The Last twenty years of claims, counter-claims, and confusion in linguistic and psycholinguistic theory, and the accompanying proliferation of experimental literature without clear growth of knowledge has, if nothing else, demonstrated how remarkably little we can agree upon about language. We don’t seem able to decide on what it is, or where it is (‘out there’ or solely in the mind), let alone why it is. But, at least, our recent experiences have taught us something. We have learned a great deal about how not to proceed; and that, without cynicism, is a very important beginning.

Recent linguistic research has explored the possibility of using standard logical analyses to explain some phenomena of natural languages. The logical notion of scope in modal contexts has yielded to the linguistic dichotomy of [±specific] indefinite NPs. Donnellan’s (1966) distinction between referential and attributive uses of definite description has been used to extend this dichotomy to include definite NPs. The behaviour of moods in Romance subordinate clauses has been tentatively explained by the same notions.

The purpose of this paper is to criticize some of these attempts to apply logical analyses to natural languages. Without denying the heuristic and even the explanatory value of standard logical analysis in linguistics, I will try to show that the correspondence between logical semantic notions and the categories of natural languages is much more approximate than is sometimes believed.

Introduction. Despite a rather extensive literature on the subject, most research on the nature of infant speech can be characterized as impressionistically descriptive, or anecdotal, or speculative, or some combination thereof. Such studies have by and large ignored the structure, function and natural history of early vocal behaviour, an empirically adequate specification of which is a necessary prerequisite to an understanding of the development of infant vocalizations and of their relationship to later linguistic usage. Likewise, reports have generally failed to recognize the dynamic interactions within the developing organism as a whole, eschewing discussion of concomitant neurophysiological maturation and cognitive growth. While detailed consideration falls beyond the scope of the present paper, some insight into the issues involved may be gained from recent treatises dealing with brain development (Jacobson, 1975), myelogenesis (Lecours, 1975) and the ontogeny of cerebral dominance (Zangwill, 1975). Problems relating to speech input and output requirements in acquisition have been treated by Mattingly (1973), and the interplay of physiological-cognitive factors with respect to early speech perception and production has been critically overviewed by Gilbert (1975). Suffice it to say that until experimental evidence can be adduced, interpreted and properly interwoven into a coherent description, definitive theories on the acquisition and development of speech and language must perforce remain only as desiderata.

Sentences like the following are basically the same in meaning (although not absolutely the same).

• (1) I believe Ralph came

• (2) Ralph came, I believe

These have been described by Green and Morgan (1972) and Hooper and Thompson (1973) as related by a transformational rule of Sentence-Lifting or Complement Preposing (to be abbreviated here as “Slifting”). By this hypothesized rule, an underlying embedded sentence, here “Ralph came,” is raised so that it precedes its higher subject and verb. Bolinger (1968) describes sentences such as (1) and (2) as related by a rule of Main Phrase Postposing, by which the material at the beginning of the sentence is moved to the end. None of these writers give any arguments for setting up the rule as they do.

Derivational morphology is one of the most difficult and least studied of all the areas of linguistic description (cf. Lightner, 1968:71). There are two main problems which are largely responsible for this. The first is the question of morpheme recognition or lexical identity: how similar in meaning or in sound do two words have to be in order for the linguist or language learner to identify a common morphemic unit and thus to see a morphological relationship between the words? (This problem is discussed in detail in Derwing, 1973: 122-6.) Many of the morphological rules which are proposed by linguists, whether morphophonemic or phonotactic in presumed character, are posited primarily, if not solely, in order to capture certain kinds of supposed ‘lexical redundancies,’ i.e., systematic variations which appear in the phonological form of the same morpheme when the morpheme occurs in different syntactic constructions. The viability of all such rules is thus directly contingent upon the assumption that the words involved do, in fact, share a common morpheme. Consider, for example, the morphophonemic rule which Chomsky proposes for English which changes a /d/ to an /s/ before the suffix /lv/, and the phonotactic rule which changes a /d/ plus /i/ or /y/ into a /ž/ before a vowel (1964:90); both of these rules are motivated by the presumed fact that the English words decisive and decision, for example, contain in their ‘underlying’ or ‘lexical’ representations the common morpheme decide. But how does one decide whether this claim is justified for ordinary native speakers of the language, particularly in some of the more problematical cases discussed in Derwing (1973)?

