With the increasing concern for explicit, precise and complete grammatical descriptions of languages (primarily under the impetus of Chomsky), the relation between poetry and grammar has come to command particular attention since sentences occurring in poetry often fail to be accounted for by the grammar of the language. That is, poetic sentences may simultaneously manifest more constraints and less constraints on combinatorial possibilities than exist in non-poetic language. Some linguists, not content merely to list such sentences as exceptions to the grammatical rules, have suggested ways of ‘expanding’ the grammar to account for such sentences. One well-known effort is Levin's (1964) attempt to ‘fix’ a generative grammar of English so it will generate such deviant sentences as, for example, Cummings's He danced his did. Another approach, though not specifically applied to poetic texts, is represented by Harris's (1952) discourse analysis. Here many vexing problems are avoided in that the aim is to construct a ‘grammar’ of a single text by setting up categories, empirically defined in terms of morphological environments, that apply only to the given text.

The traditional account of the position of the Latin accent is well known, both from ancient sources (e.g. Quintilian i.5.30) and from modern text-books – e.g. Kent (1932: § 66): ‘Latin developed an accent depending upon the quantity of the penultimate syllable, as follows: A long penult was accented, as in pepérci, inimtcus; but if the penult was short, the antepenult received the accent, as in extstimō, cōnfíciunt, ténebrae. Disyllables were necessarily accented on the penult, as in tégō, tóga.’

The following thoughts were stimulated primarily as a result of correspondence with Joseph L. Malone of Columbia University, and partly by reading Noam Chomsky's recent paper in Language (Chomsky, 1967).

Recent work on elliptical forms of the English imperative has drawn quite heavily upon the apparent parallel between tag formation in imperatives and tag formation in interrogatives. Thus, it has been argued that the auxiliary in imperatives must be will because in all interrogative tag formations the auxiliary element in the appended tag is the same as the one occurring in the initial segment (Klima, 1964: 254; Postal, 1966; Katz & Postal, 1964). The invited comparison is between tag-interrogatives like (1) John did it, didn't he? (2) They can do it, can't they? (3) He can't do that to us, can he? (4) You will try harder, won't you? and putative imperatives like (5) Do it now, will you! (6) Bring me a slab, won't you! (7) Bring me a slab, will you! (8) You will try harder, won't you! Consideration of such examples makes it fairly evident that, in the cases of the elliptical constructions (5)–(7) aux Will has been deleted from the initial segment and hence occurred in the deep structures serving as the sources for these constructions. Moreover, such parallels provide good motivation for the conjecture that ALL imperatives eventually derive from underlying sources whose phrasemarkers contain the element will (Postal, 1966: 162; Katz & Postal, 1964: 75). It is my purpose here to attempt an analysis of the putative parallel between tag-imperatives and tag-questions in order to determine the extent to which it supports such conjectures about the specific nature of structures underlying English imperatives.

Structural semantics seeks to discover certain relationships among the words in the vocabulary of a language.1 This area of linguistic analysis has received relatively little systematic study by most linguists until recently (Gleason, 1962: 86), and the vocabulary has been considered a rather unorganized set of items.

Linguistics, epistemology and psychology share many common interests; for instance, an interest in the learning of language, in the nature of the fundamental units of which linguistic systems are composed, in the correspondence between language operations, logical operations and intellectual operations. The phenomenon of COMPARISON falls under the latter rubric, as do, for instance, NEGATION, ASSERTION and PREDICATION. In the literature of these three disciplines we find ample evidence of an interest in the latter three phenomena, but there has been surprisingly little discussion of comparison. We say, ‘surprisingly’, since of these four operations comparison might well be held to be the most important. In any kind of classification the fundamental intellectual activity is the comparing of one object, event, etc. with another or with others. Further, to adopt the terminology of psychology, our behaviour in any situation must be governed to some extent by the recognition, whether implicit or explicit, of similarities and differences between that situation and others with which we have had to deal.

