Mainstream linguists have now begun to take an interest in the way the formal resources of language are put to use by people in communicative situations. A powerful impulse for this awakening interest came from Grice's paper ‘The logic of conversation’; (1975). Grice's work has begun to he examined, criticized, and developed (see, for example, Wilson, 1975; Kempson, 5975), and prospects are now emerging of a much more satisfying and comprehensive picture of language at work in a communicative setting. The present paper is intended as a contribution to this developing field.

Part of the meaning of a verb phrase containing a form of one of the English modal verbs CAN and WILL1 is that the actions, events, etc., indicated by the following full verb took place, takes place and will take place. I shall use the term MODALITY to refer to the meaning of the modal verb and EVENT to refer to the meaning of the full verb and say that, in certain circumstances, there is ACTUALITY of the event or that the event is ACTUALIZED. I wish to discuss the circumstances in which this is so and attempt to provide explanations in terms of some of the characteristics of modality in general.

Postal (1968: 300) writes as follows:

Bloomfield in effect noted the incompatibility of phenomena like … metathesis, dissimilation, etc., with the view of sound change as gradual drift in performance. Instead of admitting that these were counterexamples to the view, he simply appealed to terminology and declared that they were not sound change … But, since these types of changes are as systematic, regular, cross-lexical, etc., as other changes, this terminological attempt amounts to nothing more than the naming of a class of exceptions.

1. Most versions of generative phonological theory contain a provision for restricting the ordering of rules in the grammar of individual languages.1 The use of language particular, or extrinsic, ordering statements has recently been challenged by Koutsoudas, Sanders & Noll (1974). These authors propose an alternative theory whose principal claim is that the ordering of rules follows from universal principles. Within this theory, which we may term the Unordered Rules Theory, a derivation proceeds as follows:

(i) (a) A representational string is checked against the structural descriptions of all the rules. If only one rule is applicable, then that rule is applied (optionally, in case the rule is optional); if two or more rules are applicable, then universal principles, such as (6) below, may enforce the applicational precedence of one rule over another rule; if the conditions of the universal sequencing principles are not satisfied, then the rules are applied simultaneously.

Poutsma (1926: 441–447) says of sentences like: (I) I could have got the money easily enough. that ‘the notion of completed action in this combination [is expressed] not in the finite verb, where it logically belongs, but in the following infinitive’. He speaks of this phenomenon as ‘tense-shifting’; I have preferred ‘past tense transportation’ (PTT) in order to make it clear that it is only the Past Tense that is involved, I and to avoid confusion with the quite different but more frequent use of ‘tense- shifting’ in accounts of the ‘sequence of tenses’ in indirect speech, etc., where a direct speech non-Past is commonly said to be ‘backshifted’ to a Past Tense (She is ill ∽ He said she was ill).

The performative analysis claims that every sentence we utter refers, self-reflexively, to our utterance of it, that every sentence comes equipped in its underlying structure with a higher performative clause of the form I (or Speaker) + Verb of Communication + You (or Hearer) (see especially Ross, 1970; Lakoff, 1971, 1972). The self-reflexive nature of the performative clause is brought out even more clearly by the addition of hereby, which functions as a deictic instrumental adverb referring to the utterance-act. In this paper I shall deal with two sets of data that have been invoked in support of this analysis and I shall try to show that on closer scrutiny they disconfirm it, at least in its generally accepted form. Both concern sentence adverbials that modify not the propositional content of the sentence to which they are attached but what I shall provisionally call the pragmatics of the speech situation; the solutions I shall suggest as an alternative to the performative analysis will, however, differ considerably for the two sets.

In Kirkwood (1970) I noted that in the passivization of a sentence such as: (i) They issued a report on recent developments. i.e. (2) A report was issued on recent developments. a prepositional phrase on recent developments, which appears in some way to be attached to the subject noun phrase a report, may be detached from it in surface structure and placed after the verb. A similar phenomenon was observed in equivalent German sentences. Compare:

I. Despite much activity, the recent attention paid by generativists to diachronic syntax has led to no significant implications for a general theory of grammar and, from a purely historical viewpoint, has failed to focus on any well-defined concepts of historical change. The papers in this field stand largely in isolation from each other and show few common threads of interest or argumentation; there is little agreement on even the most fundamental concepts. Modern diachronic syntacticians, it is true, have no legacy equivalent to what was handed down to phonologists, and they must do their own pioneering work. This will preclude rapid progress, but it does not explain the current disarray of the field. The fault for that lies in ourselves and is a consequence of a theoretical approach to syntax precisely as barren as that of the neogrammarians.

I. In Korean, alternation between certain vowels or consonants in sound symbolic adjectives and adverbs is regularly correlated with a connotation shift in those words. The examples below illustrate such alternation and the resulting connotation shift: (i) Vowel alternation: /piŋkwl/ ‘(turn) round and round’ /pεŋkwl/ ‘round and round (the circle involved is smaller and the movement faster)’

(2) Consonant alternation: /piŋkwl/ ‘round and round’ /phiŋkwl/ ‘round and round (the movement is more powerful and faster)’ ‘ppiŋkwl/ same as /phiŋkwl/ The alternation between /i/ and /ε/ in the examples in (1) brings about a connotation shift in the speed of the movement and also in the size of the moving object and of the circle made by the circular movement. In the examples in (2), the alternation between the word initial lenis stop /p/ on the one hand, and its aspirated or tense counterpart on the other, signals a connotation shift in the speed and force of the movement, but curiously not in the size of the circle or of the moving object. These means of changing the connotation of words are highly productive in the sense that, given a basic word that belongs to the category of sound symbolic words, native speakers can predict the form and connotation of the paired member resulting from the phoneme alternation.

