Consider the following two sentences: (i) a. This man cut the bread b. This man fell In both cases, many traditional accounts (e.g. Zandvoort, 1961: 236–240; Scheurweghs, 1959: 1–19; Chomsky, 1962: 138–140, 1965: 63–64; etc.) would say that we have a single clause (or sentence) which consists of two parts, a subject and a predicate. And the two examples differ in the constitution of the predicate. This distinction between the two is usually described as having to do with transitivity. In (i.a) the verb is said to take an object, and is therefore transitive; in (i.b) this is not the case, and the verb is intransitive.

In a paper read at the Tenth International Congress of Linguists, Bucharest, 1967 (Bennett, forthcoming), I discussed the question of synonymy within the framework of the stratificational theory of language, taking examples from the area of English prepositions. The present paper has two aims. On the one hand, it incorporates the findings of more recent work on synonymy. Thus whereas, for instance, in the earlier paper two levels of synonymy were distinguished, it now seems necessary to recognize four or possibly five levels. On the other hand, the paper will attempt to set the discussion of synonymy in a wider framework by sketching the outlines of a semological description of English prepositions. To present such a description would be beyond the scope of the paper. I hope merely to indicate the general shape that the description might take. In addition to the remarks on synonymy there will be some discussion of polysemy, componential analysis and idioms. In particular it is hoped that a clear picture will emerge of the relationship between these various areas.

Beginning with the paper of Chomsky, Halle & Lukoff (1956) a theory of accent has been developed which attempts to explain by certain fairly simple rules the complex pattern of degrees of prominence assigned to any given sentence. In the present paper I will not be concerned with those rules which specify the main stress for stems (or, more precisely, for words containing only one stem), but only with the rules which introduce degrees of prominence in compound words and phrases. Let me call these latter rules Phrase-Accent-rules, or for short, PA-rules. The general conditions on the form and the manner of operation of PA-rules may be stated as follows: (i) PA-rules apply cyclically, beginning with the innermost, or lowest constituents of given final derived phrase markers, proceeding ‘upward’ until the topmost constituent is reached. (ii) PA-rules pick out one of the several primary accents of a constituent to which they apply, and make it the main accent of that constituent, thereby lowering all other accents by one degree. (iii) Formally, PA-rules are strictly local transformations whose structural descriptions recognize only three factors: first, the constituents, or bracketing, of a sentence; second, the categorization of the constituents; and third, the previously assigned accents.

The grammar of Kasem is being analysed in terms of a hierarchical model (cf. Halliday, 1961; Bendor-Samuel, 1963), the (ascending) levels of relevance to this paper being word, phrase, clause, string, and sentence. (The ‘string’ is the unit which functions in the sentence and consists of a tightly bound sequence of clauses, the non-initial clauses operating under extensive restrictions with respect to their structure. This type of syntactic unit appears to be characteristic of many Gur languages and is often referred to as a ‘series’ or ‘serial construction’. For a recent discussion in some detail of this unit, under the term ‘clause clusters’, see Pike, 1966: 55–78.) At the word level in this hierarchy, a system of categories can be set up to account for the form of every verb word, i.e. so that every verb word can be completely ‘parsed’ or described in terms of these categories. But one of the characteristic features of this system of categories is that there is extensive neutralization between the categories. The question, then, that this paper seeks to discuss is this: are the ambiguities inherent in the verb word resolved within the language as a whole? An answer is here presented which seeks to relate the resolution of the ambiguities to the different levels of the grammatical hierarchy, as set up.

Previous parts of this paper have been concerned with two areas in the syntax of the English clause: Part 1 with transitivity, Part 2 with theme. Transitivity is defined as relating to the experiential component of meaning (or ‘cognitive’, though this term is not really appropriate since all components involve a cognitive stratum); the discussion has been confined to the expression of processes and the participants therein – syntactically, those functions having in general verbal and nominal realizations – although a full treatment of the experiential component in the syntax of the clause would take account of other features, the expression of time and place and other adjuncts to and conditions on the process. Theme is related to the discoursal, or informational, component; under this heading are brought together the principal options whereby the speaker introduces structure into the discourse and (in the ideal case) ensures ‘comprehension’ – the recognition of the text as a text, and its interpretation along predicted lines.

