One of the most fundamental constructs of phonological theory past and present is ‘neutralization’, i.e. the merger of a contrast in certain contexts. It is as basic as such other constructs as ‘contrast’, ‘distinctive feature’, and ‘segment’. While there exists a substantial body of literature on the phonetics of various phonological constructs (e.g. acoustic correlates for features, acoustic invariance, descriptive phonetics of particular languages, instrumental measurement techniques and segmentation criteria), the phonetics of neutralization has largely been assumed on the basis of casual impressionistic phonetics. The assumption is that forms which are distinguishable phonetically and phonologically in certain contexts and/or levels of representation (e.g. intervocalic voiced and voiceless obstruents in German) are under certain other well-defined circumstances totally indistinguishable at the level of phonetics (e.g. only voiceless obstruents occur word-finally in German).

Sentences (1) and (2) have traditionally been related by a process that is called Verb Phrase Deletion (VPD).

(1) If I wanted to collect bottles, I would collect bottles.

(2) If I wanted to collect bottles, I would.

The earliest analyses of this phenomenon suggested that (2) was derived from (1) by a syntactic deletion rule (hence the ‘deletion’ in the name of the process – cf. Ross (1969a)). Later (Jackendoff, 1972; Wasow, 1972; Fiengo, 1974; and Williams, 1977a, among others), it was suggested that a null anaphor was generated in the base following would in (2), and that the semantic component read this anaphor as meaning collect bottles, hence accounting for the synonymy of (1) and (2). A third possibility is that (2) is generated in the base with nothing following would, would itself serving as a proform for would collect bottles. And fourth, (2) could be derived from (1), leaving would as a proform, in a process resembling pronominalization more than deletion (perhaps ‘proverbalization’).

1. Natural Morphology as represented in the forthcoming volume by Dressler, Mayerthaler, Panagl & Wurzel (1985) came into being about 1977 as an attempt to create a counter-part to Stampean Natural Phonology and to develop and systematize Jakobsonian reflections on morphological universals. In this paper I will present and exemplify some ideas and findings of Natural Morphology, of course from my own specific point of view.

This paper is concerned with the social mechanisms of linguistic change, and we begin by noting the distinction drawn by Bynon (1977) between two quite different approaches to the study of linguistic change. The first and more idealized, associated initially with traditional nineteenth century historical linguistics, involves the study of successive ‘states of the language’, states reconstructed by the application of comparative techniques to necessarily partial historical records. Generalizations (in the form of laws) about the relationships between these states may then be made, and more recently the specification of ‘possible’ and ‘impossible’ processes of change has been seen as an important theoretical goal.

Hopper & Thompson (1980) is an important contribution on the issue of transitivity, in which they propose that transitivity consists of the following ten semantic parameters:

Standard treatments of antonymy regularly state that of a pair of antonyms, one member is marked while the other one is unmarked. Certain semantic and syntactic properties are predicated of the unmarked (or in some cases of the marked) member of the pair. A few examples are given, usually 20 or so, which bear out the predictions.