The English intonation often referred to as a calling contour—a stepping-down sequence of two level tones—is not inherently associated with calling, but rather conveys the implication that an utterance is in some way stereotyped or stylized. Vivid and quite precise nuances in specific usages can be accounted for by the abstract meaning ‘stylized’. This meaning is not restricted to the stepping-down contour, but is a more general phenomenon: at least three contours ending in level pitch are ‘stylized’ modifications of ‘plain’ contours ending in rising or falling pitch. The relationship of stylized contours to plain contours provides some evidence for preferring British-style ‘nuclear tones’ to whole-sentence ‘tunes’ as units of analysis. More importantly, it clearly demonstrates the inadequacy of any approach to English intonation which treats contours as sequences of significant pitch levels.

This paper presents an inventory of the features that are necessary to describe vowel systems in the languages of the world. The relationship between the features and their articulatory and acoustic correlates is explored. Some vowel features, like High and Back, are accounted for in both articulatory and acoustic terms. Others, like Peripheral, are best described with reference to the acoustic domain. When the number of contrasts of each feature is considered, some features turn out to be multivalued.

Conditional clauses and topics are marked identically in a number of unrelated languages. This is a surprising fact, since they are not usually considered to be related categories. Nevertheless, if formal similarity reflects similarity in meaning, they must indeed be related. A review of analyses of conditionals (in the philosophical literature) and of topics (primarily in linguistics) reveals that, in fact, their definitions are very similar. Moreover, it is possible to motivate revisions to these definitions by which they become virtually identical. This paper thus justifies the method of basing semantic analysis of a construction on a cross-linguistic examination of its superficial form.

Simplification in structure, and also confluence between the local-language structure and the prestige-language structure, are usually predicted in language death as in pidginization. For a dying Scottish Gaelic dialect, speakers representing a broad proficiency continuum were tested in the two most excessively complex morphological structures the dialect offers, the noun plural and the gerund. The forms supplied by the semi-speakers at the bottom of the proficiency continuum show considerable simplification, as expected, but very much less than in ‘classical’ pidginization; confluence with English is also quite limited. Marked functional differences between this dying dialect and the typical pidgin are invoked to account for the difference in outcome.

There are semantic universals in the domain of color; i.e. there are constraints on the types of possible basic color lexicons. These constraints arise from the structure and function of the visual system. Thus in the case of color at least, rather than language determining perception (cf. Sapir and Whorf), it is perception that determines language.

In deriving the semantic universals from properties of the visual system, one must employ a continuous rather than discrete mathematics, in particular the theory of fuzzy sets. The resulting model of color semantics thus conflicts with the discrete-feature concept of semantic primes shared by structuralists and generativists. It is argued on this basis that discrete-feature semantic theories are of limited accuracy.