Collitz lecture delivered at the meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Columbus, Ohio, July 1970. (DS)

Jane Rosenthal's paper on relative clauses in Classical Nahuatl is discussed, and it is argued that she misses an important generalization. An alternative analysis to a class of relative pronouns and new rules for the distribution of relative pronouns are proposed. (SC)

Discusses the problem of the lack of native speakers to judge grammatical acceptability in analyzing a dead language such as Latin, and proposes an analysis on the level of linguistic performance. (AM)

The contention that Esperanto is a natural linguistic system is discussed. Research is cited concerning universals of word order, dominant word order, polar type languages, Esperanto as a verb-subject-object language, and gapping in Esperanto. It is concluded that contrary to grammatical tradition, word order is not and cannot be completely free.…

The liberty of deviation from the dominant word order in Esperanto and the natural languages is considered. Greenberg's classification of the languages according to four criteria, the liberty of word order in Sanskrit, and the norm of grammaticality in a constructed language are considered. Objection is made to St. Clair's argument that word order…