The American anthropologists who have been linguistic scholars as well—I would mention Boas, Sapir, and, last but not least, Alfred L. Kroeber, whom we delight to honor in this issue of Language—have been catholic in their approaches to linguistics. Descriptive linguistics on this continent owes a tremendous amount to these men. But none of them has ignored historical problems, and in their various ways and even with radically different points of view on subjects which were open to dispute, they have contributed much to both detailed genetic problems, especially of the North American continent, and to the discussion of certain general questions. One of the latter is a problem that arises again and again in any region of the world where the linguistic picture is complicated, and it is particularly fitting, as will appear, if I attempt to add something to it as an offering to Kroeber.

This paper presents evidence for abstract phonology—that is, a phonology that recognizes underlying segments which are not realized phonetically. Two underlying vowel segments /ᴐ/ and /ε/ are posited for Nupe (a Kwa language of Central Nigeria), both of which are realized as [a], therefore merging (‘absolutely neutralizing’) with /a/. Arguments based on pattern congruity, naturalness, and a ‘weak’ form of alternation are brought forth in support of this solution. Central, however, is the demonstration of the psychological reality of these two segments. In addition, various alternate solutions are shown to be inadequate. Finally, implications of the abstract Nupe solution are discussed.

When ‘marked’ or ‘external’ negation has not been treated as an additional semantic operator alongside the straightforward truth-functional, presupposition-preserving ordinary (‘internal‘) negation, it has been collapsed with internal negation into a unified general logical operator on propositions. Neither of these approaches does justice to the differences and kinships between and within the two principal varieties of negation in natural language. Marked negation is not reducible to a truth-functional one-place connective with the familiar truth-table for negation, nor is it definable as a separate logical operator; it represents, rather, a metalinguistic device for registering objection to a previous utterance (not proposition) on any grounds whatever, including the way it was pronounced.

Transitivity involves a number of components, only one of which is the presence of an object of the verb. These components are all concerned with the effectiveness with which an action takes place, e.g., the punctuality and telicity of the verb, the conscious activity of the agent, and the referentiality and degree of affectedness of the object. These components co-vary with one another in language after language, which suggests that Transitivity is a central property of language use. The grammatical and semantic prominence of Transitivity is shown to derive from its characteristic discourse function: high Transitivity is correlated with foregrounding, and low Transitivity with backgrounding.

Evidence is presented that the superficial Subject-Verb-Object word order of English arises by a transformation from an underlying constituent order in which clauses begin with verbs—or more correctly, predicates: the representation in question here is a semantic one in which noun, verb, adjective, conjunction, etc. are undifferentiated.

Mixture of Spanish and English, whether in isolated loan words or in code-switching of clauses and sentences, while socially motivated, is subject to clear linguistic constraints. Quantitative analysis of mixing in conversations of Mexican-Americans suggests specific functional constraints to express tense/aspect/mood and subject/object relationships, as well as structural constraints which permit only surface structures which are grammatical in both languages. Resolution of structural conflict plays a key role, so that lexical cores trigger longer phrasal switches if they govern rules which create non-shared surface structures. The relative frequency of mixes without structural conflict is constrained by discourse function.

Speech performances are here considered as statistical samples drawn from a probabilistic language competence. This competence is modeled in conventional generative terms, except that optional rules are assigned application probabilities as functions of the structure of the input strings, possibly depending on the extralinguistic environment as well. We develop the mathematical background for these variable rules, which were introduced by Labov, and we apply the theory and methodology to examples from Spanish, French, and English. The data consist of relative frequencies of rule application for different types of input string, and they provide a check on the frequencies predicted by variable rules. This study supports the hypothesis that the various features in rule structural descriptions tend to act independently, in the statistical sense, on rule probabilities. The analytic framework for variable rules is easily and naturally extendable to take into account the effect of sociolinguistic and stylistic features on application frequencies.

The dying East Sutherland dialect of Scottish Gaelic shows grammatical change currently in progress in two syntactic environments, the passive and the case system. The rate of change has been rapid enough to show clear differences between the usage of the oldest and the youngest fluent speakers available, a span of just over 40 years. This permits the consideration of questions about the direction of change, the processes of change, and the rate of change, and of the utility of terminal speakers for systematic language description and historical reconstruction.

