This paper is meant as a contribution to historical morphology, although it takes the form of a critique. What will be criticized is a particular proposal, made by Carstairs (especially, 1984b), to look upon PARADIGM MIXTURE as a cause of morphological change. An issue not unrelated to this proposal is the use of PARADIGM ECONOMY (Carstairs, 1983) as a teleological principle in accounting for morphological change. We will show that paradigm economy is likely to be irrelevant to historical linguistics.

It will be suggested in this article that Slovene, a South Slavonic language, is on the way to acquiring verb-second (V2) word order. In providing evidence in support of this view I shall compare Slovene, on the one hand, with the closely related language Serbo-Croat and, on the other hand, with relevant details from the history of the Germanic languages. The point of comparing it with Serbo-Croat is to discover the respects in which the word order of these two languages has diverged. Taken together with what is known about the word order of Common Slavonic, the facts emerging from this comparison allow us to identify one major respect in which Slovene has changed and two respects in which it is still changing. At the same time, they reveal a major respect in which Serbo-Croat word order is also changing. The point of comparing Slovene with the Germanic languages is twofold. First, since all the present-day Germanic languages either have or have had V2 word order (Haiman, 1974), it is possible that their history can help us to understand the changes currently taking place in Slovene and to predict how Slovene might change in the future. Secondly, where details of the history of the Germanic languages are poorly understood, the possibility exists of gaining fresh insight into them in the light of the changes that have taken place more recently, or indeed are still taking place, in Slovene. In this connection we shall assess the plausibility of two theories concerning the adoption of V2 word order by the Germanic languages, those of Vennemann (1975) and Wackernagel (1892).

One of the most promising new developments of recent research into theoretical syntax within the model of Government and Binding (GB) as presented in Chomsky (1981) and (1982) has been the new importance given to the study of languages other than English. This has stimulated a great deal of work into a variety of languages (see, for example, Rizzi, 1982; Borer, 1983; Bouchard, 1984; Huang, 1984 and others). It has also been welcomed by linguists outside the TG tradition. Thus, Comrie, (1984:155) expresses his delight that ‘Chomsky (1981) makes clear that generative grammarians have come to realize that an adequate study of syntax within universal grammar requires the study of languages of different types. Chomsky's main concern has always been to formulate a theory that would achieve ‘explanatory adequacy’ by providing a restrictive set of principles which could characterize universally the notion ‘natural language’. However, detailed and in-depth analyses of various languages have revealed that in order to achieve ‘descriptive adequacy’ the theory has to allow for cross-linguistic differences, or ‘parametric variation’. The concept of parametric variation weakens some-what the restrictiveness of the universal grammar (UG) hypothesis and even more so its purported innateness, since the values for the parameters must be arrived at by the child through induction from empirical evidence. Nevertheless, explanatory adequacy may still be attained if the number of parameters is very small and each parameter has few values.

The topic of this discussion is analogical change of a particular sort, namely that where, pretheoretically, meaning seems to have had a role to play in determining the direction taken by the change. Analogy is an area of linguistic change of the highest theoretical interest. No analogical changes can take place without the involvement of ‘performance’ factors in general, including a perceiving human agent as one of these (cf. Vincent, 1974; Anttila, 1977), for many analogical acts illustrate the human mind in a condition that is at the same time relatively free and relatively fettered. It is free in the sense that the inferential processes used in the cases that interest us are ABDUCTIVE (cf. Andersen, 1973: 775; but contrast Mayerthaler, 1980: 126–7); that is, given some facts, a law may be invoked which allows the reasoner to infer that something MAY, not MUST, be the case, and to act upon that possibility in a creative way. The basic data in this paper include instances of similarity between lexemes, a notion which will receive the closest scrutiny. In the changes we will examine, people appear to invoke a law-like principle to the effect that there is a close relation between similarity of form and similarity of meaning. And they infer, abductively, that cases of similarity in such instances may be failed examples of sameness, and accordingly may replace the state of similarity by one of sameness (cf. Panagl, 1982: 5). The result is therefore the fruit of not always unreasonable guesswork rather than of the logical security of deduction (or induction). The mind is fettered in the sense that it appears condemned to try to make something transparent, or at least formally transparent, out of what is linguistically obscure; its activity is thus constrained by the rest of the linguistic system with which it operates. It is in the condition of an electrician who is summoned to sort out a dangling wire and connects it up to the first other dangling wire that he or she finds.

This article will be concerned with the accentuation of two types of sentence in English: straightforward intransitive sentences, like (1), and intransitive sentences embedded in the frame It's just NP V-ing, like (2), (1) The DOOR slammed. (2) It's just the DOOR slamming.

Arguments about constituency in syntax can often be settled by such methods as testing whether conjoining is possible, or whether a particular string can be moved as a single constituent by a transformational rule. In view of the isomorphism which has been noted between syntactic structures and phonological structures (cf. Clements & Keyser, 1983:25–26; the notion of ‘structural analogy’ in Anderson & Durand, 1986:3; and most notably the isomorphism pointed out between Sentence and Syllable by Kurylowicz, 1949), one might wonder whether such means are available for settling analogous arguments in phonology. It appears that they are not: in this area conjoining does not occur, while movement rules are either not recognized at all, or restricted to those accounting for processes of metathesis, which would normally be taken to be local transformations operating on single segments (cf. Vincent, 1986:318, fn. 3). What types of arguments, then, ARE available for settling questions of phonological constituency? This article attempts to explore some aspects of this question.

The properties of gaps are intrinsically significant in that the language learner can confront little direct evidence bearing on them, so that it is reasonable to assume that they reflect deeper principles of UG, the biologically determined endowment that will be the primary concern for those interested more in the nature of the human mind than in the arrangement of data in the environment (Chomsky, 1982:19. Some concepts and consequences of the theory of Government and Binding).