§ 1. The purpose of the following account is to show that the morphological rule for pluralization of nouns in Brazilian Portuguese can be simply expressed given (a) a basic representation for morphs which might be said to be ‘independently justified’ by alternations elsewhere in the morphology of the language, and (b) a set of phonological rules operating on and modifying the basic representation, the majority of which again seem to be widely applicable in Portuguese morphophonology.

During the past few years linguists have begun to express doubts about the validity of segmental analysis for the study of child language and have come to feel that it is probable that a child perceives spoken language differently from an adult, e.g. Bellugi & Brown (1964: 113), Ingram (1966: 218), Ladefoged (1967: 148–9), Lenneberg (1967: 279–281), Weir (1962: 30). They are also beginning to realize the importance of treating a child's language as having its own independent system (Carroll, 1961: 332; Fry, 1966: 194). To date, however, investigators of child speech have made their analyses on a segmental and distributional basis and have expressed the child's phonological system in terms of the adult's phonemic system; one may cite for example Cohen (1969), Grégoire (1933, 1947), Jakobson (1941), Jakobson & Halle (1961), Leopold (1939, 1947, 1961), Lewis (1968), Ohnesorg (1959), Velten (1943) and Weir (1962). Such studies, valuable though they be, cannot be said to have succeeded in explaining the relationship between the forms and structures of child and adult and have left many questions unanswered such as: (1) What governs the choice of sound that the child will use as a ‘substitute’ for an adult sound? (2) Why does the child ‘drop’ certain sounds of the adult form or ‘substitute’ for them when he is already capable of making such sounds and is in factusing them in some other contexts? (3) Why does the child use homonyms for adult forms which appear to be quite unlike each other and which have been proved to be semantically clearly differentiated for the child? (4) What governs the form that reduplicated words take?

In this paper I present a stylistic analysis of a short discourse by Bertrand Russell. My purpose is twofold: first, to suggest an approach to syntactically based stylistic analysis that goes beyond mere frequency counts, and, second, to draw out some linguistic ramifications of the approach.

What has been described as ‘one of the most remarkable (facts) in quantitative linguistics’ is the constancy of the logarithmic type/token ratio. If V denotes vocabulary and N text length, then log V/log N ‘remains sensibly constant for samples of different size from a given literary text’.1

This note is concerned with historical sound change expressed in rules added to a previous set of rules that develop a language from an earlier to a later form. I am not prepared at this time to explore in full the relationship between rules of sound change and rules of generative phonology, although it is obvious that this relationship exists in Maltese, as in many other languages. Because my considerations are primarily historical ones, perhaps ‘law’ would be a better term than ‘rule’, in spite of its being hopelessly out of date. However, since the term ‘rule’ and the format in which the information is presented are familiar and useful, I will use them here.