In my comments on David Lightfoot in BBS (INFL,/Spec, and other fabulous beasts, 1989, 12:350–52) regarding language learnability, the symbol for verb was incorrectly printed as Y, rather than V. The error appeared at the end of the first paragraph in the second column on page 351. The clause should have read: “…the approach allows a child to learn rules of syntactic structure in terms of whatever category components he can so far identify (hence prior to the acquisition of the full repertoire of category notions) and it allows him to impose specific syntactic structures on sentence types whose syntax and semantics he has not yet learned (even a child who did not yet understand passive sentences would assimilate was given money to the already learned [V', VV'] surface configuration as soon as he had identified was as a V').”

Generative phonological research has typically relied heavily on gratuitous assumptions about the particular morphemic decompositions that are by convention treated as data, about the relevance of those decompositions to the determination of underlying forms, and about the individuation of linguistic phenomena. I discuss a number of topics that take on a different complexion when these gratuitous assumptions are avoided: the identification of particular segments as making up underlying forms, which is far more problematic than has hitherto been recognised; various prior studies that can be interpreted as showing that ‘Vowel Shift’, while playing some role in the competence of speakers of English, has much less generality than standard tenets of generative phonology would lead one to expect; and individual variation in perceived morphemic relations among words. I report on an experiment that demonstrates the existence of such variation and provides evidence for individual differences in the system of vowel alternations and in the status of vowel shift alternations in that system.

Frederick J. Newmeyer, Generative linguistics: a historical perspective. London: Routledge, 1996. Pp. x+218.

In this book (henceforth, GL), Newmeyer has collected 11 of his articles (including two co-authored ones), two of them previously unpublished, on the history of generative grammar, supplemented by reprints of two sections of Newmeyer 1986.