D. A. Cruse's ‘Some thoughts on agentivity’ (1973: 11–23) makes the useful distinction of [volitive] and [agentive] NPs. Recognizing this difference is the first step in avoiding some of the difficulties encountered by Jackendoff (1972), Fischer and Marshall (1969) and others in their discussion of how an NP is characterized as [volitive] in a clause and how some predicates can characterize an NP in an embedded clause as [volitive]. These discussions have been relatively inconclusive because of the very common assumption that [ ±volitive] or something like it should be represented as a feature of predicates, or predictable from one. If one believes that lexical selectional features are semantic (as McCawley (1968) argues), one arrives at the kind of ‘referential’ criterion for volitivity that Cruse rightly wishes to shun and that other writers have found so dismaying (see e.g. Jackendoff, 1972: 221). The way to avoid this is to suppose that [volitive] is not a ‘feature’ at all, but rather abbreviates an assumption entailed (or ‘presupposed’) by saying certain things. In this way, some sentences can be marked as contradictory, but many will simply seem queer outside of an explicating context, set of special assumptions, and so on. It follows that a great many sentences starred in recent grammatical literature as inherently bad regardless of context ought not to be. We mark: I asked John to be tall.

I. Some recent work in phonology/phonetics has tended to reaffirm the relevance of larger-than-segment (non-syntactico-morphological) structural units like the syllable: that is, that phonological representations are per se more highly structured than has generally been supposed in the immediate past. On the one hand, it has been argued that various ‘prosodic’ phenomena have as their domain non-arbitrary groupings of segments, including in particular groupings of ‘syllable size’ (e.g. Cheng, 1966; Lehiste, 1970), and that ‘morpheme structure conditions’ and redundancy conditions in general are most naturally interpreted as in large part constraints on syllable structure (cf., e.g., O'Connor & Trim, 1953; Fudge, 1969; Sampson, 1970; and the works they refer to). There have, on the other hand, been a number of studies particularly of co-articulation and of malfunctioning in production (stuttering, spoonerisms, etc.) whose import seems to be that ‘the unit of articulatory programming is larger in size than the segment, and makes it difficult to believe that articulation consists merely in the concatenation of phonemes’ (Kim, 1971: 60) - cf. the work surveyed by Kim and by Fromkin (1968).

Linguists are constantly invoking a relation of subordination of one clause to another and there seems to be agreement among linguists, about their native tongues at least. Yet the reason for the existence of the relation and the consistency of judgments concerning it is not well understood. The study of subordination and of argumentation for assigning the relation can profitably be made from at least two viewpoints. One viewpoint is paradigmatic or transformational. Evidence for subordination derives from an asymmetry in certain transformational relationships. Non-subordinating constructions on a pair of clauses show identical properties in each clause when the whole construction undergoes transformation, while the same transformations display non-identical properties in the clauses of subordinating constructions. The other viewpoint is syntagmatic or textual. One might even call this viewpoint semantic. Subordinating constructions are restricted in their co-occurrence within coreference patterns of a text in a way that corresponds to an intuitive feeling that a subordinate clause is not the topic of the text at the point where it occurs. Thus one might state the pattern by saying that the common element of meaning of all subordination markers is to indicate that the clause they operate on is subordinate in topic to the non-marked clause. However, the precise account will be in cerms of coreference patterns.

The categories of DIRECT SPEECH and INDIRECT SPEECH may be distinguished by differing policies of pronoun reference. Direct speech takes its pronoun orientation from the clause in which it is immediately embedded: for example, in the following sentence: (I) John Said to Peter, ‘I Can see you’, the first person pronoun I refers to the participant who is identified as speaker in the preceding clause (John said to peter) and the seconf person you refers to the participant identified as addressee. Of the two clauses involved, the second or embedded clause (‘I can see you’) May conveniently be referred to as the quotation content. The first or main clause may be referred to as the Reporting Clause; this correspondes ti the use of the term Margin in recent studies from the Summer Institute of Linguistics (Lowe, 1969; Pike, 1966; Pike & Lowe, 1969) from which the inspiration for this paper has been taken. Any third person reference in the quotation content in direct speech must refer to a participant who is neither speaker nor addressee in the reporting clause.

