[§1: Constituent, string, and transformational analyses compared. §2: A revised formulation of transformations as an equivalence relation among sentences. §3: Sketch of a set of transformations sufficient to characterize English sentences. §4: Properties of the set of sentences under transformation; derived well-formedness condition for derived sentences, composition rule for obtaining sentences from elementary sentences, normal form, informational correlations. §5: Properties of the set of transformations; elementary operations, and a derivation rule for obtaining transformations from them. §5.2: Appendix on zeroing. §6: Some properties of the set of sentences under the elementary operation.]

History repeats itself, with variations. Two decades ago American structuralists were trying, with indifferent success, to apply to morphology the same analytical techniques that had proved successful in the analysis of sound. For a number of reasons—including the lack of a suitable theory of meaning—the attempt made no headway at a time when phonology was still scoring advances with help from both acoustics and information theory. Morphemics still remains, in current texts on linguistics, a kind of relic of the 1940's. Now we witness a revived attempt from a different direction, but with essentially the same desire: to try out in a new field the techniques that have been developed in an older one. The new field is meaning, the old one is syntax, and the techniques are those of generative grammar. For the moment, morphemics is only slightly involved, but the signs are clear.

Within the Vedic verbal system there is a series of second singular forms made by suffixing -si to the full-grade root, which differ from the present type ási ‘thou art’ in that they function primarily as imperatives; e.g. yákṣi ‘sacrifice’. This archaic formation is found frequently in the Rigveda, where approximately 150 forms occur from 23 roots (§2); in other Vedic texts -si imperatives occur only for roots which have such forms in the Rigveda and predominantly in Rigvedic mantras; e.g. maghónām ‘bring safely across the gift-giving of the patrons’ (RV 8.103.7, 9.1.3); vakṣi yákṣi ca ‘bring the gods and sacrifice’ (.5.21.6, 6.16.2, 8.102.16); see Bloomfield, Concordance sv. párṣi, .

On 2 February 1786, in Calcutta, Sir William Jones delivered an address to The Asiatic Society, in which occurs a passage that has since repeatedly been hailed as the first clear statement of the fundamental assumption of the comparative method. We may justifiably take that event as the birth of modern linguistics. Between Sir William's address and the present Thirty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America there is a span of 178 years. Half of 178 is 89, a prime number. If we add that to 1786 we reach the year 1875, in which appeared Karl Verner's ‘Eine Ausnahme der ersten Lautverschiebung’. Thereafter, two successive steps of 41 years each—41 is also a prime number—bring us first to the posthumous publication of Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de linguistique générale and then to Noam Chomsky's Syntactic structures.

1. The problem. The objectives of diachronic linguistics have always been to reconstruct the particular steps by which a language changes, and also to hypothesize about processes of language change in general. Recent discussion of the latter problem has frequently involved five closely related proposals. First, language changes by means of a series of individual innovations. These innovations consist primarily in the addition of single rules to the grammar of the adult speaker. Second, these innovations usually occur at some point of break in a grammar; for example, ‘before the first morphophonemic rule involving immediate constituent structure of the utterance … before the phonological rules that eliminate boundary markers from the representation’. Third, these innovations are passed on to the next generation when the child imitates the adult. A child may internalize the adult's grammar; or, more probably, he will simplify it. This is because children have an ability, not shared by most adults, to construct by induction from the utterances to which they have been exposed, the simplest grammar capable of generating sentences. The simplification will give rise to a discontinuity in transmission from generation to generation. In the interests of preserving intelligibility, this discontinuity will be minimal. Fourth, whenever the discontinuity results in radical changes such as restructuring, a mutation occurs. Finally, these mutations, which affect the overall simplicity of the grammar, are rare.

In recent years there have been a number of interesting attempts to redefine the prehistoric stages of Germanic. The need for such a redefinition has long been evident, as van Coetsem, Makaev, and Lehmann have all pointed out. One of the reasons for this need is undoubtedly to be found in the prevailing view of a protolanguage as an entity which is ‘timeless, non-dialectal, and non-phonetic’, and therefore unreal. Pulgram, for example, considers ‘Reconstructed Proto-Indo-European’ (in contrast to ‘Real Proto-Indo-European’) to be a ‘timeless structure which is diachronically heterogeneous, though synchronically uniform’ (425). This characterization of our reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European may be accurate, but it is questionable whether all protolanguages are equally ‘timeless’, at least in the relative sense. The younger protolanguages which we can reconstruct within the Indo-European family, such as Proto-Germanic and Proto-Romance, cannot be placed in an identical frame of reference with Proto-Indo-European. The latter is re constructible only on the basis of internal evidence. The younger protolanguages, however, have the added advantage of disposing over comparative evidence from related languages outside their limited groups to provide them with additional depth. This is perhaps what Bloomfield had in mind when he made an exception of Proto-Germanic and Proto-Romance to his general rule that the comparative method ‘cannot claim to picture the historical process’ (318).

0.1. The aim of this paper is to investigate the relations between the layering in structural trees and the scale of rank. My standpoint will be that of scale-and-category grammatical theory as I understand it.

When the aims and methods of the Survey of English Usage were preliminarily drafted, analysis was envisaged as focussing upon ‘the plotting of variables’. The purpose of the present paper is to consider what types of variable need to be distinguished and what kinds of relevance the variables have for descriptive statement.

