The ideas of this paper spring from an attempt to grapple with certain phonological problems in a number of languages, and in particular with the special problems which arise when one desires to use a generative, ‘distinctive-feature’ approach. The facts of Tswana phonology summarized below (§5.1) proved especially awkward to handle; when the original twelve features were taken and assigned in a ‘classical’ manner (i.e. [+Vocalic, + Consonantal] for all Liquids, [—Vocalic, —Consonantal] for all Glides, etc.), there were found to be many different ways of characterizing the various segment-types. What was disturbing was that every one of these ways entailed writing phonological rules which failed to highlight the underlying structure, or even obscured it. Conversely, if assignments other than the ‘classical’ were permitted, any attempt to group the segment-types into an arrangement which faithfully reflected the relationships between them (such as Table 8 below) left one with insuperable phonetic problems of feature-assignment. Both these types of difficulty are exemplified in Appendix i.

It is planned to publish this paper in three parts, in this and the two subsequent issues of the Journal of Linguistics. The three parts will consist respectively of the numbered sections 1–3, 4–7 and 8–10; references to section 4 onwards are thus to forthcoming parts of the paper. Sections 1–3 contain observations concerning transitivity; 4–7 deal with what is here referred to as ‘theme’, a general term for all those choices involving the distribution of information in the clause; in 8–10, transitivity is reconsidered in the light of certain further problems and of what has been said about theme, and some generalization is attempted.

Katz (1966) attempts to explicate the notion of analyticity on the basis of a theory of natural languages. This theory assumes that grammatical transformations do not affect semantic interpretations, which are performed on the underlying phrase markers. Hence, the interpretation of the conjunction of two co-ordinate clauses consists of the logical conjunction of their interpretations. The following two sentences have therefore identical interpretations:

1. The thief snatched the money and the clerk pressed the alarm.

2. The clerk pressed the alarm and the thief snatched the money.

We know a great deal about the Indo-European language family, and we can reconstruct a significant part of its vocabulary and its meaning-structure. Some words are virtual certainties, e.g. the form and meaning of the number ‘seven’, as well as other numerals. Other words are quite beyond confident recovery, both for form and for the notion itself, e.g. ‘good’. As a rule, we may say that in proportion as the lexeme is bound up with semantics that are or have been culturally relative the reconstruction becomes increasingly elusive.

1. In the last few years there have been three papers published devoted wholly or largely to a study of the English comparative construction: Lees (1961); Smith (1961); and Pilch (1965) The focus of attention has been the structure of what, following Pilch, I shall call the comparative expansion (the constituent introduced by than or as), rather than the morphology of the compared adjective or adverb. It is not surprising that so much interest should be shown in this construction at a time when one of the main concerns of linguists is to make their syntactic descriptions maximally explicit. For as this was not the aim of traditional grammarians, they had relatively little to say on the structure of the comparative expansion, implicitly assuming doubtless that such ungrammaticalities as

(1) *John bought a bigger car than Mary went home yesterday can be ruled out by commonsense, semantics, or logic.

The purpose of this study is to show that the theory of English syntax contains at least two phrase structure rules (cf. Chomsky, 1956, 1961) which introduce sentences. The first of these exemplifies the principle of NOUN PHRASE COMPLEMENTATION by which a sentence is introduced under the immediate domination of a noun phrase (NP). The second is VERB PHRASE COMPLEMENTATION, involving the introduction of a sentence under the immediate domination of a verb phrase (VP). These rules, couched in a workable phrase structure context, will be postulated at the outset. (For a more complete phrase structure component incorporating the principles of noun phrase and verb phrase complementation, cf. Rosenbaum & Lochak, 1966.) It will then be shown (i) that these rules follow as a consequence of syntactic theory previously formulated and independently justified and (ii) that the incorporation of these rules into the grammar of English leads to a compelling account of a wide range of English complex sentence phenomena.