Certain Peninsular Spanish varieties have two third-person plural forms in the simple past indicative of verbs with ‘strong’ (stem-stressed) preterites. While this phenomenon is documented in large-scale linguistic atlas surveys, its current geographic distribution and diachronic origins remain under-studied. This paper sets out to: 1) establish the geographic distribution of these variants; the differing methodologies and epochs of the data sources make them particularly interesting to compare, showing that these analogical strong preterites have suffered a drastic decline over the last century; 2) use historical corpus data to show that the vernacular variant is by no means a recent phenomenon; 3) examine external history as a source of explanation in linguistic reconstruction, showing that this process of analogical levelling took place after the reconquest and resettlement of these regions. These findings support the hypothesis of a feature which spread over the centuries by linguistic diffusion.

Although a preliminary survey of the vocabulary and pronunciation of a Central Newfoundland dialect is the chief concern of this paper, some tentative observations about the development of Newfoundland dialect as a whole may perhaps also be put forward here. Both the terms discussed and the observations made are based primarily on a field-trip made in the Summer of 1963 as part of the expanding programme of research in dialect, toponymy, and folklore which is now being carried out at Memorial University. Some of the theoretical points are drawn both from the fieldwork and a sampling of the material available in the University’s Folklore and Dialect Archives. From these sources it would appear that two main speech-groups probably exist in Newfoundland as a whole, one descended from Southern Irish and the other from the English West Country. Historical evidence of settlement in Newfoundland of course supports this, but proof of such a hypothesis as regards the language must await further collecting and more intensive analysis. However, the dialectal differences so far examined seem to indicate that this is the probable pattern.

Having decided to lend a hand with the Dictionary of Canadian English, one’s first thought will be to read various items of Canadiana for the purpose of excerpting quotations. In his initial burst of enthusiasm, the volunteer is likely to tackle something on the order of the Publications of the Hudson’s Bay Record Society, Cartwright’s Labrador Journal (1792), Pennant’s Arctic Zoology, Isham’s Observations on Hudson’s Bay (1743), Palliser’s Journals (1863), or files of such pioneer newspapers as the Loyalist (York), Qu’Appelle Vidette, or Bob Edwards’s Calgary Eye Opener. While works like these are ideal sources of citations for the dictionary we envisage their every importance renders them unwise choices for the neophyte. It is not enough to select works of historical value, for mere mechanical examination of the most promising sources cannot be expected to yield optimum results in the absence of a thorough knowledge of the field of inquiry. Not only is there the risk that the unskilled researcher will fail to notice some unfamillar words, illustrative of the life and thoughts of earlier periods, but he may also miss a few common ones. Then, too, he may waste time in collecting irrelevant material. Since the earlier examples of more settled words are ordinarily hardest to locate and, of course more prized, the consequences of an inexperienced researcher overlooking, say, an 1856 example of Confederation (for it was used anticipatively well before 1867) are rather more serious than would be the skipping of more recent words. The products of a disciplined understanding are superior to those of an uncultivated understanding, so it is to our helpers’ advantage to learn as much as possible of the basic principles of lexical research before delving into scarcer source materials.

G. L. Piggott’s paper “Implications of linguistic change for concrete phonology” does not present diachronic evidence in favor of a theory of phonology with abstract representations and derivations, as it claims, but rather reconstructs a hypothetical sequence of events. This reconstruction is based on a theory of phonology; that is, Piggott reconstructs a sequence of events that is consistent with the theory that he holds. It is not legitimate, therefore, to turn around and use this reconstructed situation as an argument for his theory. We return to this point below.

A somewhat weaker point is in principle possible, and Piggott tries to make it also. This would be to show that some theory cannot provide an historical account of how a certain situation could have arisen. Note that all that is required here is that the theory provide sufficient machinery to produce a plausible reconstruction of a state of affairs. Piggott is quite correct in maintaining that this is a legitimate test of a theory. He argues that the theory he defends provides such an account of the examples he discusses, but that the theory of Hooper (1976), natural generative phonology, cannot provide such an account.

This article analyzes Marshallese pronouns and demonstratives, arguing that both privative and binary morphosemantic features are necessary, and that the two types coexist in a single domain. Marshallese encodes number with atomic, and person with [$\pm$author] and [$\pm$participant]. In the complex system of Marshallese demonstratives, atomic and [$\pm$human] map to the same head, subject to a constraint that only one feature appears at a time. The element $\chi$, which derives person orientation in demonstratives and pronouns, does not universally map to the same syntactic position. While in Heiltsuk $\chi$ is a dependent of the person head, in Marshallese it heads a projection above the person head. And while in Heiltsuk the person features occupy the same position in both pronouns and demonstratives, Marshallese pronouns have a different structure, with person and number features mapping to a single syntactic head. The contribution of UG is thus not a set of specific features or specific structures, but a set of more abstract principles.

In linguistics as in any other field of learning, a scholar may concentrate on the particular aspect of study that most appeals to his temperament. One may choose to analyse and classify the structural phenomena which are found in all varieties of human speech; another may seek to determine the relationships which exist between languages known to be or suspected of being related; a third may follow the history of one particular language, tracing its development from the earliest records to the present; a fourth may concern himself with the many differences which exist contemporaneously among the speakers of one language. The different varieties of speech to be found in any language are called dialects, and the person who studies them is called a linguistic geographer

This paper investigates the place of Vietnamese in the binary NP/DP typology as formulated by Bošković (2005, 2008, 2009, 2010). Vietnamese patterns with NP languages when it comes to its lack of a genuine definite determiner, the presence of radical pro-drop, and its lack of number morphology, but it patterns with DP languages when it comes to the presence of TP, subject expletives, and subject-object extraction asymmetries. The mixed status of Vietnamese suggests that the difference between article and article-less languages might not be as straightforward or clearcut as Bošković claims. In fact, the way these properties pattern in Vietnamese reveals that there are at least three smaller parameters (nominal, clausal, and quantificational) at stake, not just the presence or absence of DP, and that these three are independently fixed as [-DP], [+TP], and [-movement], respectively. Also important is the fact that Vietnamese is a topic-prominent language.