The kinds of rules found in the phonological components of generative grammars have been traditionally grouped into three types: (1) LEXICAL REDUNDANCY or MORPHEME STRUCTURE rules, which fill in redundant features of systematic phonemes within morphemes; (2) PHONOLOGICAL rules, which operate both within morphemes as well as across morpheme boundaries, and can either add or change features; (3) PHONETIC rules, which supply n-ary values to the binary distinctive feature specifications which are the output of the earlier phonological rules. It has furthermore been assumed that these three subcomponents are strictly ordered with respect to one another. Recent studies, however, have revealed a number of rules which do not conveniently fall into these categories, and still others have been found which contradict the assumed ordering relationship (Vennemann, 1972; Anderson, 1975; Daniels, 1973; Labov, 1972). Many of these rules exhibit articulatory phonetic regularities which are obscured at the level of binary distinctive features. Instead they apply at a level when scalar values have already been assigned to the individual features.

As Bott (1970: 217-19) points out, one of the most successful applications of computer to language research has been in the production of concordances—alphabetical lists of all the words in a written corpus followed by a reference system (i.e., page and line number) and a context (i.e., the line in which the word occurs). This valuable tool has greatly facilitated the description of the language of old texts.

The literature on the synchronic problems related to languages in contact is abundant. However, the effects of borrowing on the formation of a language have not been studied in any detail mainly because (in our opinion) of the lack of appropriate analytical tools. Clearly, the diagnosis and examination of interference mechanisms in old texts is important not only for a complete historical description of a language at a particular stage in its development, but also as a means of understanding the nature of contact phenomena. With the advent of computer concordances this lacuna may soon be filled.

The Hispanic Peninsula immediately prior to Romanization was occupied by numerous tribes or clans representing diverse Indo-European and non-Indo-European populations. Basques resided in the north, Celts in the northwest and central regions, Tartessians in the south, Bastetanians in the southeast and Iberians in the east and northeast.

The region of the Iberians, extending from a little north of the Pyrenees south to Alicante and beyond, has consistently yielded a number of inscriptions in a language thus far unrelated to the other known languages of the Peninsula, or to the undeciphered languages underlying the inscriptions of the south. Iberian, a geographical and collective term, refers to the several cultures and dialects which appear connected in unknown degrees to two major groups: the Edetanos of the Valencian plains and the related Ilergetes who dwelt further north in Catalufña.

Many native speakers of American English show in their speech a phenomenon that could be called ‘consonant cluster simplification.’ This may be illustrated by examples such as:

Rule R1 below would account for the simplification of these CCC-cluster:

The Cowichan Dialect of Halkomelem, a Coast Salishan language, has a reduplication process in three morphological categories that copies stem-initial CV. When a stem-initial resonant (voiced sonorant) is reduplicated, a prefix hə- results. Two possible explanations for h instead of the predicted resonant support distinct, although not necessarily mutually exclusive, claims for the status of h in a universal classification. One possible explanation is that the reduplicated resonant devoices to h-lending support to Chomsky and Halle’s (1968) classification of h as a voiceless sonorant, since h would be functioning as the voiceless counterpart to Cowichan voiced sonorants. But an alternative is that the prefixed sonorant elides, with the subsequent insertion of h as a juncture phenomenon—suggesting that h functions here as a neutral nonsyllabic segment.