The development of contrastive studies (CS) in recent years, judging by the proliferation of projects and published materials, has been accompanied since the late sixties by vigorous discussions and controversies concerning the theoretical status of CS, their form and their place in both general and applied linguistics.

Many linguists and language teachers have gone so far as to reject the validity and usefulness of CS (cf. Alatis, 1968). It seems that this attitude results from a number of misunderstandings created by such factors as the peculiar methodological status of CS, the lack of a clear-cut distinction between theoretical and applied CS (Stockwell, 1968:25; Fisiak, 1971:88ff), and the lack of any precise formulation of the different aims of theoretical CS and applied CS, as well as the confusion of the relationship between CS, psycholinguistic theories of interference and errors, and the theory of second language learning (Zabrocki, 1976). Some confusion also stems from the misunderstanding of the relationship between CS and linguistic theory.

IL ne saurait être question dans un article de faire un historique de la critique sur les problèmes soulevés par l’imparfait; on trouvera dans Imbs (1960) un état satisfaisant de la question, auquel on pourra se reporter avec profit. Notre but est d’essayer d’éclairer l’ambiguïté que l’on dénote dans l’imparfait en français. Pour ce faire, nous n’avons pas, du moins consciemment, voulu nous situer dans un système de linguistique particulier. Nous nous sommes contenté de donner une interprétation assez générale pour rendre compte des valeurs les plus insolites du temps que nous nous proposons d’étudier, et qui parfois semblent entrer en contradiction les unes avec les autres.

D’une façon générale on caractérise l’imparfait comme ayant une valeur aspectuelle, c’est-à-dire comme un duratif passé, ou comme un passé inachevé, et accessoirement comme un itératif. Mais ces valeurs ne recouvrent pas toutes celles de l’imparfait et sont même en quelque sorte accessoires. L’opposition qu’il y a entre Il y a dix ans je travaillais comme garçon de course à Paris et Il y a dix ans j’ai travaillé comme garçon de course à Paris n’exprime pas seulement une opposition duratif-non duratif. Il est évident que là n’est pas la différence essentielle entre ces deux exemples. On sent le caractère complexe de l’imparfait, mais l’opposition de ces deux phrases ne permet pas de bien le cerner.

This report contains the results of a preliminary study dealing with the ways in which children between five and six years of age discriminate and learn phonetic elements of spoken language. In particular, it describes differences on a verbal discrimination learning task of stops vs fricatives in CVC syllables.

Language events occur in a temporal domain. Every speech event occupies a span of time and has temporal boundaries beyond which it cannot be reduced (or, presumably, expanded) and remain intelligible. Normal language users operate successfully within these temporal boundaries, both producing and perceiving utterances within the critical limits.

Transformational grammar has attempted to outline the systematic nature of language structure while also stressing the creative aspect of language. Language is systematic in that speakers use a finite number of means to make up their messages, and yet it is creative in that there are an infinite number of individual different messages which are possible in any natural language. In natural languages, however, there is not a perfect one-to-one correspondence between possible messages—intended or perceived—and possible linguistic realizations, as there exists in conventional or artificial languages. Often it is found in natural languages that a single linguistic form may have two or more meanings. Homonymy, whether it is lexical or syntactic, is an important notion, not only because syntactic ambiguity plays a central role in linguistic theory, but also because its study gives us a better understanding of the systematics of language and of the way we attach meaning to linguistic representations. Hence, the importance of evaluating how speakers deal with syntactic ambiguity in their attempts to understand and to be understood.

Il règne dans le cerveau une activité électrique constante qu’on peut capter sous forme d’ondes transmises par des électrodes fixées à la surface du crâne. En période d’éveil, la fréquence de ces ondes varie de 8 à 12 cycles/sec. en état de relaxation ; c’est ce qu’on appelle les ondes alpha. Cette fréquence peut augmenter jusqu’à 30 cycles/sec. lors d’une activité mentale intensive. Pendant le sommeil, il se produit aussi des variations de fréquence, à partir desquelles on peut déterminer divers niveaux de profondeur.