In linguistics as in any other field of learning, a scholar may concentrate on the particular aspect of study that most appeals to his temperament. One may choose to analyse and classify the structural phenomena which are found in all varieties of human speech; another may seek to determine the relationships which exist between languages known to be or suspected of being related; a third may follow the history of one particular language, tracing its development from the earliest records to the present; a fourth may concern himself with the many differences which exist contemporaneously among the speakers of one language. The different varieties of speech to be found in any language are called dialects, and the person who studies them is called a linguistic geographer

The following is an account of glottalization and gemination in the traditional vernacular of the Greater Bolton area. Bolton is a town situated 12 miles north-west of Manchester in northwestern England. The Greater Bolton area consists of the county borough of Bolton, Farnworth municipal borough, and the urban districts of Horwich, Turton, Little Lever and Kearsley. Its population is approximately 230,000.

From a consideration of various historical, industrial, economic, social and administrative factors, the Greater Bolton area can be shown to be a relatively homogeneous cultural unit within the urban field of influence of Bolton. This cultural homogeneity is reflected in the speech of the area, which is also relatively homogeneous in character, and distinctive when compared to the speech of other parts of Greater Manchester County, South Lancashire and Merseyside (cf. Shorrocks 1980:1–27).

Although a preliminary survey of the vocabulary and pronunciation of a Central Newfoundland dialect is the chief concern of this paper, some tentative observations about the development of Newfoundland dialect as a whole may perhaps also be put forward here. Both the terms discussed and the observations made are based primarily on a field-trip made in the Summer of 1963 as part of the expanding programme of research in dialect, toponymy, and folklore which is now being carried out at Memorial University. Some of the theoretical points are drawn both from the fieldwork and a sampling of the material available in the University’s Folklore and Dialect Archives. From these sources it would appear that two main speech-groups probably exist in Newfoundland as a whole, one descended from Southern Irish and the other from the English West Country. Historical evidence of settlement in Newfoundland of course supports this, but proof of such a hypothesis as regards the language must await further collecting and more intensive analysis. However, the dialectal differences so far examined seem to indicate that this is the probable pattern.

Certain Peninsular Spanish varieties have two third-person plural forms in the simple past indicative of verbs with ‘strong’ (stem-stressed) preterites. While this phenomenon is documented in large-scale linguistic atlas surveys, its current geographic distribution and diachronic origins remain under-studied. This paper sets out to: 1) establish the geographic distribution of these variants; the differing methodologies and epochs of the data sources make them particularly interesting to compare, showing that these analogical strong preterites have suffered a drastic decline over the last century; 2) use historical corpus data to show that the vernacular variant is by no means a recent phenomenon; 3) examine external history as a source of explanation in linguistic reconstruction, showing that this process of analogical levelling took place after the reconquest and resettlement of these regions. These findings support the hypothesis of a feature which spread over the centuries by linguistic diffusion.

This article proposes an account of genitive case marking in the Maori DP which shows how the licensing requirements for genitive depend both on thematic role distinctions and on the presence of a functional projection situated immediately below D. An investigation of ordering alternations including genitives, demonstratives, adjectives, and the lexical head indicates that the FP below D is also the location of an identifying or specifying function within the DP. The label “IdentP” is proposed as a cover term for this FP projection. It is also proposed that DPs containing nominalized verbs include a head, Nmz, that has the capacity to license additional instantiations of genitive case marking.

This article investigates whether Tenetehára is a predicate-raising language. The purpose is to determine whether VSO order results from verb movement to the heads T0 or C0 only, or whether Tenetehára exhibits VP remnant movement, similarly to languages like Niuean, Choi, Malagasy, and Seediq. The analysis concludes that Tenetehára does allow predicate movement, to Spec-CP or Spec-TP. Either option depends on particles related to tense and complementation, in sentence-final position. Additionally, assuming Kayne’s antisymmetry theory, in which all movement occurs to the left, and the predicate-raising hypothesis, it is proposed that final tense particle orders are derived from the basic word order [Tense [SVO]]. To derive the fact that T0 can be head-final, the analysis holds that the predicate, represented by the v-VP complex, must move to the specifier position of TP. Finally, it is proposed that the syntactic trigger for predicate-raising is the presence of a [+PRED] feature both in the head C0 and in the head T0, a fact that explains why Tenetehára grammar systematically strands tense and complementizer particles in clause-final position.

This article explores some evidence against the ECP that appears at first to be fairly overwhelming. Upon deeper inspection, however, the evidence supports the ECP and a special universal computation involving the complementizer system, the Complementizer Contraction rule (Pesetsky 1982). Complementizer Contraction is parameterized; some languages have an overt reflex (French, Norwegian); other languages do not (English, Tagalog). To make the argument, many intricate details are described about the structure of relative clauses, comparative clauses, embedded complement clauses, and wh-questions in Rejang, a Western Austronesian language of Sumatra.

G. L. Piggott’s paper “Implications of linguistic change for concrete phonology” does not present diachronic evidence in favor of a theory of phonology with abstract representations and derivations, as it claims, but rather reconstructs a hypothetical sequence of events. This reconstruction is based on a theory of phonology; that is, Piggott reconstructs a sequence of events that is consistent with the theory that he holds. It is not legitimate, therefore, to turn around and use this reconstructed situation as an argument for his theory. We return to this point below.

A somewhat weaker point is in principle possible, and Piggott tries to make it also. This would be to show that some theory cannot provide an historical account of how a certain situation could have arisen. Note that all that is required here is that the theory provide sufficient machinery to produce a plausible reconstruction of a state of affairs. Piggott is quite correct in maintaining that this is a legitimate test of a theory. He argues that the theory he defends provides such an account of the examples he discusses, but that the theory of Hooper (1976), natural generative phonology, cannot provide such an account.

This article analyzes Marshallese pronouns and demonstratives, arguing that both privative and binary morphosemantic features are necessary, and that the two types coexist in a single domain. Marshallese encodes number with atomic, and person with [$\pm$author] and [$\pm$participant]. In the complex system of Marshallese demonstratives, atomic and [$\pm$human] map to the same head, subject to a constraint that only one feature appears at a time. The element $\chi$, which derives person orientation in demonstratives and pronouns, does not universally map to the same syntactic position. While in Heiltsuk $\chi$ is a dependent of the person head, in Marshallese it heads a projection above the person head. And while in Heiltsuk the person features occupy the same position in both pronouns and demonstratives, Marshallese pronouns have a different structure, with person and number features mapping to a single syntactic head. The contribution of UG is thus not a set of specific features or specific structures, but a set of more abstract principles.