Individual speech is a minimal system of language use and variation and yet, despite its theoretical interest, has been neglected; syntax (as against phonology) has been egregiously ignored. This article, stimulated by the work of Adam Parry and of Sapir, partly solves a thorny problem over two millennia old. Using total samples of Achilles and his interlocutors, the authors establish nine categories of discriminatory variables in rhetoric, discourse, and syntax; ‘expressive rhetoric’, asyndeton, and particles are particularly revealing. The speech of Achilles is related to the personality which it symbolizes. Our conclusions concern three major open questions in the study of individual variation.

This paper argues against syntactic derivation of deverbatives from forms marked for tense. It is shown, first, that Khalkha Mongolian deverbatives have categories completely different from those of finite verbs; second, that the facts of the English perfect are falsified by such derivation; and, third, that neutralization of underlying tense in Greek deverbatives results in a paradox involving primacy relations. It is concluded that deverbatives need not be marked for tense underlyingly, since tense is a ‘main clause phenomenon’ serving pragmatic functions of discourse. The surface actualization of underlying categories depends in part on such pragmatic functions.

There-sentences in English fall into two types: EXISTENTIAL and LIST. ‘Existential’ there-sentences typically allow only indefinite NP arguments, while ‘list’ there-sentences accept both definites and indefinites. The reason for this difference is that the argument of an existential there-sentence is the NP itself; but the argument of a list there-sentence is the list, not the individual members comprising that list. Once this distinction is noted, only one restriction remains on the arguments of all there-sentences, namely that they be non-anaphoric in the sense discussed in this article.

The history of pidgin Portuguese is divided into two temporally and geographically distinct phases: first, the period of formation in Europe, beginning around the 1440's, and second, the period of transfer and establishment in West Africa of the resultant ‘acquired code’, beginning around 1500. In the first period, pidginization did not occur as a result of the initial contacts between ocean traders and Africans; rather, native speakers of West African languages were captured and taken to Portugal—where, at the orders of Prince Henry the Navigator, they were taught Portuguese so that they could be used as translators on future voyages.

Extensive modifications, attested in contemporary sources, were introduced into their speech by the Portuguese in communicating with Africans; and this type of speech became known to the populace at large through popular plays, poems etc. Examination of 15th and 16th-century literary representations of this European pidgin shows that it had the familiar pidgin structural peculiarities. The modifications were not the result of imitation-of-error, tertiary hybridization, or substratum influences, although Eastern Sabir may have played a role as a model for them. Their ultimate origins, however, can be traced to an attempt by the base-language speakers to avoid accumulation of elements of meaning in surface units.