The word DERIVATION and its cousins DERIVE and DERIVATIONAL are technical linguistic terms. Thus they ought to be models of sober precision. But in fact these words carry several meanings and they have a way of slipping from one sense to another without warning, so that when an author uses a word from this group his meaning is not always unmistakable.

This paper takes up various problems of Gorum verb morphology and, more important, of its semantic categories. These relate specifically to the interconnections found between so-called causativization and transitivity. The notion ‘intransitivity’, is shown to be inadequate to characterize the data, and can be replaced by a semantic feature – which we call affectedness – of the subject NP of a primary verb in a tree. Higher sentence construction is not adequately handled by the ambiguous – or various – notions of causativity. What happens in Gorum can be more adequately described in terms of displacement of the head NP in a sentence, and this is shown to be directly related to transitivity, causation and perhaps volition. For, an additional distinction operating in the Gorum verbal system is that of internally motivated action versus the absence of such motivation. This distinction – and its correlation with the feature affected – is also touched on.

Two models of generative grammar are now available, the interpretative semantic model and the generative semantic model. The latter model differs sharply from Chomsky's ‘standard model’ in that its base component generates semantic objects, namely predicates and their arguments, whereas the base component of the ‘standard model’ generates syntactic objects, e.g. noun phrases and verb phrases. The interpretative semantic model is essentially the ‘standard model’ to which have been added rules for interpreting surface structures. (For an interpretative account of pronouns and negation, see Jackendoff (1968, 1969). A criticism of Jackendoff's proposals is to be found in Lakoff (1970)). This paper offers an informal account of aspect in Russian which, it will be argued, indicates that the many problems raised by generative semantics must be tackled by any linguist interested in ‘explanatory adequacy’.

The continuous gradation of colour which exists in nature is represented in language by a series of discrete categories. Athough there is no such thing as a natural division of the spectrum, every language has colour words by which its speakers categorize and structure the colour continuum. The number of colour words and the manner in which different languages classify the colour continuum differ. Bassa, a language of Liberia, has only two terms for classifying colours; hui and ziza (Gleason, 1955: 5). Hui corresponds roughly to the cool end of the spectrum (black, violet, blue, and green) and ziza corresponds to the warm end of the spectrum (white, yellow, orange and red); in Bambara, one of the languages of the Congo area, there are three fundamental colour words: dyema, blema and fima (Zahan, 1951: 52). Dyema includes white, beige, and natural (cotton) colour; blema denotes reddish, brownish shades; and finally fima includes dark green, indigo and black. Maerz and Paul (1930) list over 3000 colour names in English, but generally it is considered to have eight basic names: black, white, red, orange, yellow, green, blue and violet.

1. The development of transformational theory has been marked by a considerable shifting about of powers allotted to the various constructs. As a theory of lexicon arose, for example, some of the function of the context-sensitivity of the phrase-structure rules was rendered unnecessary; correspondingly, when the rewrite system was tightly confined to a context-free nature, the transformational component took up part of the burden of providing for certain dependencies and concord phenomena. A fair estimate of the history of that component would have to concede that its powers – in spite of the cycle, and some scattered efforts (Emonds, 1969; Postal, 1971; Ross, 1969; Sanders, 1970)–have grown significantly. For example, Emonds's work aside, no general principles of derived constituent structure have developed (as originally anticipated, say, in Lees, 1957b: 400–401); quite the contrary, the particular elementary operations at the root of transformational relationships have been extended, so that at the moment, in addition to sister-adjunction and daughter-adjunction, we have at our disposal Chomsky-adjunction – a range of moves allowing just about any sort of bracketing relation to be developed. Similarly, the recent suggestion that a transformation be considered, most generally, a relation holding between P-markers (not necessarily ‘adjacent’ and not necessarily paired) engenders an enormous increase in power – all the more so since the so-called local and global constraints that are intended to offset the magnification of power are only promissory (Lakoff, 1970).

1. Adverbial subordinate clauses introduced by instead of and rather than exhibit certain unique syntactic and semantic properties. I will propose an account of the interaction between the structure and the meaning of sentences containing these two clause types, and suggest some explanations for the rather clear-cut variation which exists among speakers with respect to these sentences.

