Brazilian Portuguese prosody is organized in a rhythmic hierarchy which governs the phonology of the language, and which is demonstrated by instrumental and phonological evidence to be present diachronically and synchronically in different speech styles. Principles of stress, which yield two degrees, assign secondary stress to pretonic syllables and no stress to posttonic syllables. From this follows the relationship pretonic ⊃ posttonic—which means that, in a given style, any reductive process necessarily operates posttonically before it can operate pretonically. From this hierarchical relationship, vowel quality and syllable weight are predictable. However, the hierarchy may be disrupted slightly to accommodate the tendency toward stress-timing and an alternating strong/weak pattern.

Typological and theoretical speculations about clitics require that the CLITIC be adequately distinguished from the INFLECTIONAL AFFIX on the one hand and from the INDEPENDENT WORD on the other. The first of these tasks has been attended to, but the second has been slighted, with the result that many items labeled ‘particles’ have been treated as clitics.

After some remarks on the nature of ‘tests’ in linguistics, a series of tests is provided here for distinguishing clitics from independent words. On the basis of these, it is concluded that most of the ‘particles’ in the literature are simply words; from this conclusion, it is argued that treating words with idiosyncratic distributions as acategorial ‘particles’ is wrong.

We then consider the relevance of various cases of ‘particles‘—in German, Chrau, Hidatsa, and Welsh—to theoretical proposals about special clitics. These examples include some items that are independent words, some that are inflectional affixes, and others that are independent words with simple clitic variants.

Finally, a class of DISCOURSE MARKERS is delineated: a grammatical category of items which are often classified as ‘particles’ but which turn out, again, to be independent words rather than clitics of any sort.*

This article offers a holistic approach to the understanding of Arizona Tewa passives by examining them from typological, genetic-historical, and areal-historical perspectives. Two types of functional passives, IMPERSONAL and SEMANTIC, are contrastively analysed in terms of their grammatical properties and discourse functions. Genetic-historical comparison reveals the Arizona Tewa semantic passive to be rather anomalous in terms of other Kiowa-Tanoan languages. Areal-historical comparison suggests the influence of Apachean languages. A strategy of combining these distinct perspectives for historical analysis is shown to provide a more precise tool for the anthropological linguistic study of the past.

Two theses concerning word order in Mandarin Chinese have been investigated through a quantified study of written and spoken contemporary Mandarin. It is found, first, that Mandarin is synchronically a typical VO language, in terms of text distribution of VO and OV orders. OV appears at the level of 10% or lower in text, and this is true for both definite and indefinite objects. Further, the functional distribution of OV in both texts suggests that it is an emphatic/contrastive discourse device, having little to do with the contrast between definite and indefinite object. Finally, neither the evidence from our text distribution data nor a comparison with a recent study of the acquisition of Mandarin by native children suggests the existence of a diachronic drift toward SOV order.

Taiwan Mandarin (TM) is the variety which is learned and used, primarily as a second language, by the people of Taiwan, 80% of whom speak Taiwanese (Tw), a variety of Minnan, as a native language. Taking Peking Mandarin (PM) as the designated standard, this paper identifies those PM features which (a) are not common in TM, e.g. zero markers for future action, lack of contrast between simple past and perfect, the use of verbs or adjectives instead of auxiliary verbs in short answers; and (b) those that are shared by Tw and PM, e.g. the use of an inclusive 1pl. pronoun and the discontinuous A-not-A question forms. In addition to the common phenomena of transference of features from a first language (Tw) to a second language (TM), and the adopting of features that are simple and regular—and therefore easy to process—there is a third important difference between TM and PM. TM displays an obvious drift toward those characteristics which are common to the southern Chinese dialects (Verb-Object languages), and away from those features of Altaic (Object-Verb languages) which are characteristic of PM. The structural and extralinguistic aspects of this trend are examined.

On the basis of recent linguistic changes in TM and Tw, it is claimed that a significant correlation exists between sociolinguistic conditions and the way in which TM has changed. This correlation may be useful in reconstructing the sociolinguistic situation under which Altaic features were brought into PM and other northern Chinese dialects.

As the Dyirbal language of Australia nears extinction, its diminishing social function is accompanied by reduction within the linguistic system. If we place semi-speakers on a continuum according to the degree to which their language has been simplified, it is possible to trace changes in the grammar of the dying language. Focusing on morphological and syntactic ergativity demonstrates that decay in terminal Dyirbal involves systematic variation along the continuum. Reduction occurs on various levels, affecting syntactic operations and morphology. However, the data suggest that important formal and functional differences exist between dying Dyirbal and a typical pidgin.

Controversy exists over whether there is any connection between children's babbling and the development of the adult sound system. The classic proponent of the discontinuity school is Jakobson 1941/1968, who claimed that the pairing of sound and meaning drastically alters the child's sound system. Jakobson's arguments for discontinuity are here evaluated on the basis of data on the transition from babbling to speech in a single set of children recorded weekly in two contexts: mother-child interaction and solitary play. Using the data from the mother-child context, and comparing the sound system of babbling with that of the early words in terms of the distribution of consonants, vocalization length, and phonotactic structure, we find striking parallelism between babbling and words within each child, across time and within time period. The data constitute strong evidence for continuity.