The adverbials, as far as I am aware, have never been systematically considered in relation to English verbal description and definition, most traditional text-books resolving the relationship in terms of a vaguely-defined notional ‘modification’. Scholars have of course noted the existence of regular formal co-occurrences between temporal adverbials and tense-forms, but this has been only for the most obvious cases, and there has been no general, empirical study of all the mutual restrictions and formally definable correlations in English. For example, Jespersen (1933) introduces adverbials into some sections of his description of English tenses (e.g. 23.43) but omits them from others (e.g. 23.41 or 23.54) where one could suggest a comparable relevance, and in many sections (e.g. 23.63–23.67) gives only a partial picture of the total number of possible relationships. Again, Ward (1954:44) notes the frequency of adverbials with ‘past ordinary’ tenses, but gives only a few examples, and then lists ‘exceptions’ with no apparent order. Adverbials with other tense-forms are given little mention, and are in any case given a different orientation, which makes it difficult to compare the sets of information. This approach seems typical of that found in most teaching handbooks on the subject: one could instance Zandvoort (1957: 58–63), who gives adverbials only incidental mention in his description of present, past and perfect tenses, despite the fact that the majority of his examples involve their obligatory use. However, Ota (1963) has studied in more detail correlations between verb forms and certain adverbs of particular semantic classes in English; and Osman (1964: 28–106) has recently given adverb-tense relationship a great deal of prominence in his exposition of English tenses; but the scope of his handbook does not allow a sufficiently detailed treatment to show the full range and complexity of the situation. (Cf. also Hornby, 1954: Part 2.)

1. Three stages of Hebrew are covered by the enquiry:

(a) a Proto-Hebrew stage (= PH), when I assume Hebrew to have conformed to the language structure of the common Northwest Semitic of the second millennium B.C. Its lineaments can be recovered by a backward reconstruction from the following stage controlled by comparison with the surviving second millennium dialects, Amorite (see Gelb, 1958), Ugaritic (see Gordon, 1955) and Tell el-Amarna Canaanite (see Dhorme, 1951). The theory that Northwest Semitic at this early period was more or less a unity and that a division into Aramaic and Canaanite sub-groupings can be safely carried through only after about 1000 B.C. is now generally accepted; see Moscati, 1956; Garbini, 1960.

In the representation of syntagmatic relations in language, we may distinguish between a linear sequence of classes, such as ‘adjective followed by noun’, and a non-linear configuration of functions, such as ‘modifier-head relation’ or simply ‘modification’. Both of these have been referred to as ‘structure’, although this term has also been extended to cover paradigmatic as well as syntagmatic relations. For Hjelmslev, for whom ‘structure’ was not a technical term (see e.g. 1961: 74 (=1943: 67)), ‘the structural approach to language … [is] conceived as a purely relational approach to the language pattern’ (1948: quoted in Firth, 1951: 220); among others who have emphasized the relational aspect of such studies are Firth (1957: 17 ff., 1951: 227–8; cf. Robins, 1953; Palmer, 1964a), Tesnière (cf. Robins, 1961: 81 ff.) and Pike(cf. Longacre, 1964: 16). Chomsky's (1964: 32) distinction, using Hockett's terms, between ‘surface structure’ and ‘deep structure’, ‘structure’ here going beyond syntagmatic relations, is extremely valuable and widely accepted: the surface structure of a sentence is defined as ‘a proper bracketing of the linear, temporally given sequence of elements, with the paired brackets labelled by category names’, while the deep structure, which is ‘in general not identical with its surface structure’, is ‘a much more abstract representation of grammatical relations and syntactic organization’.

The fullest account of English imperative sentences considered in the context of a transformational grammar is contained in Katz & Postal (1964: 74–9). Their account forms part of a discussion of the general thesis that transformations do not affect the meaning of sentences, and of the proposal that follows as a natural corollary of this thesis, that the set of optional singulary transformations be restricted to those usually referred to as ‘stylistic’ transformations. Instead of treating imperative sentences as derived from declarative kernels, therefore, they postulate the occurrence of an imperative morpheme (Imp) in the underlying phrase-markers of imperative sentences. This, they assume, marks these structures as the domain of the imperative transformations and imposes certain selectional restrictions upon them. The notion of the Imp morpheme, which is the most original and most important part of Katz and Postal's analysis of imperative sentences, is adopted in this paper and the occurrence of the morpheme in the deep-structure of all imperative sentences is assumed throughout it. In the rest of their analysis, however, Katz and Postal draw upon more traditional ideas, one of which is disputable.

The purpose of this paper is to outline a classification of Dacorumanian dialects, according to certain morphophonemic particularities chosen as criterial. This classification is (to be sure) only a first step, a kind of first approximation to a more detailed specification of diverse dialectal morphophonemic and phonemic structures occurring in this area.