In a lengthy footnote to his article ‘Pronominalization, negation, and the analysis of adverbs’ (1970) George Lakoff makes the following interesting observation:

All known selectional restrictions on the occurrence of lexical items are finite in scope. Usually they apply in the same sentence (subject–verb and verb–object selections) and sometimes one sentence away (verb–verb selections; i.e.force requires an activity verb in its complement) (160).

1. The T'in are a small tribe located in Nan Province in the north of Thailand and in adjacent areas of Sayaboury Province of Laos. They are mountain dwellers engaged chiefly in slash and burn farming, planting rice on steep mountain sides; however, a few villages are located in low areas where it is possible to grow wet rice. Each T'in village is an autonomous and endogamous unit having few strains of relationships extending out to other villages. There is no tribal consciousness among the T'in, nor are there any clans or lineages that call for supra-village loyalties. For this reason the tribe is fragmented into several dialects, customs and religious traditions. A few villages are in the process of discarding their language and religious traditions and becoming assimilated with the lowland Thai. The government of each T'in village in Thailand is structured along the same lines as any Thai village of the same area; indeed the lack of any tribal unity among the T'in has made it easy for the Thai Government to administer these villages directly from the District level.

While the notion of naturalness or plausibility has been a tacit guiding principle for past generations of phonologists, the effort to accord the notion of naturalness a theoretical status and to incorporate this notion into the descriptive formalism of a linguistic theory was a major innovation by the generative school. In accordance with what we may refer to as the ‘formalness condition’, the generativist requires that the substantive naturalness of a phonological process be explicitly recognizable in the very formalism used to state the process. The lively interest in and the on-going search for a ‘natural’ phonology is very much in evidence, witness, e.g., the titles of papers presented at the 1971 Annual Meeting of the Linguistic Society of America.

The term ‘agentive’ is a familiar one in current discussions of the syntax of English (and other languages). Although most who use it seem, at first glance, to be referring to more or less the same semantic feature, the term is employed in a variety of ways. For instance, Fillmore (1968: 24) talks of an ‘agentive case’; Gruber (1967: 943) has ‘agentive verbs’; Lyons and others speak of ‘agentive nouns’; while Halliday (1967: 196), although he does not use the term ‘agentive’, distinguishes a feature of clauses which is clearly related to the notion of agentivity. Apart from this disagreement as to what, precisely, the term ‘agentive’ is to be predicated of, there is a further divergence of opinion over which nouns (or verbs, etc.) are to be considered agentive. For instance, Lyons marks the surface subject of see as agentive (1968: 387). Fillmore, on the other hand, assigns this to the dative case, and Gruber classifies see as a non-agentive verb. Again, Lyons and Halliday take up what are in effect incompatible positions with regard to the status of the prisoners in John marched the prisoners. In view of this indeterminacy, it seems worthwhile to attempt a critical examination of the notion of agentivity, in the hope that a clearer characterization of it might emerge.

The convention discussed in the following pages made its debut, as will be apparent, in the course of work on Catalan morphology and phonology. It is clear, however, that the TYPE of data discussed is by no means restricted to this language, and the problem arising in its interpretation is a general one.

1. In a recent historical survey of work in morphology, Matthews claims that in the 1940s and early 1950s the question ‘What are the basic units of morphological structure, and what are the relations which obtain between them?’ received a comparatively simple answer, namely that the units were morphemes and the relation between them one of linear succession (1970: 97–98). This seems to me inaccurate in two respects. Firstly, some linguists (notably Harris) recognized ‘morphemic components’ as well as morphemes; secondly, and more generally, explicit provision was made (following Bloomfield) for a statement of the order of elements in a grammatical construction – and simple succession, with X preceding (or following) Y was not the only order relation recognized. Allowance was also made, implicitly or explicitly, for (a) simultaneity, with X and Y occurring at the same time; and (b) discontinuity, with Y interrupting X. It will be convenient to discuss morphemic components in the larger context of simultaneous ordering; I shall then return to discontinuity in 3.

