1. Introduction. In the course of building an automatic essay-paraphrasing computer program it became apparent to me that certain quantitative features of style could be controlled in the paraphrasing process. This paper presents the results of several experiments in the control of two quantitative measures of style, frequency of occurrence of syntactic structures and frequency of occurrence of pronouns. The results suggest that any well-defined quantitative measure of style is subject to machine control.

The traditional definition of conjoining particles in English is this:

[i] Conjunction: A connective or connecting particle with the special function of joining together sentences, clauses, phrases or words.

The purpose of this paper is to compare some aspects of the quantity systems of two related languages, Finnish and Estonian.

Finnish and Estonian belong to the Balto-Finnic branch of the Finno-Ugric language family. They have almost identical segmental phoneme inventories. Superficially it also seems that they have very similar word structures. Often Finnish and Estonian words can be matched morpheme for morpheme or even phoneme for phoneme. Both languages have fixed primary stress on the first syllable of a word. In principle, both are quantity languages: oppositions between short and long phonemes permeate the phonological structure of both. Upon closer scrutiny, however, the quantity systems of the two languages show far-reaching differences.

Introduction. In this study I present the solution to a well-known problem of aspect markers in Mandarin. The problem involves several seeming irregularities in the formation of negative sentences and of the so-called A-not-A questions. Essentially, my solution of the problem consists of the identification of the morph -y⊖u (as in méiy⊖u) and the aspect marker -le as suppletive alternants of the same morpheme. In the light of this identification, it will be seen that the relations among declarative, negative, and A-not-A sentences are both simple and regular.

Madurese, like some of its neighboring languages (Sundanese, Javanese, Balinese, and Sasak), has socially determined choices of words depending on the relations between speaker and addressee, and on the status of the subject of discourse (referee). There are two independent systems involved, though with overlap at some points.

Haas, in a recent article entitled ‘Shasta and Proto-Hokan’, presents evidence to suggest the changes PH *ama > Sh. /a·/ and PH *ima or *ami > Sh. /e·/. Her recognition and documentation of these changes are valuable contributions to Hokan studies.

The phonological description of Amuzgo will be presented in two parts. The present paper treats the syllable dynamics in relation to tones and segmental phonemes. A later paper will present an exhaustive catalog of vowel and consonant clusters.

On page 72 of his Syntactic structures, Noam Chomsky writes:

One of the nominalizing transformations will be the transformation TAdj which operates on any string of the form

and converts it into the corresponding noun phrase of the form T + Adj + N. Thus, it converts “the boy is tall” into “the tall boy,” etc. It is not difficult to show that this transformation simplifies the grammar considerably, and that it must go in this, not the opposite direction. When we formulate this transformation properly, we find that it enables us to drop all adjective-noun combinations from the kernel, reintroducing them by TAdj.