In the present study I am adducing arguments against the assumption that there is a discrete level of grammar where all syntactic operation has stopped and the assignment of phonetic values to the then existing structure (the output of transformations) begins.

The concept of ‘surface structure’ has received the following definitions in Chomsky's various works: ‘a proper bracketing of the linear, temporarily given sequence of elements, with the paired brackets labelled by category names (that is a labelled tree diagram, with such categories as Sentence, Noun Phrase, Verb Phrase, Noun, and a small number of others serving as labels)' (Chomsky, 1966: 21), ‘the organization into categories and phrases that is directly associated with the physical signal’ (Chomsky, 1968:25). These definitions take the physical event of speech as a starting point, and refer to the organization of the sentence on this level (cf. Chomsky, 1965a: 15). One finds, on the other hand, that in the Chomskyan system ‘surface structure’ is also defined in terms of derivation, as the last item in a finite sequence of phrase-markers, the output of the transformations (Chomsky, 1970: 53 f., 87), and such surface structures ‘are mapped into phonetic representations by the phonological rules’ (ibid.: 54) and are assigned intonational contours by rules of phonological interpretation (ibid.: 77). This is summed up in the formula ‘phonology: Pn→phonetic representation’ (ibid.: 87, where Pn is the surface structure, the last phrase-marker).

1. I want in this paper to draw attention again to the theoretical basis of the use of distinctive features in generative phonology, and with that in mind, to consider what improvements can be made. One function of distinctive features is to provide a formal means of expressing the notion of a NATURAL CLASS (cf. Harms, 1968: 26), such that a phonological rule which applies to a natural class of segments may be expressed in a simpler way than a rule applying to some other class of segments. Distinctive features, and notational devices and conventions, are intended to capture this notion of simplicity so that by examining a formalized rule one may discover, counting the symbols in it according to a set of values provided, at least whether the rule is simpler than a comparable rule, if not its simplicity in any absolute sense. It is also intended that the set of features should be a substantive universal of language, though, as Harms' examples (1968: 23–38), drawn from various people's analyses of various languages, show, it cannot yet be seen that there is a tendency towards agreement on which these might be, as Harms himself (38) is aware. He sees the problem, however, in these terms:

The basic set of features can be viewed as a hypothesis about language, subject to empirical validation. Arguments for adding new features to the list or for altering the basic features must demonstrate the inadequacy of the basic hypothesis. Such arguments, however, cannot be based upon an appeal to the simplicity metric, for the features themselves are elements in the simplicity metric. Phonemic solutions that do not assume the same set of features cannot be compared in terms of simplicity. The claim must be that one solution provides a more reasonable hypothesis of the phonological structure of the language in question.

Linguists concerned with the historical evolution of a language have for some time been aware of the implications for their discipline of the distinction between deep and surface structure implicit, of course, in the writings of such Cartesians as Cordemoy and in the Grammaire générale et raisonnée of Port-Royal, but largely ignored by historical linguists until it re-emerged as crucial within the generative-transformational approach to language study. It is now evident that historical linguistics should not be exclusively concerned with surface-structure changes – changes which are particularly clear and well-documented within the field of Romance linguistics – but should also consider what changes, if any, have taken place in the deep structure underlying the surface representation. The present paper will look at various recent analyses of the interrelationship between these two levels and will go on to suggest, largely on the basis of evidence drawn from the evolution of the verb system from Latin to French, that there are in fact at least three valid levels of analysis and that the historical linguist will be primarily concerned with neither the deepest nor the most superficial of these.

In several recent articles the issue of directionality in transformational grammar has been treated, rather unsatisfactorily to my mind. The question is this: are the relationships among the various levels of grammatical description (semantic structure, deep structure, surface structure, phonetic structure) such that certain levels are descriptively prior to others? That is, is there an inherent ‘direction’ to the relationship between two levels of description (say deep structure and surface structure)? Recent treatments suggest that the question is pointless, or that the answer is no. I maintain that this impression results entirely from the way previous discussions have been worded, and that the issues have yet to be approached properly.