In one of the many insightful passages in his Meaning and the structure of language (Chafe, 1970), Wallace Chafe characterizes sentences like It's hot, It's late, and It's Tuesday as referring to ‘all-encompassing states’. ‘They cover,’ he says, ‘the total environment, not just some object within it’ (101). His treatment, in common with most others – but in his case partly because of the centrality of the verb in his System – denies any value to it: ‘it need not reflect anything at all in the semantic structure’. I believe that the notion of ambience is correct, though that of totality must be qualified; but I think that not only is it more than an empty surface element: it has as its referent precisely the ‘environment’ that is central to the whole idea. There is a hint of this notion in a recent observation by Arthur Schwartz (1972: 70–71) concerning it seems: ‘the surface it is not really a pronominal substitute for the proposition, but closer to the impersonal situational it of It is cold today or It is crowded in here’.

A sentiment which is expressed in a number of recent works in linguistics, e.g. Emonds (1970) and Kisseberth (1970) is that there are certain generalizations about languages which cannot be captured by devices already found in linguistic theory, such as rule ordering and the various collapsing conventions (cf. Chomsky & Halle, 1968). In this paper I will present evidence which suggests that there are generalizations about languages which are not capturable even by a linguistic theory which includes a number of these recent plausible revisions. I will also give an indication of how one might go about capturing these generalizations, given the assumption that they are not spurious ones.

In his study of Japanese phonology, McCawley introduces an interesting typological classification of languages according to the kinds of rules needed for describing the distribution of prosodic features like stress and pitch (1968: 58–61). Whereas Trubetzkoy had made a simple distinction between ‘syllablecounting’ languages and ‘mora-counting’ languages, McCawley suggests that we should make two independent distinctions:

(a) accordig to the ‘unit of phonological distance’ (the unit in terms of which the location of any accent is calculated) between ‘syllable-counting’ and ‘mora-counting’ languages;

(b) according to the ‘prosodic unit’ (the unit the actually bears the accent) between ‘syllable languages’ and ‘mora languages’.

In the case grammars of English proposed by Charles J. Fillmore and John Anderson perfect aspect is scarcely mentioned. Fillmore explicitly relegates it to a ‘modality’ component separate from the core ‘proposition’. Progressive (be ing) has not fared so badly – non-occurrence with (be ing) is frequently used as a defining test of a [+state] feature in a clause – and the readings assigned it are fairly constant and independent of the features of clauses in which it occurs. A model which treats progressive as ‘added on’ to any [–state] clause does not seem to miss any obvious generalizations or leave unaccounted-for any major divergences in semantic interpretation. With (have en), however, readings vary considerably depending on the character of the clause and the task of paraphrasing the ‘meaning’ (have en) ‘adds to’ a clause has frustrated many a grammarian of English, especially those who try to link ‘completion’ to it. In what follows, I will argue that we do need a [completive] semantic feature, but that it should be introduced into Anderson's subcategorization rules (1971: 211) and is only peripherally related to the readings assigned (have en). Adding an ‘aspectual’ feature to the subcategorization rules is not without warrant, since such features as [state] and [direction location] can be said to be aspectual, at least in the broadest sense of the term (‘having to do with “the temporal distribution or contour” of the action’ - Hockett's definition cited in Lyons, 1968: 315). Clearly relevant to the expression of aspect in this broad sense are manner and degree (or extent) adverbials, especially what I will call ‘aspect-manner’ adverbials: slowly, evenly. The relation of some manner adverbials (‘agent-manner’) and agency has been recognized and somewhat belaboured, though the parallel relation of degree adverbials and ‘completion’ has not. Again, these forms, like (have en), have been regarded as peripheral to the basic core of features, though some dependency relation between ‘agent-manner’ and agent has been suggested.

Traugott and Waterhouse (1968: 302) have made the interesting suggestion that the adverbials already and yet should be generated from a set of semantic features associated with the perfective, and that still may be related to the progressive in a similar way. The present paper hopes to show that still and anymore are actually more related to the PERFECTIVE than previously supposed, and that a description of these forms in structural semantic terms, particularly with respect to what Chafe (1970) calls the distribution of new information, helps to clarify the meaning of the perfective inflection.

1. The paraphrase relation or the cognitive synonymy between sentences has played a key rôle in the development of the theory of transformational grammar. It was a remarkable feat of early transformational grammarians to discover that the cognitive synonymy as well as the similarity of certain selectional restrictions between pairs of active and passive sentences can be accounted for by positing single deep structures, and by relating the two types of surface sentences by transformations: I have in mind the restrictions which apply to sentences such as John frightens sincerity, Sincerity is frightened by John.