In this paper we propose an analysis of the semantic structure of modal sentences in English. Central to this analysis is the notion of ‘speech act’. The notion of speech act derives principally from the work of J. L. Austin (cf. especially Austin, 1962). Austin is particularly concerned with the use of sentences like I promise to go, I bet you sixpence and I name this ship ‘Queen Elizabeth’. One of his main purposes is to show that it is a mistake to class these sentences with sentences like John is running as statements. To utter the sentence I promise to go is not to make a statement about or to report some inner condition of mind or consciousness. It is to perform the act of promising, just as to say I bet you sixpence is to perform the act of betting. Indeed, in the case of these kinds of acts (promising, betting, naming, etc.) it is difficult to see how one could engage in them without using sentences of this kind. Austin calls verbs like promise, bet and name ‘performative’ verbs. It follows from this account that verbs like say, state and assert are also performative verbs. So that the mistake involved in classing I promise to go with John is running is not that in uttering the first sentence one is performing an act and in uttering the second one is not (ignoring the uninteresting fact that the act of vocalizing is common to both), but that the speaker is performing a different act in each case—in the one case promising and in the other stating. The fact that in the case of the utterance John is running the performative verb state does not occur, so that what Austin terms its ‘illocutionary force’ is not explicitly marked in the way in which the utterance I promise to go is explicitly marked as having the illocutionary force of a promise by the words I promise, while giving rise to certain difficult problems,2 does not affect Austin's main point, which is that a complete account of the meaning of a sentence cannot be restricted to semantic analyses as these are usually understood and that they must be extended to include information about the kind of speech act involved in uttering the sentence – that is, its illocutionary force.

Kohler (1966a, 1966b: 346–348) asks whether the syllable is a phonological universal, and concludes negatively.1 The way to support such a conclusion is not difficult to imagine: the sort of specific objections to the syllable which Kohler raises would, if well-founded, be sufficient to prove his case.

Katz's statement of the core of the problem of ungrammaticalness is worth quoting at length: ‘The knowledge that enables a speaker to understand sentences – his knowledge of the rules of the grammar – must be identically the knowledge that enables him to understand semi-sentences, for semi-sentences are understood in terms of their well-formed parts. Moreover, the knowledge a speaker uses to recognize the respects in which a semi-sentence is ungrammatical is also his knowledge of grammaticality: knowledge of the grammatical rules is here employed to discover instances of their violation.…

A study of word order must take account of the different sets of criteria governing the position of elements and the extent to which the one or the other has a bearing on the order of elements in the languages investigated. It must consider whether word order is predetermined by grammatical rule and what measure of freedom is left to the speaker or writer to manipulate word order to conform to the communicative intention. The present study will mainly be concerned with the sentence opening elements and the position of the grammatical subject.

The present study arose out of an investigation of whether already and yet as in He has left already, *He has left yet, IHe hasn't left already, He hasn't left yet formed a suppletion set that matches some →any, sometimes → ever, etc. as in They want some love, *They want any love, ?They don't want some love, They don't want any love (for discussion of some, sometimes, too, etc. cf. Klima, 1964; Fillmore, 1967; UCLA, 1967: Negation). Various observations about the restriction of already and yet to certain tenses and aspects, and about their failure to match with many adverbs of time, led to an investigation of whether already and yet were really adverbs of time, as is usually assumed. The conclusions we reached are that already and yet indeed form a suppletion set (with certain limitations not shared by other suppletives), but that they cannot usefully be treated as time adverbs. Rather, they seem to have close connexions with perfect aspect. The arguments presented here in support of this hypothesis are by no means exhaustive but will hopefully provide a suggestive contribution toward the study of both adverbs and aspects.

The Survey of English Usage (see especially Quirk, 1968: 70 ff., 184 ff.) combines a corpus basis with data obtained by elicitation techniques which so far have taken the form of acceptability tests. Most of the latter type of work is done with aural (taped) input, the subjects making their responses in writing. The drawbacks in this process were acknowledged in Quirk & Svartvik (1966), hereafter QS, in connexion with the interpretation of responses to the instruction to make a sentence negative (pp. 95 f.), since a written response such as I haven't a car is ambiguous as between a negative sentence (I /haven't a càr#) and a denial of the corresponding positive sentence (I /hàven't a car#). It was therefore decided ‘to experiment with oral responses … through the use of a language laboratory’ (p. 104), in order both to collect data not available from the written responses and at the same time to preserve maximum similarity with the written-output experiment in having a group of subjects being tested simultaneously.

It is generally accepted that Contemporary Standard Russian (CSR) has four labiodental fricatives, f, f', v and v'. Most descriptions of Russian phonetics note that two of these, the voiced v and v' differ from all other Russian obstruents in one important respect. While as a general rule obstruent sequences are either voiced throughout or voiceless throughout depending on the voiced or voiceless character of the last member of the sequence, v and v' do not effect assimilative voicing in a preceding obstruent; cf. otbój [-db-], otdát' [-dd-], otgón [-dg-], otzýv [-dz-], otžít' [-dž-], but otvál [-tv-].