This paper is concerned with two topics, the status of the syllable and the scope of redundancy rules, in generative phonology. We begin the discussion by examining material from Lugisu, a Bantu language of eastern Uganda, which will be used as the main language of exemplification. The simple noun in Lugisu is formed by the sequence: determiner, classifier, stem. The determiner is deleted before consonant-initial stems in some syntactic environments (and in isolation; examples 1 and 3, for example, show the sequence: classifier, stem). The first examples are from Meinhof's noun class 3 (Meinhof, 1932) where the determiner is /gu/ 3 and the classifier /mu/.

Words of certain semantic types which can be subsumed under the label ‘expressive’ (notably onomatopoeias, movement words, and words with pejorative, jocular, or intense connotations) have a tendency in a wide range of languages to be associated with peculiarities of phonological structure – these peculiarities include types of sounds, sound-sequences and syllable-structures which can be regarded as peripheral in the language concerned.

The problem that provides the subject of the present study has, curiously enough, received little more than a passing glance from most grammarians. Many of them mention that adjectives can be formed from substantives by means of a dental suffix, but none seem to be intrigued by the four aspects of the problem to be examined here. The fact that these aspects of the problem have received little or no attention up to now would in itself justify this study. There is, however, a further and even weightier justification. The problem brings into focus four parts of speech-verb (through the past participle), substantive, adjective and adverb–and so provides an excellent opportunity for observing the relations between these categories. Such a chance should not be missed, especially at a time when not merely the system but the very existence of the parts of speech is being called into question.

In an article in this Journal (Specification and English tenses) Crystal has pointed out the hitherto neglected role that adverbial determiners may play in giving unambiguous indication of time where the verbal tense-form itself is not specific enough: ‘It is [in such cases] not a question of tense-form alone giving the relevant distinguishing indication of time, as has been traditionally assumed, but of tense-form with or without adverbial specification which gives unambiguous indication’ (Crystal, 1966: 5). Adverbials may thus become ‘non-omissible determiners’ (a term borrowed by Crystal from Ivić, 1962).

In the existing grammars and pedagogical works on Hindi-Urdu, the category of possessive expressions has mainly been described on the analogy of the possessive in English (Guru, 1952: 434–438; Kellogg, 1938: 101–102; Sharma, 1958: 34–35; Vajpeyi, 1959: 127–133, 159–170, 302–305; Pořizka, 77–78, 149–150, 277).1 In these works, it has been suggested that the genitive postposition ka, the invariable postposition ke, the compound locational postposition ke pas, and the directional postposition ko predicate possession. In Hindi-Urdu, the following types of sentences in English are generally translated by constructions containing one of the above postpositions: John has a son, John has a book, John has a headache. Such an analysis of possessive expressions in Hindi-Urdu is unsatisfactory from the point of view of an overall syntactic description of the language, since it would imply that there are gaps in the system of possessive expressions in Hindi-Urdu, and hence that in a transformational grammar of these languages some possessive phrases at least could not be derived from underlying simple sentences.

Explanations answer or anticipate questions about why something happened or why something is as it is. Such questions are often difficult to answer, for they require us not only to think of an explanation, but to think of one that will satisfy the questioner. I shall not attempt here to evaluate the satisfactoriness of various types of explanation. Rewarding though such an investigation would undoubtedly be, its very initiation depends upon the prior resolution of a more mundane descriptive problem: which utterances should be classified as explanations—however unsatisfactory they may be—and which should be classified as something else? It is with this problem that I shall be concerned in this paper—with a search for formal properties that distinguish explanations from other kinds of utterance such as simple statements.

