1. It is now a commonplace that one of the functions of intonation in English is to divide a discourse into ‘units of information’ and to structure these units by singling out within each one a focal part which contains what the speaker is presenting to the listener as ‘new’, in the sense of ‘newsworthy’ (Halliday, 1967; Quirk et at., 1972; Bolinger, 1958, 1972). The remainder of the information unit (if there is a remainder - some units are all focus) is said to contain ‘given’ information. 2 According to some versions of the theory, many information units – in fact the majority of those with ‘unmarked tonicity’ (Halliday), or with the focus in the ‘neutral position’ (Quirk et at.) – are ambiguous in structure, and the choice between two or more structural possibilities is made in accordance with the context. The principle is illustrated in the following examples, in which the A-sentences provide the context, the nuclear syllable is marked with an accent, and the focal unit is in capitals (Halliday's term for the focal unit is the ‘domain of focus’; Quirk et al. speak of the ‘new element’ or the ‘unit marked as new’)

Greenberg's pioneering work on word order universals (Greenberg, 1966) in which he proposed a total of universals concerning the ‘order of meaningful elements’ as well as a typology based on this order distinguishing 24 language types has truly had a great influence on linguistic research in the past few years. Not only has this important contribution to our understanding of language universals and typology precipitated such widespread interest in this particular field of linguistics which has culminated in a number of language specific monographs (see for instance Heine, 1976; Lehmann, 1974; Friedrich, 1975); symposia (see Li, 1975, 1976, 1977) and even larger projects (for example the Language Universals Project of Stanford University, and the Cologne project on language universals, see Greenberg, 1978; Seiler, 1973, 1978), but it also has influenced linguistics in general to such an extent that many consider syntactic description and research to be incomplete without a thorough discussion of word order, in some cases to the virtual exclusion of other topics.

Analyses of word-meaning can usually be divided into those which assign a meaning to a word IN ISOLATION FROM a specific context of use, and those which regard the meaning of a word as being largely, if not entirely, DEPENDENT UPON a specific context of use. The ultimate expression of the latter ‘polysemantic’ approach is probably that of the later Wittgenstein who argued that ‘every difference in a word’s use is a consequence of and evidence for a difference in its meaning’ (Wertheimer, 1972: 49). One recent example of the former ‘monosemantic’ approach is that of Bolinger (1977) whose stated purpose is to ‘reaffirm the old principle that the natural condition of a language is to preserve one form for one meaning, and one meaning for one form’ (p. x); also, the proponents of lexicalism are likewise ‘monosemantic’ in inclination in that they stress the primacy of lexical units over the syntactic relations which exist between them. Both these approaches have their advocates, and it should be stated at the outset that neither is necessarily right or wrong; each can only be judged according to whether the phenomena it is used to interpret are thereby illuminated.

In Biblical Hebrew, the tendency for rhythmic stress was primarily manifest in stress retraction, which moved word-final stress to the preceding syllable so as to avoid ‘stress clash’ with an immediately following word-initial stress, subject to certain restrictions. It was discussed in detail by the traditional grammarians of Hebrew; recent generative accounts include Prince (1975) and McCarthy (1979). In Modern Hebrew, the tendency for rhythmic stress can be realized in a variety of ways, of which stress retraction is by no means the commonest.

Recent transformational analyses of liaison in French have postulated in one form or another a simple general syntactic basis for this phenomenon (Schane, 1968; Selkirk, 1974; Klausenburger, 1978). This contrasts with the traditional approach in which all the syntactic contexts in which liaison is obligatory, impossible, or depends on stylistic factors are painstakingly listed (Fouché, 1959; Delattre, 1947, 1955, 1956). This may appear to be due to the fact that the traditional approach lacked an appropriate syntactic theory which would unify the apparently unmotivated series of contexts in which liaison capriciously wandered. Working within the framework of the Syntactic theory, Selkirk (1974) was able to discover a small set of simple rules to account for a wide array of previously recalcitrant data. This success has sometimes been taken as an argument for the superiority of the syntactic theory, cf. Jackendoff (1977).

In this paper various conclusions will be drawn from a comparison of productive and non-productive German verb morphology; more specifically, it examines some of the properties of the morphological component of a generative grammar of German.1

Two assumptions are made at the outset, which clearly distinguish the position adopted from that of the standard model of transformational phonology as exemplifed particularly in Chomsky & Halle (1968) (SPE). The first of these refers to the position of morphological rules in a grammar: it is that, for at least a large number of languages, the phenomena of morphology are not appropriately dealt with by syntactic, readjustment and phonological rules, in the manner of SPE, but that distinct morphological rules are required, rules which are, in particular, quite distinct from phonological rules.

This paper raises the question whether transitive or intransitive semantics is the more basic. Recently, the transformational analysis of causatives (Lakoff, 1970; McCawley, 1968) has proposed that transitives are derived from intransitives by a causative transformation — thus implying that intransitive semantics is more basic. Because the transformational model has been so influential2 this claim has been carried over, often unquestioningly, into the grammar of many languages such as Hindi (Kachru, 1966, 1971; Kleiman, 1971). This paper shows that of significance in determining basicness is the question whether intransitive verbs of the form (O_) represent natural activity or agent-motivated activity; and using this criterion, we expect most transitives to be basic.

In 1980 Koutsoudas published a paper entitled ‘The Question of Rule Ordering: Some Common Fallacies’. In this paper he attacks various types of criticism of the theory of intrinsic rule ordering, and gives a set of procedures by which he allows his version of that theory (henceforth the KSN theory2) to be falsified. In the present article we utilize the procedures prescribed by Koutsoudas to demonstrate that this theory is not tenable.