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…

This paper presents two views on the categorization of Japanese nouns, verbs, and adjectives into form classes: the traditional view and a view set forth in the writing of Suzuki Akira. The fundamental issue here is the criterion for categorization. Is it the meaning of words, or is it their grammatical behavior that determines the system of…

This volume, one of a series of concise but relatively exhaustive descriptions of the grammatical structures of the principal standard Slavic languages, contains an outline of Polish morphology. The four major sections are morphophonemics, nominal inflection, the Polish verb (Part 1--stem alternation and conjugation, and the Polish verb (Part…

This paper emphasizes the need for empirical research and objective discovery procedures in semantics, and illustrates a method by which these goals may be obtained. The aim of the methodology described is to provide a description of the internal structure of a semantic field by eliciting the description--in an objective, standardized manner--from…

Reflexives in Japanese and English show a number of interesting differences. Morphologically, there is a single form "jibun" ("jishin") in Japanese, which does not vary for person or number. In English there are various forms which always agree in person and number ("myself,""himself,""themselves,"…

This article presents a description of intonation in English in terms of the relationship between the syntactic surface structure of a given sentence and certain distinctive intonative features.

This article discusses the problem of assigning gender to Spanish calques and loan words borrowed from English. (Text is in Spanish.) (CLK)

This article discusses sonorants and affricates in English, and contrasts them with the sonorants and affricates in French and German. (Text is in French.) (CLK)

A discussion of transitive and intransitive verbs in Russian leads to the conclusion that the question of transitivity rests primarily with the meaning of the verb itself and with the resulting amenability to passive transformation. (Author/RM)

Reports on a 1978 study of socially conditioned phonological change in the context of the decreolization process in Trinidad. (AM)

Argues that verbal prefixes in Hungarian should not be assigned to a specific category of their own, but should be analyzed as belonging to the category of postpositions. (Author/AM)

This paper attempts to investigate the semantic and syntactic features of Taiwanese question particles and to make some preliminary inquiry into their diachronic development mainly on the basis of their synchronic phenomena including, frequencies of forms in various age groups and localities. (CHK)

A survey of research in the history of the "h-aspire" in French. It is suggested that a synchronic rule of h-deletion never existed and a synchronic rule of insertion existed only in Old French. The evolution of liaison is compared to that of "h-aspire." Questions are raised for further study. (AMH)