The publication of Syntactic Structures in 1957 stimulated a much-needed re-evaluation among linguists as to the goals of linguistic theory and the nature of language. Part of the discussion which has ensued has centred around the question of linguistic competence versus performance. Competence has been related to performance as ‘langue’ is to ‘parole’. ‘Competence’ thus refers to the ‘underlying system of rules that has been mastered by the speaker-hearer’ (Chomsky, 1965) and ‘performance’ to the way the speaker-hearer utilizes this ‘internalized grammar’ when he actually produces and understands utterances. Despite the continued controversy about this distinction, little can be added to the justifications for it put forth over many decades (cf. Chomsky, 1957, 1964, 1965; Katz, 1964, 1966; Postal, 1966; Sapir, 1933; Levin, 1965; de Saussure, 1916; etc.). Yet there remains much vagueness as to the limits of each and the relationship between the two. For many years the confusion was due to the influence of Bloomfield who centred his attention on the speech act; his aim was the classification of the OUTPUT of performance, i.e. the utterances, and led to no theory about the dynamic process of performance itself (Bloomfield, 1924, 1926, 1927, 1933). While giving lip service to a concern for ‘langue’, his own mechanistic approach negated any possibility for the rules of ‘langue’ to be anything more than lists of recurrent patterns found in ‘parole’. And since he was of the opinion that ‘the physiologic and acoustic description of acts of speech belongs to other sciences than ours’ (Bloomfield, 1926: 153) he did not direct himself to those aspects of ‘parole’ which could explain speech performance.

Although this paper deals with Russian phonology, our aim is not to describe in detail any part of the phonological component of Russian (cf. Lightner, 1966 and forthcoming); rather, we are concerned here with demonstrating the explanatory adequacy of a modified framework of generative phonology.

In each of the following pairs of sentences, the verb in (a) is intuitively apprehended as being related in some significant way to that in (b): (1) a. The rice grew b. The fanner grew the rice (2) a. The barge sank b. The storm sank the barge (3) a. The coconut dropped b. The man dropped the coconut (4) a. The cart turned b. The driver turned the cart (5) a. The laws changed b. The Government changed the laws (6) a. The mourners collected b. He collected the mourners (7) a. The boat sailed b. The fisherman sailed the boat (8) a. The meeting began b. The Chairman began the meeting For transformational grammarians working on English, the delineation of the kind of relationship illustrated here is vital for the achievement of (at least) descriptive adequacy in their analysis of the language. Deeper investigation of the relationship has, however, revealed that concealed beneath its apparent simplicity there are certain highly complicated problems with fundamental and far-rseaching implications for the theory of transformational grammar itself.

Schools of thought concerning the study of language in anthropology and in linguistics proper have developed historically along lines that are sometimes convergent, but too often divergent because of a certain gap in communication between the two disciplines. It is the purpose of this paper to suggest the existence of an area of common interest which is at present unrecognized in the literature. I submit that recent work in what anthropologists refer to as ‘formal’ semantic analysis, when considered in the light of transformational linguistics, provides a potentially fruitful point of interdisciplinary interaction which should result in the formulation of a more adequate theory of meaning in the study of language than exists at the moment.

The present paper is initially concerned with a rather minor problem in comparative Germanic morphology: the shape of the consonant in certain present active indicative endings. There are discrepancies among the early attested dialects in this matter, and the traditional explanation has been that one group of Germanic dialects generalized present forms with Indo-European root accent, the other group forms with Indo-European suffix accent. I show that this solution, which is widely accepted, is deficient in several respects, and I demonstrate that the problem has a correct solution with interesting consequences for historical linguistics provided we concentrate on the rules and their order of application in the grammars of the different dialects, that is, provided we attack the problem from within the framework of generative phonology.

1. It is a well-known fact that in English wh-words occur both in interrogative sentences and in certain complex sentences (e.g. in relative clauses), and that whenever this is the case, the members of each such set of wh-words found are identical in form and have related meanings. For example, the interrogative pronoun in sentence (1) is identical in form to the relative pronoun in sentence (2); furthermore, these pronouns have a related meaning in that both refer to ‘human (subjects)’: (1) Who cut the pie? (2) The man who came yesterday cut the pie