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 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).

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.

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.

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 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-].