Martin Joos once said: “In matters of language, Chao never goes wrong,” or words to that effect. I certainly appreciate this great compliment, but in many ways which Martin has not noticed, I did go wrong quite a number of times in matters of language.

It goes without saying that in my pre-adult speech, which was of course way back in the pre-Martin Joos days, there were a number of things in which I deviated from the speech of my environment. In the form of Mandarin spoken around me retroflex initials were distinct from dental sibilants; I used dental sibilants for both. There was also final n after front vowels, but I dropped all the final n’s. Thus, when I noticed that a cat had lapped up my bowl of noodles, I exclaimed: Mhau tsy woode mieh! for Mhau chy woode miann! ‘The cat is eating my noodles!’

Many different systems of writing the Eskimo language are in use in Canada today. Several alphabetic systems based roman letters affect only a minority of Eskimos. The syllabic system consisting of such symbols as small triangles, right and acute angles, and semicircles is written by the great majority. Those who know a given alphabetic system usually know the syllabary as well, except those who were born and brought up in the Mackenzie River area and Labrador. In Canada, at present, there is no standard orthography for the Eskimo language as there is in Greenland, for example. The syllabary which serves some 75 per cent of the Canadian Eskimo population, by virtue of this fact, comes closest to being a standard system of writing. It should be noted that the syllabary is not known in Greenland.

Words which in southern Greek dialects contain [azis], [úsis], and other sequences of stressed vowel + sibilant + [i] + sibilant, appear widely in the north with [áys], [úys] etc., and the phenomenon constitutes a major crux in modern Greek phonology. Although the problem has been widely discussed, no really satisfactory solution based on attested processes has been offered. It is the purpose of this paper to review the data, criticize existing treatments, and offer a new proposal.

Nous voudrions examiner, dans son ensemble, le processus de grammémisation (Pottier 1974:68) ou passage du lexème au morphème grammatical en québécois. Il y a là un vide à combler, car le sujet n’a guère fait l’objet d’une étude large. Il convient cependant de signaler que, dans un champ lexical particulier, Thibault et Vincent (1981) ont déjà constaté le passage des lexèmes ayant un dénoté de caractère religieux et sacré au statut de sacres (jurons) puis de quantificateurs ou de modalisateurs (modalisateurs assertifs ou qualificatifs).

In this paper I will deal with a type of nominalization which appears in Desano. Emphasis will be placed on arguments justifying a given underlying structure of a class of nominalizations rather than on the types of rules needed to convert the underlying structure into the realized nominalization.

A class of nominalizations will be presented here. I will give evidence to show that these forms are to be derived from relative clauses. Consider the following forms:

We pursue two goals in this article. The first is to examine morphosyntactic factors that promote noun ellipsis in French. The second is to show that acquisition data can help us evaluate different proposals for a given syntactic phenomenon. Using a transversal corpus of 15 French-speaking children aged 1;8 to 2; 12 years, we conclude that a cause-effect relationship between the acquisition of nominal agreement and noun-drop is difficult to establish. We propose rather that it is the presence of a determiner and its properties that license noun-drop. Our analysis rests on the concepts of partitivity and atomisation and thus supports Bouchard’s (2002) semantic analysis of noun drop while rejecting the notion that noun-drop is linked to pro drop.

The aim of this paper is threefold: descriptive, methodological and theoretical. It offers a distinctive collexeme analysis of two pairs of near-synonymous complex prepositions (sous le coup de SN/sous le choc de SN; sous l’emprise de SN/sous l’empire de SN), completed by a qualitative analysis. The analysis of the statistically significant co-occurrents suggests that sous le coup de has a more abstract and general meaning than sous le choc de, while the semantics of the second pair are less differentiated. The analysis touches upon several methodological issues; thus, examination of the problem addressed allows for assessment of the method. It also shows that the collostructional analysis offers an interesting contribution to the debate on the existence of a constructional semantics by identifying repelled collexemes that may yield coercion effects.

In a modest way, I have something in common with Webster, Mencken, and Avis, the three spokesmen for linguistic autonomy whom I am discussing. True, St. Noah of Amherst ascended to that great lexicographical office in the sky fifty-eight years before I was born; and as varied as my dreaming has been, I have never dreamed of meeting him. Nevertheless, we share a common birthday, October 16; and in the line of duty, I have often been entangled with his successors and their critics, especially with the critics of Merriam’s Webster’s Third New International.

With Mencken, my relationship was more direct. I had heard vaguely about The American Language in my South Carolina boyhood, when—in the eyes of the southern Baptists who dominated my community—Mencken metaphorically had horns, hoofs, and a tail. But I never read it till 1937, two years after I acquired a Ph.D. as a Miltonist. I had gone to the Ann Arbor Linguistic Institute, under orders from my college president (a retired four-star general) to improve my teaching and my use of the language.

Most recent measures of morphological productivity are reliable only if they are based on a large corpus of the language. This article presents a detailed demonstration of a method for establishing an inventory of productive affixes in a language for which a large corpus is not available. This method evaluates the productivity of an affix first and foremost on the basis of its threshold of profitability (the number of different words derived via the affix) in correlation with other diagnostics to bolster reliability. These other diagnostics are the semantic and phonological transparency of derived words and the decomposability of such words. The application of the method is illustrated step-by-step with data from St. Lucian.

Comme le faisait justement remarquer A. M. Kinloch dans une récente notice nécrologique (Kinloch 1980), le nom de W. S. Avis est indissolublement lié—avec celui de mon collègue et ami M. H. Scargill—à l’expansion des études de linguistique canadienne, domaine anglais: “it is no belittlement of the work of C.J. Lovell or of other of his associates to say that it was Avis who put Canadian English on the map.” II est done normal de placer la présente note sous l’égide de Avis, et j’en profite pour rappeler les contacts fructueux qui ont existé entre nous tout au long des années 1950 et 1960. Je voudrais cependant adopter ici une perspective un peu différente de la sienne, celle des canadianismes pancanadiens, si l’on peut dire, en ayant à l’esprit le problème très concret d’un dictionnaire bilingue français-anglais à l’usage des Canadiens (Vinay 1962). Je me propose d’examiner brièvement les différents critères retenus par les auteurs pour cerner le concept de canadianisme; et pour compléter l’image que Avis donne du mot canadianism, je ferai porter l’accent sur l’aspect français de la question.

1. A not insignificant problem of Spanish syntax is that of relating the subdeletion sentence (1) to its comparative-deletion congener (2)

• (1) Juan comió más manzanas que peras había traído.

  Juan ate more apples than he had brought pears.

• (2) Juan comió más manzanas de las que había traído.

  Juan ate more apples than he had brought.

At first glance there appears to be little that is problematic and the solutions that have been proposed for English seem readily applicable; under such an analysis (as we shall see below) both sentences are held to be structurally identical, but subject to a more or less extensive deletion rule in accord with the extent of the identity of lexical elements in the compared constituents of the matrix and subordinate clause.