We use the variationist method to elucidate the expression of future time in English, examining multiple grammaticalization in the same domain ("will" and "going to"). Usage patterns show that the choice of form is not determined by invariant semantic readings such as proximity, certainty, willingness, or intention. Rather, particular instances of…

The reconstruction of genealogical relationships between languages is traditionally performed through lexical comparison and the establishment of regular sound changes. The historical analysis of other aspects of linguistic structure, like syntactic patterns or the function of grammatical elements, is normally understood to depend on a previously…

The principal nominal deictic affixes of Bella Coola, a Salishan language of British Columbia, are examined. (Author/RM)

Introduces the theory that the conversational historical present (CHP) in itself has no significance. It is the switching between CHP and the past tenses that is the relevant feature. (Author/CFM)

Uses a detailed analysis of a single grammatical problem to present the principal commitments and mechanisms of a grammatical theory that assigns a central role to the notion of grammatical construction. The grammatical phenomenon used to introduce construction grammar is the construction that licenses the surprising syntactic and semantic…

Demonstrates through an examination of naturally occurring discourse that Wh-Clefts and It-Clefts are not interchangeable; they have highly specialized distributions and functions. (EJS)

A report of an investigation of conversations involving more than two persons. Two types of illocutionary acts are accounted for: the traditional kind directed at the addressee(s) and another, called an informative, addressed to all participants. Evidence is presented that every illocutionary act is performed by means of an informative. (AMH)

Argues that sentences in the "have a V" frame are not idiosyncratic, but exhibit orderly and systematic behavior and are governed by strict semantic rules. Discusses 10 subtypes, each with a slightly different semantic formula. (EKN)

Presents a discourse-functional account of English inversion, based on an examination of a large corpus of naturally occurring tokens. It is argued that inversion serves an information-packaging function and that felicitous inversion depends on the relative discourse-familiarity of the information represented by the preposed and postposed…

A number of experimental tasks were conducted in which subjects were asked to interpret and create novel noun-noun compounds. Results indicate that semantic relationships that hold between members of these compounds cannot be characterized in terms of a finite list of appropriate compounding relationships. (CHK)

The Saussurean thesis of arbitrariness of the sign is considered incomplete since it specifies only vertical and not horizontal relations. (DD)

Preliminary paper on this subject read at the Mid-Summer Linguistics Conference, University of California, Santa Cruz, July 1971. (DD)

A context-sensitive, generative lexical rule model is developed that is capable of overcoming the insufficiencies of both the transformationalist and the lexicalist approaches to work formation, e.g., semantic-syntactic asymmetry, metaphoric usage, and restricted rule productivity. (DB)

Preliminary version of this paper was given at the 1968 winter meeting of the Linguistic Society of America, New York City, based upon work supported by the Office of Education as a Cooperative Research Project. (VM)