimate and indispensable precondition for the other ... sources of knowledge. Consequently ... inner perception constitutes the very foundation upon which the science of psychology is erected’ (Brentano [1874] 1973:43) ... ‘If anyone were to mount a skeptical attack against this ultimate foundation of cognition, he would find no other foundation upon which to erect an edifice of knowledge. Thus, there is no need to justify our confidence in inner perception. What is clearly needed instead is a theory about the relation between such perception and its object ... such a theory is no longer possible if perception and object are separated into two distinct mental acts, of which the one would only be an effect of the other’ (ibid., 140).

This paper proposes a model of syntactic change based on a quantitative study of the rule of subject/verb agreement in spoken Brazilian Portuguese. Among speakers of the lower socio-economic levels, this rule is currently undergoing a process of elimination from the grammar. The model postulates that syntactic change starts at a point where surface differentiation between the old and new systems is zero (or nearly so); later it spreads throughout the language in inverse proportion to the degree of saliency of the surface differences between these systems in each particular environment. Thus ‘natural’ clusters of linguistic features arise only gradually.

Nominative/absolutive case and verb agreement are, in many languages, indicators of a category which is here called VIEWPOINT: the perspective from which the speaker describes the event. The order of NP constituents in a sentence encodes ATTENTION FLOW, which is the order in which the speaker expects the hearer to attend to them. Split ergative case-marking patterns are shown to reflect conflicts between the most natural viewpoint and attention-flow assignments. It is argued that the characterization and grammatical marking of an event as first-hand or inferred knowledge for a speaker, and as intentional or inadvertent for an actor, can be described in terms of whether the entire event or only its terminal phase is directly accessible to the conscious mind of the speaker and the actor, respectively; and that these categories can also be described in terms of attention flow and viewpoint.

Kay & McDaniel 1978 have recently proposed a new method of distinguishing between basic and non-basic color terms, based on fuzzy set theory (Zadeh 1965). In the present paper, we report two empirical studies that test the effectiveness of the fuzzy set method for identifying basic color categories. It is found that the method fails to discriminate between basic and non-basic categories. It is argued on theoretical grounds that the method proposed by Kay & McDaniel cannot distinguish between basic and non-basic colors because its primary premise, that the two types of categories display different characteristic membership functions, is false. Some general conclusions about the structure of categories are offered.

Coahuilteco, an Indian language formerly spoken in southern Texas and northeastern Mexico, possesses a unique system of concord by which non-subject NP's, including clausal arguments, show person agreement with the subject NP of their clause. Coahuilteco is typologically SOV, with modifiers and determiners/relators following the noun in that order. Subject concord is marked by personal suffixes on the determiner/relator, or alternatively by person-marked particles or auxiliaries. The system serves to bracket constructions and permit tracking of subject scope (or verb dependency relations), fulfilling some of the same functions as switch-reference.

Since the 6th century B.C., Jews have created unique variants of many coterritorial non-Jewish languages with which they came in contact; Aramaic, Greek, Arabic, Spanish, Persian, and German are just a few examples. Widespread shifts to non-Jewish languages throughout the world and to revived spoken Hebrew in Israel are now resulting in the obsolescence of contemporary Jewish languages and putting an end to 2600 years of Jewish language creation. The present paper proposes a typology of Jewish language phenomena, explores the common linguistic components and processes attending their genesis and development, formulates urgent research tasks in comparative Jewish in-terlinguistics, and assesses the contribution of Jewish language study to general linguistics.