Argues that Charles Morris' division of signs into syntactics, semantics and pragmatics is too rigid. The line between pragmatics and semantics is not sharp, and a language theory is needed that can predict and explain borderline cases without forcing them into arbitrary established categories. (CHK)

Suggests that stylistic variation should be used by linguistis in their search for linguistic structure. (AM)

This final report is a brief outline of Phase One in the preparation of a comprehensive reference grammar of Tamil, based on the results of recent linguistic theory and analytic techniques, and designed to be "accessible" to any student of Tamil. The studies which have resulted from Phase One are "strictly preliminary" to a larger study of the…

Original version of this paper presented an Indiana University, Bloomington, April 28, 1971. (VM)

This article attempts to show that a more rigorous approach to surface structure analysis can reveal distinctions just as subtle as those discovered through analyzing deep structures or transformations. Relative clauses are examined in relation to nominal constructions, and alternatives to restrictive and non-restrictive classifications are…

According to the author, most grammarians have been writing stratificational grammars without knowing it because they have dealt with units that are related to one another, but not simply as a whole to its parts, or as a class to its members. The question, then, is not whether a grammar is stratified but whether it is explicitly stratified. This…

The author presents this monograph as essentially a "prise de position" with regard to certain of the central questions in current debates over the nature of human linguistic systems and techniques of analyzing and describing them. While it is presumed that the reader is already acquainted with the issues being debated in linguistics in the…

Use of "the language of observation" as a level of scientific discourse is exemplified. The formal properties of this language are characterized, and the derivability and feasibility of the axiomatic method as applied to it are considered. Also discussed are the theoretical and practical significance of this level with respect to various…

A particular aspect of syllable structure, length of syllable margins, was investigated with the aid of a Markov chain model. The model represented explicitly the dynamic relationship between types of syllable structure and the historical processes that affect them. It is proposed that the regularities concerning syllable types (universality of CV…

When considering vowel alternations in English, it is possible to develop a less abstract vowel system than the one developed by Chomsky and Halle by using their laxing rule as the input for a restrictive vowel-shift rule which accounts for the relative height of alternating vowels in alternations such as divine-divinity, extreme-extremity,…

It is possible to apply Lamb's stratificational theory and analysis to English graphonomy, but additional notation devices must be used to explain particular graphemes and their characteristics. The author presents cases where Lamb's notation is inadequate. In those cases, he devises new means for performing the analysis. The result of this…