For Three-Quarters of a century, scholars have had to rely for a general survey of the dialects of England either upon Volume V of On Early English Pronunciation by A. J. Ellis, published in 1889, or upon J. Wright’s The English Dialect Grammar, published in 1905. These two works have merit as pioneer studies but their accuracy and reliability are questioned today.

Studies in linguistic geography in Britain made an important step forward in 1962 with the publication of the first volume of a new, scientifically-conducted dialect survey, Survey of English Dialects (hereafter SED). This survey, when completed, will provide an extensive corpus of primary dialect material but as yet, because it would be largely premature, interpretative study of this material has not been attempted. Despite this, as the basic material for Northumberland, Durham, Cumberland, Westmoreland, Lancashire, and Yorkshire, the six northern counties of England, has been published, a study of questions confined to these counties is valid. It is the purpose of this paper to examine briefly four consonantal features of northern English dialects in the light of this newly-published material.

In 1924 Otto Jespersen pointed out the difficulty of finding an adequate term for a type of indirect speech which is not dependent on an immediately preceding verb like ‘he said’ or ‘he thought.’ He suggested that previous terms such as ‘erlebte Rede’ be replaced by the term ‘represented speech,’ because the writer “does not experience or ‘live’ these thoughts or speeches, but represents them to us….” Since then the terminology problem has by no means become smaller. Jespersen’s term is almost forgotten today, having been replaced by completely new terms, or by terms previously in use, among them ‘erlebte Rede.’ Some of the more common terms presently in use are: ‘style indirect libre,’ ‘monologue intérieur indirect,’ ‘indirect interior monologue,’ ‘narrated speech,’ ‘nesobstvenno-prjamaja reč’, and ‘quasi-direct discourse.’ The last two are direct translations of the German term ‘uneigentliche direkte Rede.’ One of them, viz. quasi-direct discourse, will be used in the present paper only tentatively, since it will be shown later that there is actually no need for having a special term in the grammar of Russian.

The purpose of this note is to introduce a restricted class of transformational grammars, the deletion grammars, and to use them to discuss the names of natural numbers in Chinese. Hereafter these names are referred to as Chinese number names.

Transformations and transformational grammars were introduced into linguistics by N. Chomsky. By now a vast literature on transformations has grown up. However, many of the transformational grammars appearing in this literature lack precision and rigor. In particular, it is not always clear what corpus they generate because of the multiplicity, complexity, and inadequate definition of the transformations contained in these grammars.

I propose to present here the findings of an analysis of a limited corpus of English loanwords as found in four Canadian weekly newspapers published in the Serbo-Croatian language. Though interference in written language is a secondary phenomenon in a situation of languages in contact, instances of such interference are interesting and important since they may contribute to the adoption and spread of the corresponding instances of interference in spoken language. In addition, kinds of interference, as well as the total amount of interference in an immigrant language contact situation, may be usefully compared with interference phenomena in the corresponding standard language (in which very often, as is the case with E and SC in contact, almost all borrowing is done from a written model language). The linguistic analysis of the interference in written language seems therefore to be worth while.