Susan Ervin-Tripp has remarked that she ‘would like to see more done on the comprehension side of development,’ and that ‘this is something that we are still in very serions ignorance about’ (1971). Despite this ignorance it seems to be a widely held view that comprehension develops in advance of production, but the authors feel that this whole question is in need of close analysis.

Linguistic analysis possesses both an ‘arbitrary’ and a ‘natural’ component – on the one hand, methodological principles and various means of organizing and handling data; on the other, empirical studies aimed at exposing linguistic universals through the detailed analysis of specific languages, cross-linguistic comparison, phonetic studies, psycholinguistic experiments, observation of language acquisition, and other sources of pertinent data. In practice, the arbitrary and natural components are intertwined, and each makes use of methods and results from outside linguistics in a narrow sense: the arbitrary component contains many principles and methods which are not peculiar to linguistics at all, but are rather the common property of scientific investigation, while the natural component refers ultimately to aspects of mental and social organization and physical properties of the vocal tract, many of which are independent of speci-fically linguistic behaviours and abilities.

The main thesis of this paper is that the grammars of natural languages contain an exhaustive set of conditions on the output of the phonological rules – in fact, a surface phonotactics. I shall show that, contrary to what is usually assumed in generative phonology, a surface phonotactics is not redundant in a generative grammar if the grammar is indeed intended as ‘a theory of linguistic competence’ (Chomsky, 1965: 3), and that if any set of rules in the phonological section of the grammar is redundant it is the morphophonotactic rules, better known as morpheme structure conditions. I shall propose a format for the statement of rules (including so-called ‘conspiracies’) which are ‘motivated’ by the phonotactics in the sense of Matthews (1972: 219–220). Finally, I shall present a set of phonotactic rules for consonant clusters in Latin, and show how the statement of certain rules of Latin phonology can be simplified by taking their phonotactic motivation into account.

Perlmutter claimed (Perlmutter, 1968) that the like subject constraint in English is a deep structure constraint. Apart from being a contribution to a theory of filtering devices in natural languages, this claim is of interest because it is based on the assignment of abstract deep structures containing causal clauses which do not appear in surface structure. For example, Perlmutter proposed deriving the sentence:

(1) ( = (7)) I tried to be arrested.

from the deep structures:

rather than from the more conservative:

(3) ( = (9)) I tried [Pro arrest I]

Like other proposed abstract deep structures, (2) brings out the meaning of the sentence; it predicts paraphrase relations between (1) and the sentences:

Perlmutter presented independent evidence for this analysis, but he also used it to explain away what would otherwise have been counterexample to the claim that the like subject constraint holds over deep structures (the ‘deep subject hypothesis’).

The syntax of adjectives is perhaps one of the less controversial issues in contemporary transformational generative grammar. Predicative adjectives are held to underly attributives (Harris, 1952; Chomsky, 1957: 72; Lees, 1960a), and are further embedded from underlying relative clauses (Smith, 1961, 1964; Lees, 1960b; Katz & Postal, 1964). This position has not apparently been seriously affected by several attacks on the primacy of predicative adjectives (Winter, 1965; Bolinger, 1967; Motsch, 1967) and on the relative clause source of restrictives (Annear, 1969); and it has if anything been strengthened by attempts to prove that adjectives are derived from deeper underlying classes (Lakoff, 1966, 1970: Appendix A; Bowers, 1968; Ross, 1969; Givón, 1970; and see Sussex, 1971: Ch. 2). The aim of the present paper is to present several objections to the analysis deriving attributive adjectives from predicative adjectives in relative clauses, on the basis of the formal and semantic characteristics of prenominal attributive adjectives like: (1) fine white Georgian house and to investigate some of the theoretical questions raised by these objections.