Two types of bound morphemes—clitics and inflectional affixes—are found attached to (free) words in many languages. At least six lines of evidence separate the clear cases on each side: the degree of selection between the dependent morpheme and the word to which it is attached; arbitrary lexical gaps; phonological idiosyncrasies; semantic idiosyncrasies; syntactic operations affecting the combinations; and restrictions on the combinability of clitics with inflectional affixes. These criteria all indicate that English contracted auxiliaries (She's gone) are clitics, but that the English contracted negative (She hasn't gone) is an inflectional affix—a rather surprising conclusion that turns out to have satisfying consequences.

This paper discusses the linguistic development of Genie, an adolescent girl who for most of her life underwent a degree of social isolation and experiential deprivation unparalleled in the reports of scientific investigation. This case touches on questions of profound interest to psychologists, philosophers, and linguists, including the relationship between cognition and language, the interdependence or autonomy of linguistic competence and performance, the mental abilities underlying language, proposed universal stages in language learning, the critical age for language acquisition, and the biological foundations of language.

This paper presents a description of an interestingly rich subset of English in terms of Generalized Phrase-Structure Grammar, and compares this description with some other recent treatments. The domain covered includes the auxiliary-verb system together with a number of subsystems that crucially interact with the analysis of auxiliaries: Do so Ellipsis, VP Fronting, VP Negation, VP ‘Deletion’, Sentential Adverb Placement, and ‘Subject-Auxiliary Inversion’. The theoretical framework is strongly equivalent to one using only context-free phrase-structure rules. Featurally complex category symbols, finite rule schemata, and metarules are employed to capture generalizations; but these devices do not alter the expressive power of the system, which is considerably more restrictive than systems of generative grammar in use elsewhere. Nonetheless, the description fares well when compared with rivals; e.g., a fairly large number of difficulties found in ‘Affix-hopping’ analyses, and not found in the present treatment, are noted. The present description is also compared briefly with that of Pullum & Wilson 1977, and found superior. Finally, the analysis of Akmajian, Steele & Wasow 1979 is criticized in considerable detail, and shown to compare unfavorably with the one given here.

There are semantic universals in the domain of color; i.e. there are constraints on the types of possible basic color lexicons. These constraints arise from the structure and function of the visual system. Thus in the case of color at least, rather than language determining perception (cf. Sapir and Whorf), it is perception that determines language.

In deriving the semantic universals from properties of the visual system, one must employ a continuous rather than discrete mathematics, in particular the theory of fuzzy sets. The resulting model of color semantics thus conflicts with the discrete-feature concept of semantic primes shared by structuralists and generativists. It is argued on this basis that discrete-feature semantic theories are of limited accuracy.

The Chomsky-Halle Nuclear Stress Rule and its modification by Bresnan, and to some extent the criticisms that have been leveled at it, have in common an attempt to account for accent in terms of syntax. Instead, accent should be viewed as independent, directly reflecting the speaker's intent and only indirectly the syntax. Accented words are points of information focus.

The organization of taking turns to talk is fundamental to conversation, as well as to other speech-exchange systems. A model for the turn-taking organization for conversation is proposed, and is examined for its compatibility with a list of grossly observable facts about conversation. The results of the examination suggest that, at least, a model for turn-taking in conversation will be characterized as locally managed, party-administered, interactionally controlled, and sensitive to recipient design. Several general consequences of the model are explicated, and contrasts are sketched with turn-taking organizations for other speech-exchange systems.

The following report presents some of the findings of several years’ research on the relations between standard English and the non-standard English used by Negro speakers in various urban ghetto areas. The immediate subject is the status of the copula and auxiliary be in Negro non-standard English. The approach to the problem combines the methods of generative grammar and phonology with techniques for the quantitative analysis of systematic variation. The notion ‘rule of grammar’ is enlarged to include the formal treatment of inherent variation as a part of linguistic structure. Furthermore, a model is presented for the decisive solution of abstract questions of rule form and rule relations, based upon the direct study of linguistic behavior.

Noun incorporation is perhaps the most nearly syntactic of all morphological processes. Examination of the phenomenon across a large number of geographically and genetically diverse languages indicates that, where syntax and morphology diverge, incorporation is a solidly morphological device that derives lexical items, not sentences. It is used for four different but related purposes; these fall into an implicational hierarchy which in turn suggests a path along which incorporation develops historically. Differences in its productivity from language to language show that this development may be arrested at any point—resulting either in the eventual disappearance of the process, or in its resurgence as a productive system of affixation.