This paper examines the applicability to the history of linguistics of Thomas Kuhn's conception of the history of science. It concludes that his notion of REVOLUTION, borrowed from the history of the non-sciences, can be applied to the history of linguistics; but the same is not true of his other key notion, the PARADIGM. The possession of paradigms, according to Kuhn, is what distinguishes the hard sciences from fields in the humanities and social sciences which have not achieved scientific maturity. Kuhn regards a paradigm as (1) resulting from an outstanding scientific achievement on the part of a single innovator, and (2) commanding uniform assent among all the members of the discipline. If these two requirements are to be everywhere met, the concept cannot be applied either to the history or the present state of linguistics. Serious objections can also be raised to other features of Kuhn's theory, such as the view that shifting allegiance from one paradigm to another is a largely irrational process. The paper recommends, then, that linguists abandon the theory.

This article offers a holistic approach to the understanding of Arizona Tewa passives by examining them from typological, genetic-historical, and areal-historical perspectives. Two types of functional passives, IMPERSONAL and SEMANTIC, are contrastively analysed in terms of their grammatical properties and discourse functions. Genetic-historical comparison reveals the Arizona Tewa semantic passive to be rather anomalous in terms of other Kiowa-Tanoan languages. Areal-historical comparison suggests the influence of Apachean languages. A strategy of combining these distinct perspectives for historical analysis is shown to provide a more precise tool for the anthropological linguistic study of the past.

This paper presents a theory of surface case which bears a strong formal similarity to autosegmental theory in phonology and morphology. We suggest that surface case forms a tier which is autonomous of phrase structure—and which is associated with NP's of the PS tier by general principles analogous to those which associate tones with segments, or phonemic melodies with CV skeleta. We show that this theory permits parameterization of a variety of case systems, and thus provides some insight into how case might be characterized in Universal Grammar. The theory permits, most strikingly, a unification of Accusative and Ergative systems under one simple parameter, and explanation of the mysterious appearance of postverbal nominative case in the passives of certain Icelandic ditransitive verbs.

The Anatolian branch of Indo-European is characterized by a split-ergative case-marking system in which neuters inflect ergatively and common-gender nouns inflect accusatively; its ergative case originated via the reanalysis of an unproductive neuter instrumental marker in null-subject transitive clauses. A development from instrumental to ergative also occurred in the prehistory of the Gorokan languages of Papua New Guinea, and it is suggested that this process is a general mechanism for the development of split ergativity of this type. The well-known NP hierarchy discovered by Silverstein receives a natural interpretation as a hierarchy of instrumentality.