Students of language do not need to ask Why a linguistic society? but many laymen have asked this question. The answer, to be sure, lies really in our work and in its results; but, for this very reason, it is desirable that our motives be understood.

[The author points out cases in which contiguous languages, though different in structure and vocabulary, exhibit in common striking morphologic peculiarities that must have spread by borrowing from language to language. A simple genealogical classification cannot therefore adequately represent the development, but ‘hybridization’ must also be taken into account.]

[The paper delimits the field of descriptive phonology, formulates a system thereof, and briefly points out some of its implications.]

0.1. Leonard Bloomfield was the first to state explicitly some of the assumptions that underlie the methods of linguistic science; his formulation of these axioms in the second volume of LANGUAGE has remained for more than twenty years the only attempt of its kind. We may find it necessary now, in the light of recent theoretical discussions, to make certain changes of detail in his list of assumptions; but the importance of his article as a contribution to linguistic theory is undiminished. Whoever undertakes, in future, to apply the postulational approach to linguistics, will find his task made easier by the model that Bloomfield has provided.

Leonard Bloomfield, in his book Language, makes the statement:

Two later writers, discussing the reconstruction of earlier stages of related languages, have made relevant statements in this connection. Bruno Migliorini says

There used to be and to some extent still is a feeling among linguists that the psychology of a language is more particularly concerned with its grammatical features, but that its sounds and its phonetic processes belong to a grosser physiological substratum. Thus, we sometimes hear it said that such phonetic processes as the palatalizing of a vowel by a following i or other front vowel (“umlaut”) or the series of shifts in the manner of articulating the old Indo-European stopped consonants which have become celebrated under the name of “Grimm's Law” are merely mechanical processes, consummated by the organs of speech and by the nerves that control them as a set of shifts in relatively simple sensorimotor habits. It is my purpose in this paper, as briefly as may be, to indicate that the sounds and sound processes of speech cannot be properly understood in such simple, mechanical terms.

We aim in this paper to replace by a unified, systematic theory the heterogeneous and incomplete methods hitherto offered for determining IMMEDIATE CONSTITUENTS (hereafter abbreviated IC, plural ICs). The unifying basis is furnished by the famous concept of patterning, applied repeatedly and in divers special forms.

As basic as the phonemic principle is to linguistic science, it is only quite recently that it has had the serious attention of linguists. In studying the phonemes of Chitimacha (an Indian language of Louisiana) I knew of no single source from which I could learn to understand all the phenomena that I observed. There seemed to be a need for an adequate and complete exposition of the phonemic principle including, especially, an account of how it applies to the more marginal and difficult types of phenomena. I at first intended to include this discussion in my paper on the Chitimacha phonemes, but the wider interest of the general discussion makes it more appropriate that it be published separately. The specific treatment of Chitimacha, which can now appear without theoretical digessions, will serve to illustrate many of the points discussed here. I do not attempt to cite previous authors1 on all of the points treated in this paper, though I recognize fully my dependence on them. On a few points my treatment attempts to avoid weaknesses in previous treatments, and a point or two are perhaps introduced here for the first time. However, the chief ideals of this paper are theoretical comprehensiveness, consistency of treatment, and brevity.

The method of postulates (that is, assumptions or axioms) and definitions is fully adequate to mathematics; as for other sciences, the more complex their subject-matter, the less amenable are they to this method, since, under it, every descriptive or historical fact becomes the subject of a new postulate.

1.0. This paper presents a formalized procedure for describing utterances directly in terms of sequences of morphemes rather than of single morphemes. It thus covers an important part of what is usually included under syntax. When applied in a particular language, the procedure yields a compact statement of what sequences of morphemes occur in the language, i.e. a formula for each utterance (sentence) structure in the language.

The following investigation presents a constructional procedure segmenting an utterance in a way which correlates well with word and morpheme boundaries. The procedure requires a large set of utterances, elicited in a certain manner from an informant (or found in a very large corpus); and it requires that all the utterances be written in the same phonemic representation, determined without reference to morphemes. It then investigates a particular distributional relation among the phonemes in the utterances thus collected; and on the basis of this relation among the phonemes, it indicates particular points of segmentation within one utterance at a time. For example, in the utterance /hiyzkwikər/ He's quicker it will indicate segmentation at the points marked by dots: /hiy.z.kwik.ər/; and it will do so purely by comparing this phonemic sequence with the phonemic sequences of other utterances.

As early as 1886, Hermann Paul pointed out that all borrowing by one language from another is predicated on some minimum of bilingual mastery of the two languages. For any large-scale borrowing a considerable group of bilinguals has to be assumed. The analysis of borrowing must therefore begin with an analysis of the behavior of bilingual speakers. A vast literature has come into being on the subject of borrowing, particularly in the historical studies of individual languages; but there is still room for discussion of the relationship between the observed behavior of bilingual speakers and the results of borrowing as detected by linguists. Any light that can be thrown on the question by a study of bilingual speakers should be welcome to all students interested in borrowing and in the general linguistic problems associated with this process. In the present article an effort will be made to define more precisely the terminology used in the linguistic analysis of borrowing, and to set up certain hypotheses concerning the process of borrowing. It should then be possible to test these by their usefulness of application to particular studies of bilingualism and borrowing.

Though considerations of meaning in linguistics can be replaced, up to a point, by rigorous structural procedures, i.e. procedures involving solely the kinds and order of the elements of the language under investigation, they cannot be replaced by distributional procedures, despite the claim recently made by Harris. Distributional procedures may be sufficient to establish the rules by which all longer expressions (especially sentences) can be constructed out of the elements, but they are inadequate for the establishment of certain other rules that would mirror the so-called logical properties and relations of sentences and other expressions.

[Reconstruction by the comparative method (as distinct from internal reconstruction based on alternations between phonemes in a paradigm) is essentially a problem in phonemics, in which the place of allophones is taken by sets of sound correspondences that are partially alike (share one component) and in complementary distribution. The principle is illustrated by the IE dental and labial stops as reconstructed from Sanskrit and Germanic, by IE *s in Greek and Latin, and by the IE aspirates in Italic]

Recent developments and publications concerning the analysis and classification of morphemes have been of great importance: they have provided a variety of new approaches to old problems, refined the statements of relationships, demonstrated the applicability of the method to a number of languages, emphasized the importance of distributional criteria, and pointed out a number of unsolved or perhaps only partially solved problems. All this has been a genuine gain. Nevertheless, a close examination of some of these developments is rather disturbing, and certain rather basic objections can be raised. For one thing, the term morpheme has come to be used by Hockett, and to a somewhat lesser extent by others, as a designation for forms which are related almost wholly in terms of distribution. I do not wish to deny the significance of tactics in linguistic structure; but when the primary criterion for the choosing of alternative possibilities is stated by Hockett as being ‘tactical simplicity’, I am inclined to doubt the validity of quite so much stress being laid upon distributional characteristics, especially when such a choice leads to the conclusions which Hockett has described. In both Bloch's and Hockett's recent papers on morphemic problems there is a conspicuous tendency to make covert distinctions more important than overt ones, though the treatment is quite different as regards detail.