The purpose of this paper is to give an account of some hitherto unexplained phenomena connected with the use of the Eskimo ‘relative case’. A deep structure is proposed that not only will account for the occurrence of certain surface morphemes, but also, and in a natural way, for the semantic affinities that exist between certain types of noun phrases and the transitive sentence in Eskimo. In particular, it is shown that in phrases of the type ‘the man's house’, there exists evidence for considering ‘man’ as the subject noun phrase, ‘house’ as the object noun phrase of some deep structure. The transformational machinery involved in deriving the correct surface structures is shown in some detail. A discussion of older terminology in Eskimo grammatical tradition provides additional, indirect confirmation of the naturalness of the proposed explanation.

In recent literature on transformational grammar there has been a good deal of discussion of tag sentences (Klima, 1964; Katz and Postal, 1964; Bolinger, 1967; Arbini, 1969). The type of construction under consideration is exemplified in the following (incomplete) paradigm: (1) John has gone, hasn't he? (2) John hasn't gone, has he? (3) John has gone, has he (?) (4) John hasn't gone, hasn't he (?) (5) Come early, won't you (?) (6) Come early, will you (?)

Representation of syntactic relations by dependency trees with nodes labelled by categories of lexical morphemes and with branches effectively labelled by relational morphemes reveals the relationships of elements to which selectional restrictions apply more directly than do current phrase structure characterizations and avoids certain defects of a configurational definition of relationships. The relations are those of CASE as defined by Fillmore and more generally those of HEAD-OF and COMPLEMENT-OF. Adoption of the view that SUBJECT-OF is a surface rather than a deep structure relation eliminates the need to distinguish strict subcategorization rules from selectional rules.

It was attempted to analyse objectively the written style of different authors. Nineteen style variables were defined and the frequency of occurrence of these variables in samples of 1000 words each was counted. The Chi-square method was employed to evaluate the significance of differences found between authors and between samples of the same author. Results showed that all authors could be significantly differentiated from each other. There were much smaller and mainly insignificant differences between samples of the same author. Probable relationships between personality and style were discussed, and problems for future research were pointed out concerning linguistic and statistical aspects of the approach.

1. Dialectologists in England have concentrated on the speech of small and relatively isolated rural communities (see, for example, Orton and Dieth, 1962: Introduction, 14). Other linguists and phoneticians concerned with the English of England have almost without exception described Standard English and the form of pronunciation they call, using an established but less than happy term, ‘Received Pronunciation’ (Jones, 1967:xvii). Yet the English of most English (and English-speaking Welsh) people is neither RP Standard English nor a rural dialect. The vast mass of urban working-class and lower-middle-class speakers use a pronunciation nearer to RP, and lexical and grammatical forms much nearer to Standard English, than the archaic rural dialects recorded by the dialectologists. Yet their speech diverges in many ways from what is described as standard. The purpose of this article, which must be regarded as preliminary and tentative, is to sketch the principal phonetic variables among such local, mainly urban, forms of English.1 It is the task of anyone concerned with the description of these ‘accents’ of English to investigate whatever phonetic variables can be identified and to establish their correlation with the non-linguistic variables of age, social standing and education, and geographical provenance. (For discussion of some of the problems of urban dialectology, see particularly Wright, 1966.)

This paper attempts to present the abstract phonological system which underlies the sounds produced when a Malayan variety of Engchun Hokkien is spoken.2 It is set within a generative framework and some attempt is made at a formalization of phonological rules.

It has been repeatedly suggested in the literature on generative phonology that the number of features which appear in phonological rules be used in an evaluation measure for alternative descriptions of the phonology of a language; thus Halle states (1962: 55): ‘Given two alternative descriptions of a particular body of data, the description containing fewer… symbols will be regarded as simpler and will, therefore, be preferred over the other.’ The purpose of the present paper is to examine critically the application of the proposed feature-counting evaluation measure to alternative analyses of a very restricted body of data in the phonology of Turkish. The data considered are, as far as I can see, self-contained in that the analyses to be discussed do not have any implications elsewhere in the system of phonological rules; the adequacy of the decision based on the evaluation measure in question can therefore be fully assessed in connexion with the minor problem we shall be examining.