Linguists referring to ‘fast speech’ and to ‘normal speech’ often do not share the same definitions of the two terms. ‘Fast speech’ is normally intended as increase in speech tempo that affects the normal/slow norm, but it is also recognized that ‘fast speech phenomena’ occur in casual speech that is not necessarily rapid, and that ‘casualness’ of speech is a complex sociolinguistic notion the components of which are hard to isolate (see, for instance, Dressler, 1974, and Vanecek et al, 1975, for a discussion of the correlation between decreased attention and phonological casualness, and other factors referred to in Dressler, 1975). It is not at all clear what ‘normal speech’ is either. It is usually identified with ‘maximally distinct/differentiated speech’, but as pointed out to me by Arnold Zwicky, this is probably not the case, since there are processes that apply to give 'careful‘ or ‘;emphatic‘ speech (as when the l in please is made syllabic). Zwicky believes that normal speech ‘is related to whatever level of representation (roughly the phonemic) figures in normal rhyming (hat and had will not count as rhymes, even if they are pronounced the same, while stepped and slept will count as rhymes, even if they are pronounced differently, say without the t in slept)’ (personal communication). This paper does not attempt to tackle the problem in its entirety; it will only deal with the tempo aspect of fast speech and with the theoretical implications of increase in rate of speech. The reason for concentrating on tempo is that it can be isolated more easily than the various factors, social and other, involved in casual speech. It will also be assumed that speech tempo is relative, i.e. that one man's normal rate of speech may be another man's fast speech tempo, and that although increase in speech tempo may sometimes result in increased attention and thus in retention of the overall level of formality (Vanecek et al, 1975), the common tendency is for increased reduction and assimilation with the increase in the rate of articulation.

This article is a tentative exploration of the following question. In an account of the imperative construction in English, what should be accounted for in the syntax or semantics and what in the pragmatics?1 In the literature, we find descriptions of an imperative construction with certain specific syntactic properties. For example, there is a subjectless form and also a form with a second person pronominal subject and corresponding to both there are second person pro- nominal forms in reflexive and tag counterparts. Abstract underlying structures, in this case a you subject, which subsequently may be deleted by IMPERATIVE or EQUI, are postulated to explain these properties (Postal, 1964; Katz & Postal, 1964: 75; McCawley, 1968). My question is: if we postulate a general pragmatic theory, that is, a theory of the use of utterances in context (separate from but related to theories about the syntactic or semantic properties of sentences), how many of the properties of the imperative can be explained in such terms instead of in the syntax or semantics? My conclusion is that the proposed abstract structures are syntactically and semantically unmotivated and unnecessary for pragmatic interpretation. Each property that the abstract elements explain is better explained either as a non-arbitrary property of main clause infinitives when they are used to utter commands (non-arbitrary in that the facts could not be otherwise), or inherent properties of main clause infinitives in all their uses. In the former case at least, they are facts about men in situations, not about syntax. Thus, syntax and semantics require only a single level of representation and there is no imperative transformation.

The impetus for this paper is a curious case of gender disagreement in Scandinavian, whereby the rule assigning gender agreement to predicate adjectives is apparently violated. An analysis of the facts is provided, and it is shown that other semantico-syntactic phenomena of Scandinavian can be handled within the same explanatory framework.

where t is the ‘trace’ of the (wh) object and where wh becomes obligatorily null (cf. 23) in the ‘infinitival relative’ (and the ‘complementizer’ for as well if the infinitive has no subject, such as you in this instance)

Among the numerous constructions, disparate on the face of it, that Chomsky insightfully brings together in this paper is ‘that of the infinitival complements of easy, etc.’ (47) which he sees as having ‘an embedded S … with an obligatory PRO subject’ (48). I do not wish to comment1 on the merits or otherwise of such an analysis but only to question ‘the assumption that the complement clause’ in

In his (1970) article ‘Surface structure constraints in syntax’ Perimutter has argued that the restrictions on the combination of the weak atonic forms of the object pronouns in Spanish and restrictions on their order cannot be accounted for naturally either in the deep structure, by constraints on the phrase structure rules, or by constraints on the rules which introduce these pronouns.1 He concludes that a transformational generative grammar must be supplemented by positive output constraints which act as a filter accepting only sequences which match the filter and rejecting the rest as ungrammatical.

Robert Chapman's article on the to-Poss in English (Chapman, 1975) brings out some interesting points about constructions with the preposition to. Chapman concludes by suggesting the need for more data. As I shall try to demonstrate, more data reveal that the uses of to-Poss are more pervasive in English than his article implies.

Chapman restricts to-Poss to three categories: (a) kinship and other personal relations; (b) parts or qualities — both (a) and (b) are elements of what has long been singled out as ‘inalienable possession’ — and (c) serving adjuncts (64).

These categories seem to be simultaneously too limited and too general; all instances of the so-called to-Poss can apparently be included under one category, but a category with very special properties.