Montagnais, an Algonquian language spoken in Quebec, exists in a number of different dialects. The main divisions are on a geographic basis, with western, eastern, and southern Montagnais, and within each of these varieties sub-dialects centered on specific communities like Pointe Bleu, Betsiamites, or Natashquan. In addition, within each community there may be other dialectal distinctions based on age, socio-economic factors, or elements as specialized as the location of traditional family hunting grounds, grounds in which one need no longer hunt to still have them considered family territory. One such community is the reserve town of Betsiamites, also known as Bersimis. The most notable dialectal division there is one based on age : there is a dialect of people over 60; one of people between 40 and 60; and one of those under 40. In addition, there seems to be a conservative/innovative split that cuts across the age-based dialect split, which itself is based on innovations in the speech of younger speakers, and which does not seem to be correlated with any social or political distinction, but only with phonological change and retention in relation to earlier forms of Montagnais and Proto-Algonquian itself. In the innovative dialect, sibilant-stop clusters consist uniformly of [š] plus a stop; or, in the case of young innovative speakers, a development therefrom. In the conservative dialect, sibilant-stop clusters are found in complementary neutralization: before [t] there occurs only [s]; before [p] and [k] there occurs only [š], no matter what was the source of the first or second element of the cluster in Proto-Algonquian (PA).

Although variants of the form [fri] and [bof] for standard [θri] ‘three’ and [boθ] ‘both’ are well attested in dialects as divergent as Cockney (Sivertsen 1960) and Black English Vernacular (Wolfram and Fasold 1974), there has been no attempt, to my knowledge, to treat these “substitutions” (a term with which they are frequently dismissed) as anything but isolated phenomena. Wyld (1936) and Dobson (1957), who are among the most respected authorities on English phonology, both specifically identify the [θ]/[f] alternation as an “isolative change.

Over the past few years, research in language acquisition has shifted away from the view that linguistic structures are learned independently of semantic concepts and grammatical functions and toward a more cognitively based perspective (cf. Slobin 1973 ; Clark and Clark 1977). In the latter approach, cognitive principles are assumed to govern the acquisition of linguistic structures, and the earlier autonomous view of language acquisition is replaced by a more catholic attitude encompassing both formal and psychological aspects of language. This perspective is adopted for the analyses presented below.

The following four sentences illustrate the phenomenon which, for convenience, we shall call Missing NP’s in Japanese:

The variation in the possible referents for Δ must be accounted for, whether Δ arises by a rule deleting NP’s, or is present in deep structure and interpreted by a rule of coreference assignment.

Perlmutter posits a universally-applicable Clause Union (CU) rule as follows:

1. (a) If the downstairs clause is intransitive, downstairs 1 becomes upstairs 2.

2. (b) If it is transitive, downstairs 2 becomes upstairs 2, and downstairs 1 becomes upstairs 3.

3. (c) Deviations will be the result of (i) PSV or (ii) DAT MVT.

Vowel nasalization and the subsequent development of these nasalized vowels constitute one of the most intensively studied areas in French historical phonology. Despite this attention, however, the set of problems associated with these phenomena is not exhausted. I will argue here, for example, that nasalization in French provides evidence for the crucial role of allophonic information (redundant phonetic detail) in initiating and conditioning phonological regularities, thus violating the local determinacy constraint (Chomsky 1964) placed on the phonemic level of representation. The same evidence also illustrates an infrequent type of historical change, and reinforces the impression that much fertile ground remains to be tilled in this particular field.