The relation between structuralism and dialectology has been the subject of occasional discussion among linguists. One extreme point of view apparently claims that since the elements of a system are defined only in terms of their relations to other elements, the systems as a whole are incommensurate. This view, which essentially legislates the problem of structural dialectology out of existence, has as a consequence the clearly untenable proposition that two dialects of English, for example, are no more similar than a dialect of English and a dialect of Chinese.

1. 1. OE gycer ‘acre‘ seems to be attested only once. In the Leiden Glossary, gycer is used to translate the lemma of the gloss iugeres · unius diei opus aratoris.

2. 2. This gloss occurs in the section entitled ‘De Eusebio’, and has been traced to the Rufinus translation of Eusebius' Church History, where landed property is described in the following terms: nec haec sibi in pecunia subsistere, sed in aestimatione terrae, quae eis esset in quadraginta minus uno iugeribus constituta, quam suis manibus excolentes uel ipsi alerentur uel tributa dependerent.

This paper examines the processes of question formation in French. My purpose is to propose a generative analysis to account for these processes for which one can make a reasonable claim of descriptive adequacy. Attention will first be focused on simple yes-no and ‘wh’ questions. Then, the analysis being expanded to accommodate the est-ce que series, a close relationship will be demonstrated between these and certain embedding mechanisms. Finally, I shall indicate how the analysis presented may be extended in a natural way to account for various other phenomena of French syntax.

The question ‘What is syntax?‘ has been asked many times. In the framework of traditional grammar it cannot be answered by a definition. Traditional syntax, the kind of syntax upon which all of us have been brought up, is not a theory but a craft. We were taught by practical example how to find (say) the subject or the predicate of a sentence and how to recognize a given form as a 3rd-person singular verb indicative present active. These technical terms were never properly defined; but with a sufficient number of examples for practice plus some rules of thumb, we soon acquired an intuitive grasp of what they meant, and were thus able to work with them satisfactorily. Sometimes classical grammar did offer definitions, but they were invariably poor and clumsy.

It is well known that ‘Pāṇini's work is exclusively concerned with defining (lakṣaya-) the procedures of word formation (saṃskāra)—anything else does not fall within its scope …‘ Though Pāṇini's description presupposes a phonologic analysis, the rules of the aṣṭadhyāyī are merely preceded by a list of sounds (śivasūtras) used in the following statements as the basis for morphophonemic formulations, and phonologic details of members of this list are not elaborated.

In 1934, when Yuen-Ren Chao discussed the nonuniqueness of phonemic solutions, he demonstrated that different phonological analyses presuppose different underlying concepts. The thirty years since the publication of that paper have not produced any one phonological theory to which even most linguists will subscribe. The situation is not unusual in the history of science. Scientific theories are constantly submitted to change and revision; in an empirical science, the structure is never completed. Experiments become more precise, new phenomena are revealed, new concepts are developed. At all times we must be prepared to abandon our theory, remodel the foundations, and erect a new structure. But the history of science shows also that theories which turn out to be inaccurate can yet lead to the discovery of new facts; and each new theory retains some elements of the one it has supplanted. Acceptance of one theory does not require one to reject a rival theory in toto.

1.1. The problem. This paper deals with regional variations in one aspect of German grammar—the case inflection of nominal parts of speech. In German dialects, as in Standard German, case is a category of every noun phrase, determined by its function in the sentence. Of the several constituents of a noun phrase, the noun itself is least often inflected for case. More frequently, the case of the noun phrase is exhibited by the determiners and such adjectives as may be contained in it. Noun phrase substitutes—the pronouns—are particularly sensitive indicators of the case of a phrase. Inflection for case in the determiners and adjectives is accomplished by means of suffixes; in the pronouns, by suppletion. The markers of case are almost always portmanteau morphs that are also involved in expressing other categories (number, gender, and determination) of the noun phrase.

In this article I propose a new explanation of the forms of the verb sum. This explanation is based on synchronic facts of Classical Latin and is expressed in terms of a set of ordered rules applying to basic forms. I do not propose that forms appearing in the derivations of the Classical Latin forms necessarily appeared phonetically in any stage of pre-Latin or Indo-European. Nevertheless, I feel that my analysis is not wholly devoid of historical and comparative interest. In this I follow Leonard Bloomfield, ‘Menomini morphophonemics’, Travaux du Cercle linguistique de Prague 8.105–15 (1939):

The dichotomy between exocentric and endocentric constructions seems well established in linguistics. Its importance in syntactic analysis is obvious. In this connection it is enlightening to refer back to Bloomfield's view, in which English syntax, for example, emerges as strongly exocentric, since the more common of his two favorite sentence types calls for the exocentric actor-action construction. The characterization is further supported by the frequency of his other exocentric constructions (relation-axis, clause-subordination, phrase-subordination).

1. In many languages there are clause types characterized by the presence of a subject and complement without an element of predication such as a verb ‘to be’. Clauses of this kind, which may be termed equational, display a number of similarities across languages. Frequently there is a special negative copula; in tenses other than the present, a verb ‘to be’ is sometimes required; word order may differ from that of nonequational clauses.

The plan of the present work is to describe first the simple sentence, and the phrases which enter into such sentences as constituents; then the principal types of sentences (clauses) incorporated into superordinate complex sentences; and finally, certain special syntactic problems (enclisis, negation, interrogation). Serbo-Coatian examples cited have been checked against the speech of one native informant, my wife.

Four fundamental insights of tagmemics are the correlativity of function and set, the search for constructions of maximum relevance, the emphasis on explicit, systemic hierarchy, and the concept of relatedness in logical space (with transformation only one of the possible parameters which relate constructions). Developing these points gives an indirect answer to certain recent criticisms.