The claim made by Harris (1978) that the descriptivist position in respect of performatives is self-defeating has engendered some spirited controversy through the years since then (see Edmondson 1979, 1983, Wachtel, 1980; Spielmann, 1980; Taylor & Wolf, 1981). Let me declare right at the outset that I am with the non-descriptivists. Nevertheless, in what follows, I wish to show (a) that no brusque argument of the sort originally advanced by Harris or subsequently marshalled by the others can help settle the dispute either way, and (b) that the controversy so far has been riddled with a good deal of futile cross-talk which has blinded the participants in the intellectual free-for-all to some of the real issues at hand.

The aim of this paper is to defend the autosegmental account of nonconcatenative morphology originally proposed by McCarthy (1979, 1981), which has been seriously challenged by Hudson (1986). It is argued that an autosegmental analysis of nonconcatenative morphology such as that of Arabic still remains a better alternative than what Hudson proposes. We first present a brief overview of McCarthy's theory of non-concatenative morphology. We then review Hudson's criticisms of such an autosegmental approach to Arabic morphology and we end up by showing why his reanalysis does not constitute a better alternative than the criticized autosegmental account.

Recent work in Relevance Theory (henceforth RT) illustrates the coming of age of modern pragmatic scholarship in creating an environment in which a particular theory of pragmatics can be taken for granted, without explanation or justification, and an analysis of a phenomenon previously unaccounted for within that theory can be advanced. One is reminded of much of the recent syntactic work within GB/Principles & Parameters/Minimalist Theory: the dominance of the Chomskyan approach – particularly in certain geographic regions – allows researchers, for better or worse, to simply assume the correctness of the theory in their work and proceed to illustrate how that theory might (or must) be extended or modified to accommodate a new class of data. In this volume, Žegarac & Clark (1999) provide the latest illustration of a similar strategy in pragmatics: the correctness of RT is assumed and an analysis of ‘phatic communication’ proposed within that framework. On the one hand, this constitutes an advance for pragmatic theory, since until recently there was no comprehensive all-inclusive framework within which certain pragmatic generalizations could be stated. If nothing else, RT has served to raise a number of important issues surrounding the semantics-pragmatics interface, helping to crystallize the debate and make explicit many assumptions that had been either implicit or non-existent in other frameworks. In particular, RT work on scalar implicature/explicature and on echoic mention and metalinguistic negation (e.g. Carston 1988, 1995; Récanati 1989) has represented major advances in our understanding of these phenomena and their theoretical implications. Thus, whatever one may think of RT, it is a theory that must be taken seriously by anyone working in this area. On the other hand, we find that RT suffers from one of the principal afflictions of the aforementioned work in the GB/P&P/Minimalism mainstream: a remarkable failure to address, come to terms with, and incorporate the extensive previous literature on the topic under current consideration.

The industry of explaining away apparent cases of extrinsic rule-ordering in phonology has been in recession recently. Kenstowicz and Kisseberth, in a recent textbook (1979), make rather soothingly conservative noises about ordered-rule solutions. In this lull, during which (it is clear) ordered-rule solutions are still reckoned to be a possibility, Vago's claim (1977) to be able to substantiate such a position has gone unchallenged.

The first thesis concerning phonological representations enunciated by Anderson and Jones (henceforth A&J)(1974: 8) is ‘that phonological representations are more highly structured than the standard theory would claim’, where the level of structure with which they are particularly concerned is that of bracketing into syllables. The principles in terms of which this bracketing is assigned are given as (I) (= their (19)):

(I) (a) Medial clusters are composed of a syllable-final preceding a syllable- initial sequence. (b) ‘Precede’ includes overlap where possible.

A couple of points of elucidation are necessary here. First, it should be noted that a previous formulation of (Ia) in the same paper (4) states: ‘We claim that medial clusters are combination of clusters that can be final in monosyllables and clusters that can be initial.’ This reference to word-final and initial clusters must be borne in mind if (Ia) is not to be construed as either circular or trivial.

Schools of thought concerning the study of language in anthropology and in linguistics proper have developed historically along lines that are sometimes convergent, but too often divergent because of a certain gap in communication between the two disciplines. It is the purpose of this paper to suggest the existence of an area of common interest which is at present unrecognized in the literature. I submit that recent work in what anthropologists refer to as ‘formal’ semantic analysis, when considered in the light of transformational linguistics, provides a potentially fruitful point of interdisciplinary interaction which should result in the formulation of a more adequate theory of meaning in the study of language than exists at the moment.