0.1 For some ten years now, it has been my claim that it was through linguistic writings of his time, and not through extra-linguistic publications, that Saussure’s views took shape. This is not to say that there was no influence on him from disciplines other than linguistics, but this kind of influence was due to what I have termed the “climate of opinion” of the period, and it remained largely at the surface of things, certain frequently reiterated claims of a strong impact of Durkheim’s sociology, Tarde’s as well as Walras’ political economy, etc. notwithstanding (cf. Rijlaarsdam 1978: 260-64; Bierbach 1978 passim). Saussure’s acquaintance with disciplines outside linguistics, I maintain, was at best second-hand and remained superficial. This is not only true of the psychologism underlying his theoretical argument, a psychologism found elsewhere in the linguistic literature (e.g., Paul 1880, 1909; Baudouin de Courtenay 1894), but also of his sociologism, his repeated statement that language was a “fait social”. In short, if we want to place Saussure’s theory of language-and of linguistics for that matter-in an epistemological context, we would do better by acquainting ourselves with the linguistic literature of his day rather than deducing from certain superficial similarities and terminological borrowings a direct influence of a field outside the study of language on Saussure’s linguistic reasoning. (We should remember that Saussure never wrote a book on general linguistics, but that he was trying, through comparisons, metaphors, and references to what was general knowledge of his day, to convey his largely novel ideas to twenty-year-old students.)

Collins and Postal (2014) postulate that English NPIs represent two distinct structures: a unary NEG structure and a binary NEG structure. Some NPIs, such as any and ever expressions, can instantiate either of these two structures in different contexts. Others (such as one use of jackshit) have only unary NEG structures. The present article seeks to provide cross-linguistic support for this hypothesis by showing that the two series of NPIs in Serbian/Croatian (Progovac 1994) should be analyzed in terms of the two structure types postulated for English NPIs.

Previous evidence has suggested that acoustic similarity between first language (L1) and second language (L2) sounds is an accurate indicator of the speakers’ L2 classification patterns. This study investigates this assumption by examining how speakers of an under-researched language, namely Cypriot Greek, classify L2 English vowels in terms of their L1 categories. The experimental protocol relied on a perception and a production study. For the purpose of the production study, two linear discriminant analysis (LDA) models, one with both formants and duration (FD) and one with only formants (F) as input, were used to predict this classification; the models included data from both English and Cypriot Greek speakers. The perception study consisted of a classification task performed by adult Cypriot Greek advanced speakers of English who permanently resided in Cyprus. The results demonstrated that acoustic similarity was a relatively good predictor of speakers’ classification patterns as the majority of L2 vowels classified with the highest proportion were predicted with success by the LDA models. In addition, the F model was better than the FD model in predicting the full range of responses. This shows that duration features were less important than formant features for the prediction of L2 vowel classification.

While the use of well as an intensifier of most adjectives had supposedly died out by Early Modern English (Fettig 1934: 186, Mustanoja 1960: 327, Stenström 2000: 188, Ito and Taglimonte 2003: 278), no studies have empirically examined its frequency diachronically. The present study traces its use from Early Modern English (1560) to Present Day English, (2014) using five speech-related corpora in addition to various dialectal sources and audio/video clips. Results indicate that this use was retained in some dialects of English despite not being attested in the Corpus of English Dialogues nor the Old Bailey Corpus, which document predominantly the incipient standard variety. A qualitative analysis of its use reveals a potential diachronic shift in its stress pattern and the scale structure of its intensified heads. Moreover, the present study discusses some of the methodological challenges which arise when using historical corpora to investigate linguistic change, drawing particular attention to sample representativeness and data analysis.

The present article demonstrates how the so far unchallenged misanalysis within Chinese linguistics of a few, but central, data points has led to a distorted picture biasing, inter alia, the general typology of wh-in-situ languages as well as the crosslinguistic study of Quantifier Phrases. This is the case for méi yǒu rén ‘not exist person’, hěnshǎo yǒu rén ‘rarely exist person’, and zhǐ yǒu DP ‘only exist DP’, which are not nominal projections equivalent of ‘nobody’, ‘only DP’, and ‘few people’ as currently assumed, but existential constructions: ‘there isn't anybody’, ‘there is only DP’, and ‘there are rarely people’. In addition, a subset of speakers has reanalyzed hěnshǎo (yǒu) rén with a covert yǒu ‘exist’ as a QP hěnshǎo rén ‘few people’. A corpus study highlights the limited distribution of hěnshǎo rén ‘few people’, which shows that it is not on a par with its antonym hěn duō rén ‘many people’.

