While much of the literature on recipe contexts has focused on English and the availability of null definite patients, this paper shows that both null agents and null patients are possible in recipes in a range of typologically and genetically diverse languages. It is proposed that null agents in recipes arise due to a variety of syntactic strategies, but null patients are uniformly licensed via a null topic in the left periphery in all the languages considered. These results indicate that while the recipe register does not directly dictate specific syntactic structures such as imperatives or null objects, the register can provide the pragmatic context necessary for certain syntactic processes, such as null topicalization.

This paper presents a grammatical theory which has certain mathematical properties, and which produces the sentences of a language by means of two simple processes, word-entry and entry-reduction, with the meaning of each sentence being indicated directly by its construction. The reason for seeking a mathematical control on grammatical analysis lies partly in the inherent possibilities of such a connexion, and partly in the complex and somewhat haphazard nature of grammar, which makes one wonder if there is not something simpler and more principled involved. In the event, the system of grammatical analysis which is reached here is not an alternative to descriptions of grammatical patterns, but rather a complement to them; for in producing the sentences it locates and explicates those patterns as resultants of the two processes, but without cataloguing or arranging them.

In this paper it is argued that there existed, in a certain period of the history of Latin, a floating C-Place node in some lexical items in word- and stem-initial position. Notably, this was involved in the phonological representation of the words written – in an archaising fashion – with initial 〈gn〉. Based on a thorough analysis of the Brepols Corpus (CLCLT-5) it is demonstrated that the diachronic distribution of the prefixed forms of 〈gn〉-initial stems shows restrictions that can only be explained if one assumes a geometric representation involving a floating C-Place node that remained in the place of the original velar stop inherited from Proto-Indo-European. By classical times this floating node was also lost, and thus the possibilities for combining prefixes with original 〈gn〉-initial stems expanded.

The emphasis on syntagmatic criteria in analysis, especially as interpreted by J. R. Firth (from his 1948 paper onwards) in the phonological aspect of language, has led many scholars, in Great Britain at least, to a disbelief in the adequacy of phonemes alone – or of phonemes aided by such suprasegmental features as intensity, duration and tone – for the tasks of accurate description and powerful theoretical explanation of the operation of a spoken language. Among the fruits of the new emphasis, the studies which are characterized as ‘prosodic’ and ‘polysystemic’, is that treatment of Sanskrit discontinuous retroflexion within words which handles this feature as a prosody operating over a considerable stretch (chain of phonematic units) and being phonetically realized wherever possible, which may be more often than is graphically hinted (Allen, 1951). In this view, apparent historical ‘assimilation’ is trenchantly dismissed: we are not to imagine a shift being induced in one phoneme by another which stands at a distance from it, nor is the first to be spoken of as changing from ‘something it never was’. This, of course, begs the whole historical question; and even if the nature of Indo-European reconstructions is so skeletophonemic that we cannot say with certainty that Skt. ṇ is not the unshifted allophonic reflex of IE /n/ in the relevant positions in the relevant words, nevertheless a phonetic continuation is scarcely likely (e.g. in *plH-nó-). In many cases a different earlier form can be pointed to, attested and unmistakable (e.g. Latin octo before Ital. otto). One cannot lightly oppose a prima facie possibility that ṇ was first one thing and then became another.