The present paper will assume, for the purposes of argument at least, the essential validity of the claims made on behalf of Case Grammar, in particular that ‘the case notions comprise a set of universal … concepts which identify certain types of judgements human beings are capable of making about the events that are going on around them, judgements about such matters as who did it, who it happened to, and what got changed’ (Fillmore, 1968: 24). We shall investigate in some detail the practicability of Fillmore's statement that ‘we should take the “case uses” as basic and regard the observable “case forms” as derivable from them by the rules of the grammar’ (Fillmore, 1971: 36), by attempting to establish, informally, some of the rules that would be needed to generate certain correct surface forms in Classical and Vulgar Latin and, in so doing, we shall examine, taking into account both the traditional distinction between ‘grammatical’ and ‘concrete’ cases (in particular, as propounded by Kurylowicz, 1964) and aspects of the localist hypothesis, most recently fully discussed by Anderson (1971), the extent to which the changes attested in Latin and early Romance are merely surface re-structurings, and to what extent they are more profound. Finally, certain implications for the theory itself, as at present formulated, are presented and briefly discussed.

I propose a modification of the notion ‘phrase-marker’, to permit nodes to branch upwards as well as downwards. The change for which I argue both simplifies linguistic theory and renders it more empirically adequate.

The Inga language relies on overt ‘case’ markers, rather than the relative position of, for example, the subject or object elements with respect to the verb, to distinguish the function of each. Since little restriction is thus placed on the order of elements by the syntax, a potential for a large number of permutations results.

This paper concerns the theory of SYSTEMIC GRAMMAR, developed by Halliday (1961, 1967a, 1967b 1968, 1970), Hudson (1967, 1970, 1971, 1973, forthcoming, ms. a, ms. b) and others. In Hudson (1971) a detailed generative version of the theory has been presented, and specifically I want to suggest modifications of this model which I believe improve it. Although a fair amount of the paper consists of criticism of, and comparison with, Hudson's model, the description of what I propose is self-contained and that portion can be read independently.

Discussions of linguistic structure generally accept a distinction between rules of sentence structure and rules of sound structure, but there is very little agreement on further subcategorization beyond this general dichotomy. Indeed, recent discussion in the area of syntax and semantics has been dominated, at least superficially, by the question of whether it is possible and/or desirable to distinguish within the rules of sentence structure between syntactic rules and semantic rules, and perhaps to impose further subcategorizations on each of these; see, for example, the contributions by Chomsky and Postal to Peters (1972). Within syntax and semantics, however, there is probably much less disagreement than meets the eye: most would agree that a desirable goal for linguistics is to isolate and distinguish as many types of rule as possible, and to associate each type with a set of maximally restrictive formal and substantive constraints.

The law of least effort is of course constantly at play in language use. Redundant linguistic items are consistently reduced in size, replaced with a proform or simply left out. These phenomena are dealt with within the framework of a transformational-generative grammar through transformations involving reduction and deletion. In other grammars they may be handled differently; for example the ‘reduced’ sentences may be regarded as full sentences that may optionally be ‘completed’. But I am not concerned here to give a precise specification of the rules involved, but only to raise the more fundamental questions: what is the nature of the processes involved? And, under what conditions do they operate? In this discussion I shall use the term DELETION throughout although a more neutral term like OMISSION, or even NON-INCLUSION, might be preferred.

Charles Morris' division of signs into syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics has been handed down to linguists and philosophers of language, who have more or less accepted the validity of the categories. However, the generative semanticists have argued, persuasively in my opinion, that the line between syntactics and semantics is not sharp (cf., e.g. Lakoff, 1971). By examining a small but important class of adverbs, I will try to show that the line between semantics and pragmatics is also not sharp and that no non-arbitrary line can be drawn. What is needed for an adequate description of language is a theory that can predict and explain borderline cases without forcing them into pre-established categories arbitrarily.

The to possessive may be defined as that phrasal possessive construction using to which interchanges with either an inflected possessive or an of possessive or both, and with a sentence using a form of the verb have. For example:

(1) father to the bride (to possessive, henceforth to-Poss)

(2) bride's father (inflected possessive, henceforth gen-Poss)

(3) father of the bride (of possessive, henceforth of-Poss)

(4) the bride has this father.

This paper will be concerned with the problem of drawing a boundary, within a process or so-called ‘generative’ model of phonology, between what Matthews (1972) has called MORPHOLEXICAL phenomena and MORPHOPHONEMIC phenomena.

There are a large number of ‘adjectives’ in English that consist of a noun to which is suffixed -ed and which may be preceded by a modifier such as an adjective or a numeral (e.g. bearded, blue-eyed, three-legged). They have been treated at length in this journal (Hirtle, 1970), and I should like to continue the discussion of them by highlighting some problems raised by Hirtle, disagreeing with his main conclusion, and adding a few more problems of my own.