Several serious problems face a Committee on the Historical Dictionary in planning for the proposed Dictionary of Canadian English. At present under study are means of publicizing the project, negotiating adequate financial sponsorship and securing a capable editorial staff, with headquarters handy to research centers and the publisher's offices. These cannot be taken up here, but will be reported upon at ensuing meetings of the Association.

The basic problem concerns acquisition of the dated citations which will serve as the framework of the proposed dictionary. It is an arduous task to collect and digest the huge volume of materials necessary to compilation of any comprehensive dictionary based upon historical principles. The Oxford English Dictionary, garnering 9,000,000 quotations through the unpaid labors of 2,000 members of the Philological Society, took forty-four years to publish; and the much less ambitious Dictionary of American English was eighteen years in the making.

This article investigates the nature of argumenthood and adjuncthood, through an examination of the behaviour of the internal arguments of two classes of motion verbs in English. A highly modular view is put forth, in which three separate distinctions influencing argument-like or adjunct- like behaviour must be recognized: aspectual versus thematic licensing, structural versus inherent case assignment, and referentiality versus non-referentiality. Of these three, only referentiality is a graded rather than a binary distinction. The distinction between aspectual and thematic licensing is developed and elucidated. A picture emerges in which aspectual structure may itself be thematically licensed by a verb, and this aspectual structure may have its own arguments, which are then indirectly licensed by the verb. Cognate objects and Romance measure phrases are also discussed in light of these theoretical conclusions.

One of the principle aims of research in linguistic theory is to discover linguistic universals which may be represented as a part of linguistic metatheory. In phonological theory there are many examples of such attempts. For example, the formal conventions proposed by Chomsky and Halle (1968) in The Sound Pattern of English were to represent universal constraints for natural languages.

It has been shown on numerous occasions (for example, Labov, 1971) that phonological theory must be able to account for the systematic variability regularly present in all phonological systems. Although quantitative studies of phonological variability are still relatively new, it is important all the same to attempt to posit possible universal constraints, both formal and substantive, within the current formulation of variability theory in order to test the theory itself. Of particular interest are questions such as the following: What are universal constraints on the FORM of variable rules? Are there universal constraints on the types of environments in which variable rules may apply?

This is the second of two papers comparing relational network theory with transformational theory. In Reich 1970b we defined some basic nodes and compared relational network theory with a subset of transformational theory which is commonly acknowledged to be linguistically inadequate. In this paper we shall review the types of problems which context-free phrase-structure grammars cannot adequately handle. We shall then show that each of these problems occurs in that portion of English grammar which is concerned with the English auxiliaries; thus a good test of any proposed grammatical theory is whether or not it can be used to describe a grammar of the auxiliaries in an acceptable way. Finally, we shall describe in detail a relational network grammar of the auxiliaries and attempt to demonstrate that relational network theory passes this test.

We examine the diffusion of a phonological feature, namely the deletion of palatal glides in words such as news, tune, duke, and student. Within Canada, the conservative glided and innovative glideless pronunciations are no longer viewed as carrying, respectively, British versus American affiliation. One observes a steep generational decline in glide usage, with older, and especially upper-middle-class, females, resisting this change. This contrasts with broadcast media, where the overall glide usage rate is high: national media adopt the glided variant to a greater degree than their local counterparts; moreover, male media personnel display more glide retention than females. Both variants index different social meanings: the glided variant is associated with cultural erudition but is nevertheless not the formal target for all groups. Thus, the two variants hold different appeal for different segments of the population, and both are viewed as a prestige target within the same speech community.

This article discusses the existential construction in Malagasy, focussing on the distribution and interpretation of nominals. It is argued that the existential construction involves the raising of specific NPs out of the small clause complement of the existential verb misy. Nonspecific NPs, on the other hand, are shown to remain within the complement. That raising correlates with interpretation provides evidence in favour of the Mapping Hypothesis of Diesing (1992). Although the syntactic analysis accounts for the specific/nonspecific distribution in the existential construction, it leaves unexplained the precise interpretation of the specific NP, which may be either partitive, possessive, or locative. This article therefore argues for a relation, PARTITIVE, which unites these three readings.

The standard structural approach to word blends, such as noise1/sound2 → nound, has been to assume they involve a splicing together of the two words, where part of word2 is used to complete part of word1. The splice position has then been used as the source of mental lexicon generalizations. On the basis of 166 naturally occurring word blends, this article argues for a different approach—a “substitution” approach. The approach allows a comparison of the properties that word blends share with sublexical exchanges, anticipations, perseverations and substitutions; in addition, it accounts for the convergence of these properties. The substitution analysis allows a principled distinction between target and intruder; it predicts metrical structure output, and possible and impossible errors; moreover, the substitution analysis simplifies and constrains language production models.

