Charles Carpenter Fries stressed two points of methodology in his American English Grammar. First, his conclusions about modern American usage were not based upon impressions of the language but upon a statistical investigation that showed the relative frequency, and hence the importance, of each phenomenon noted. Such an investigation necessitated the sifting of an enormous bulk of clearly-defined and classified source material. Second, Fries was more interested in studying the structural relationships of one syntactical unit to another than in studying their lexical meanings.

An examination of the comments by linguists on the present subjunctive in current English reveals a surprising degree of unanimity of opinion concerning it. Most grammarians consider its extinction either imminent or accomplished. Thus, for example, Whitehall states that “the subjunctive is gradually dying out of the language.” Close considers that “apart from a few archaic remains it has disappeared from English altogether.” And Kruisinga says flatly: “living English has no subjunctive at all.” Other writers say that it “has very little vital power left”; that it “has disappeared”; that it is “moribund”; that it is “extinct”; that it is “fossilized”; and so on. Several authors suggest that its death throes can be observed in “literary English.” It is the purpose of the first part of this article to examine the arguments supporting these conclusions and to comment on their validity. Two types of argument can be discerned: the historical and the morphological.

This paper is an attempt to deal with some of the things C. C. Fries has to say about meaning and to offer criticisms of the meaningfulness of some of the words and concepts he introduces and dismisses. This requires a good deal of preliminary work which, however, also has the merit of showing the sort of systematic error I would claim Fries makes.

Les Trois Éditions françaises du « Lexique de la terminologie linguistique » de Jules Marouzeau viennent d’être suivies d’une édition russe. Ce qui attire particulièrement notre attention dans cette dernière publication, ce sont les nombreuses notes infra-marginales que le traducteur N. D. Andrejev ou le rédacteur A. A. Reformackij ont ajoutées au texte original. Après examen nous pourrions répartir ces notes en trois catégories: (a) les notes qui viennent compléter les articles originaux en nous fournissant des informations supplémentaires souvent intéressantes sur des problèmes de linguistique générale; (b) celles qui apportent des corrections ou des compléments de renseignements d’ordre linguistique appliqués à des cas particuliers de la langue russe; (c) enfin, les notes qui exposent le point de vue des linguistes soviétiques sur des problèmes de linguistique générale.

La Question de la valeur essentielle du conditionnel continue à exciter la curiosité des grammairiens; c’est que le conditionnel est né et qu’il vit sous le signe de l’ambiguïté, circonstance qui a engendré des méprises répétées sur son essence à travers les âges. C’est un tiroir tout indiqué pour exercer l’ingéniosité des historiens et des théoriciens de la langue. On ne s’étonne donc pas que les solutions trouvées jusqu’ici ne s’accordent pas. Les uns concluent que le conditionnel possède un aspect-temps et un aspect-mode; les autres prétendent qu’il se place carrément au-dedans de l’indicatif; d’aucuns admettent qu’il accuse des valeurs modales tout en restant fondamentalement un temps du verbe. Peu nombreux sont ceux qui osent envisager que le conditionnel soit essentiellement un mode avec, bien entendu, des restes de valeur temporelle; c’est pourtant le point de vue que nous proposons ici.

General linguistics, like any other academic subject, is always moving. But in recent years there have been more signs of fundamental change than for some time before, at least as far as may be gathered from published literature, necessarily the main source of information on contemporary trends on the part of most of one’s colleagues the world over. The earlier undercurrents and movements in linguistic thinking and discussion can only be known by those in personal contact with their prime movers.

When Barnett projected the connection of Greek eléphant- “ivory” with hieroglyphic Hittite ulubandas “bull,” he believed himself to be solving one of the minor puzzles of etymology, for the origin of Greek eléphant- was still unaccounted for. Since the Romans, when they first met the elephants of Pyrrhus in South Italy, called them Lucanian bulls, it seemed clear to Barnett that this hieroglyphic Hittite word for a bull had been used for what was supposed to be his horn. Kretschmer postulated an Indo-European equation with a particular significance: in addition to comparing Greek eléphant- and hieroglyphic Hittite ul(u)bandas, he compared Gothic ulbandus “camel” and Greek elephairmai “harm.” From this, he inferred an Indo-European appellative “noxious animal, destroyer” referring to “mammoth,” which preserved in Gothic ulbandus the evocation “big animal.” Kretschmer’s line of reasoning is especially definitive in his own words (p. 320), alleging the mammoth to be a species of animals which, though “schon längst ausgestorben…durch die grosse Menge ihrer fossilen Überreste und den kostbaren Stoff Elfenbein, den sie lieferte, sich dauernd im Gedächtnis der Menschen erhielt.”

La Stylistique Comparée commence seulement à prendre conscience de son champ d’action et de ses méthodes. Aussi les spécialistes des disciplines voisines n’aperçoivent-ils pas toujours clairement quels sont ses buts et ses moyens. Pour se justifier à ce stade de son développement, il est important qu’elle choisisse des secteurs nettement délimités où elle puisse mettre sa méthode au point et obtenir des résultats auxquels la grammaire et la linguistique descriptive n’arrivent pas aussi facilement.

C’est dans cet esprit que la présente étude se propose de comparer le verbe anglais et le verbe français dans leurs façons de satisfaire certains besoins d’expression, et, plus particulièrement, d’examiner dans les deux langues le comportement du verbe par rapport à deux dichotomies, celle qui oppose le langage propre au langage figuré et celle du mouvement et du déplacement. Pour ce faire, elle sera obligée de se placer tantôt sur le plan des signifiés et tantôt sur celui des signifiants. Dans les deux cas, certains termes seront employés dans un sens qu’il importe de préciser.

This article is an essay by a modern linguist in one aspect of the history of grammar. Grammar was a compulsory subject in the curriculum of the mediaeval university, and the golden age of scholasticism produced a number of interesting theories of grammar; this article is concerned with the theory of one group in particular, i.e. the Modistae, speculative grammarians who were active in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Modistae wrote their treatises in Latin and drew upon Latin to illustrate their theories. In addition they made of Latin an idealized language, a kind of “second-order-” or metalanguage, and it was from the standpoint of this idealized language that all grammatical speculation and pedagogy were to be carried out. This is an attitude which has persisted up to the present day and one which has considerably influenced the teaching of grammar and foreign languages since the Middle Ages.