1. A not insignificant problem of Spanish syntax is that of relating the subdeletion sentence (1) to its comparative-deletion congener (2)

• (1) Juan comió más manzanas que peras había traído.

  Juan ate more apples than he had brought pears.

• (2) Juan comió más manzanas de las que había traído.

  Juan ate more apples than he had brought.

At first glance there appears to be little that is problematic and the solutions that have been proposed for English seem readily applicable; under such an analysis (as we shall see below) both sentences are held to be structurally identical, but subject to a more or less extensive deletion rule in accord with the extent of the identity of lexical elements in the compared constituents of the matrix and subordinate clause.

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.)

Complex communication difficulties involving stylistics, logic and clarity in the discourse structures of advanced English compositions by writers from another language and culture cannot be explained as merely insufficient knowledge of English grammar, diction or idiom. Such problems do not only involve linguistic differences in the native (NL) and target language (TL) but encompass different stylistic habits, different ways of thinking, and different cultural values. Robert Kaplan has frequently argued that the rhetoric and logic in ESL English compositions vary according to the native language and culture of the writer. In one of his early essays he states:

O’Grady (1983) complains that in arguing for task-specific genetic principles the transformational-generative enterprise has not given proper consideration to the alternative Piagetian view that there are no genetic principles specific to language, but that the relevant principles hold for all cognitive domains (he does not specify what the “cognitive domains” are). Although he notes judiciously that “the current research program in linguistics cannot be undermined by simple reference to possible alternate analyses for one or two phenomena” (168), he nonetheless sketches alternatives to two analyses given in The Language Lottery (Lightfoot 1982), claiming that his alternatives do not require appeal to task-specific innate principles and are thus consistent with a Piagetian view of the mind.

In Kahn (1976), one finds a syllable-based reanalysis of certain well-known phonological rules of English. Prominent among these are aspiration and flapping. Given that the belated recognition of the syllable by generative phonologists has generally yielded very interesting and positive results, this reinterpretation of the facts must be seen as a welcome development in that respect.

On the other hand, however, Kahn’s decision to base his syllable-oriented generalizations on the concept of ambisyllabicity must be seriously questioned since the phonological evidence for such a phenomenon is so tenuous, and also because this concept is virtually unfalsifiable as it is not known to have any physical-acoustic or articulatory-correlates whatsoever.

Also, over and above Kahn’s recourse to such an unsubstantiated mechanism, there is the additional problem that the two rules he proposes simply do not correctly account for all the data. A later attempt by Kiparsky (1979) to replace Kahn’s ambisyllabic treatment of these two rules by a metrical analysis involving the foot runs into exactly the same kind of trouble.

Research in second language phonology has, until recently at least, been principally concerned with the interference of the learner’s first language in his acquisition of a new sound system. In practice, the belief that interference from the first language is the major source of pronunciation problems is well established among second language teachers, and teachers have traditionally been trained to recognize and remedy, if not try to prevent, the errors resulting from this interference. Recently, however, researchers (for example, Garnica and Herbert 1979) have begun to conclude that interference is not a sufficient explanation, and that the second language learner’s developing phonology, his approximative system, is undoubtedly influenced by many other factors.

Malgré l’existence d’un nombre considérable d’études portant sur les mots d’emprunt dans les langues romanes, l’intégration grammaticale de ces emprunts a reçu relativement peu d’attention. Correa-Zoli (1973) s’est adressé à l’attribution du genre aux emprunts anglais en italien américain. Un seul article est consacré entièrement au genre des emprunts anglais en français: celui de Haden et Joliat (1940) qui concerne l’intégration des noms anglais en français canadien. Plus de trente ans plus tard, dans Cahiers de Lexicologie Humbley (1974:67) fait remarquer (sans spécifier la source ni la date des exemples) que près de 90% des inanimés empruntés à l’anglais dont le genre est explicite, ont été attribués au masculin en français. Dans un article récent, Poplack et ses collaborateurs étudient l’attribution du genre grammatical aux emprunts anglais en espagnol américain et en français canadien (Poplack et al 1982). Ces linguistes constatent d’une part que le genre, une fois attribué, est stable, et d’autre part que seul le genre naturel du référent constitue un facteur catégorique dans l’attribution du genre grammatical, Ils concluent que les facteurs déterminant le genre sont spécifiques à une langue et que les emprunts sont gouvernés, en ce qui concerne le genre, par les mêmes processus et les mêmes contraintes que les autres mots du lexique.