This study investigates the interpretation of or in legal texts, focusing on two puzzles: “inclusive/exclusive” or and “free choice permission”. The study first examines various examples of or in American court cases described by Solan and the “and/or” rule that he describes. It then turns to occurrences of or in a different legal domain, that of the World Trade Organization, giving a brief introduction to the WTO dispute mechanism and its principles of interpretation before examining these occurrences of or. The study then introduces the inquisitive semantics framework as a way to account for these occurrences, offering an analysis of the inclusive/exclusive or and free choice or puzzles and of the interaction of or with obligation, permission, and negation more generally.

In a provocative article in a recent issue of this journal, Walker (1978) accounts for Old French (OF) alternations of the type ancestre: ancessour, mendre: menour, prendre:prenons, and cosdre: cousons with a synchronic rule of consonant epenthesis given in (1) below:

The purpose of this remark is to argue that even if OF can be said to have consonant epenthesis as a synchronic phonological process (for some convincing arguments to the contrary, see Morin 1980 [above in this volume]), Walker’s formulation of it leaves a lot to be desired.

In his recent dissertation, David Stampe (1972) discusses the notions of natural processes in child phonology. Earlier, Ingram (1971) discussed the concepts and formulations of phonological rules in child language. What we propose to demonstrate here is that the rules inherent in acquisitional phonology are ordered and, moreover, that these rules are ordered implicationally (in the sense of “unilateral implication” enunciated by Jakobson in discussing the stratified structure of the phoneme inventory). Our contention is that there are rules in child phonology, that these rules are ordered, and that while the entire inventory of rules does not appear in any child’s phonology, the presence of any one necessitates the presence of others - in a specific order.

In the past few years, a number of articles have argued that the default articulator for consonants is Coronal (see, for example, Kiparsky 1985; Iverson and Kim 1987:187; Shaw 1988; Avery and Rice 1989; and the contributors to Paradis and Prunet 1991). Paradis and Prunet (1993b), with a view to strengthening and formalizing this proposal, have expressed the Weak Coronal Hypothesis (WCH) in (1).

Rule reordering as a principle of phonological change has come under heavy criticism in the recent past. A number of articles, e.g. Iverson (1973), Picard (1974), Hogg (1976), Dinnsen and Koutsoudas (1976), have been devoted to this question, endeavouring to show in one way or another that the reordering of phonological rules does not constitute a type of linguistic change. Some of the better known cases of alleged reordering have been examined, and many of these have been judged to be deficient for two main reasons: implausibility, due to the unjustified degree of abstractness involved, and inaccuracy, due to the omission or misinterpretation of crucial data. Generally, at the very least, a reasonable and plausible alternative solution has been put forth in each case.

This article compares the results of measurements of objective language data with the subjective judgments of linguistically naïve individuals. The comparison is based upon recordings of speech orientated towards the standard language. The data surveyed are from the West Middle German city of Mainz and the northern Low German city of Neumünster. In both cases, recordings of council meetings, in which members of a defined social group are acting in an authentic situation, were evaluated. The data were first measured using a technique designed to quantify the phonetic divergence from the standard language. Subsequently, the recordings were played to various groups of non-specialists from different regions in both the Low German and Middle German dialect areas. Participants were asked to assess the speech of the councillors on a seven-step rating scale. The results show a high similarity between the intersubjective measurement of linguistic items and the metalinguistic judgments of the listeners.

The discovery that some processes are primitive rather than learned provides a window into the properties of the language faculty. One of the postulated modules of the language faculty is sociolinguistic competence, the ability to use language appropriately in its socio-cultural nexus. I present three cases where variable phenomena exhibit regularities that appear to be essential rather than accidental. First is the Ethan Experience, which inures children engaged in acquiring the community accent from learning foreign features that must later be unlearned. The experience entails an innate accent-filter, and its influence has been observed in all situations in which the accent being acquired differs from the home accent. Second is Sex-Based Variability, whereby women use fewer non-standard variants and have wider stylistic repertoires than men of the same social class in the same settings. Third is Vernacular Roots, the discovery that a number of sociolinguistic variables recur in English vernaculars wherever they have been studied, as well as in interlanguage, Creoles, and child language. The ubiquity of these features presumably reflects their privileged status in the language faculty.