Utterances are housed not in paragraphs, but in turns at talk—occasions implying a temporary taking of the floor, as well as an alternation of takers. Turns themselves are naturally coupled into two-party interchanges. Interchanges are linked in runs marked off by some sort of topicality. One or more of these topical runs make up the body of a conversation. This interactionist view assumes that every utterance is a statement establishing the next speaker's words as a reply, or a reply to what the prior speaker has just established, or a mixture of both. Utterances, then, do not stand by themselves—indeed, they often make no sense when so heard—but are constructed and timed to support the close social collaboration of speech turn-taking. In nature the spoken word is only found in verbal interplay, being integrally designed for such collective habitats. However, this paper considers some roguish utterances that appear to violate this interdependence, entering the stream of behavior at peculiar and unnatural places, producing communicative effects but no dialog. The paper begins with a special class of spoken sentences and ends with a special class of vocalizations—the first failing to qualify as communication, the second failing not to.

The six-month period following the first use of words by Jessie L. was dominated by two one-word utterances, cat and mama. A near-total record of her use of these words, along with several minor lexical items, is the basis of a detailed analysis of her acquisition of phonetic and phonological capacities. The apparent plateau of the second year is a site of intensive language-learning, which is not reflected in the growth of vocabulary or mean length of utterance.

This paper introduces selected concepts from a theory of linguistic structure called space grammar, and employs these concepts to seek an integrated account of the form and meaning of the English auxiliary. It is argued that the form of the auxiliary, apart from certain morphological adjustments, reflects each step of the conceptual path leading from the speaker to the objective situation described by the main verb. Observations are made on the nature of auxiliary status, classes of predicates, and the semantic value of individual auxiliary elements. The analysis enables one to explain many properties of simple and complex sentences.

WH-clefts and it-clefts have long been claimed to be interchangeable. However, an examination of naturally-occurring discourse demonstrates that this claim is incorrect. The presupposed part (WH-clause) of a WH-cleft represents information that the speaker can assume the hearer is thinking about. In one variety of it-cleft, the presupposed part (that/WH-clause) represents information which the speaker assumes the hearer knows or can deduce, but is not presumably thinking about. In another variety of it-cleft, the presupposed part represents information which the speaker takes to be a known fact, though definitely NOT known to the hearer.

In Spanish, most inherited stative verbs belong to the 2nd conjugation—which is characterized by mid, never close, root-vowels. This condition is a result of the interaction of several morphological and phonetic factors in Latin, and a redistribution of 2nd and 3rd conjugation verbs according to root-vowel quality. Rates of lexical retention and loss reflect the degree to which verbs fit the developing morphophonemic and semantic patterns. A type of sound symbolism has thus influenced the composition of the modern vocabulary.