Play languages involving substitution, repetition, or re-arrangement of the sound units or words of some primary language are common, especially among children. In a great majority of these systems, the rules are few in number (not more than four or five) and simple in operation. However, this paper describes a highly complex secret language called Spaka that was developed more than twenty years ago by one of the authors, and is still used as the principal means of oral communication between her and her sister. The rules of Spaka alter certain syntactic and morphological aspects of English surface structure; in addition, they produce elaborate changes in English phonetic representations.

Negation in French can be marked redundantly—since a pre-verbal particle ne may accompany a second, usually post-verbal, marker of negation. However, the pre-verbal particle is often deleted in spoken French. This deletion may be inconsistent with the usual typological characterization of French as an SVO language. In this paper, the use of ne by 37 speakers from the region of Tours is evaluated, and the data are judged by the Sankoff Variable Rule Program (Varbrul 2). The negative particle is found to vary with a complex of linguistic, stylistic, and social factors. The historical record and the data presented here suggest that ne is being lost. This on-going syntactic change may be dependent on another, as yet uncompleted, change: the fusion of the subject clitic and verb.

This paper critically examines Jerrold Katz's position on meaning, in particular his view that a semantic theory can be constructed which is free of information derived from pragmatics and speakers' belief systems. It is shown that, if such a semantic theory exists, it either excludes many fundamental phenomena which are normally thought of as semantic, or else misses linguistically significant generalizations. It is then argued that, even if Katz's particular version of semantics is rejected, this does not render an intentionalist semantic theory impossible.