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This paper presents the results of an experiment designed to investigate some of the effects of bilingualism on perception. The subjects were Icelandic monolinguals and Icelandic-English bilinguals. The phonetic parameter under investigation was duration. The experiment was designed to test which of the following three hypotheses accurately predict the perceptual responses of bilinguals: (1) the null hypothesis (predicting no interference between the two languages); (2) the awareness hypothesis (predicting more accurate perception in bilinguals); and (3) the confusion hypothesis (predicting less accurate perception in bilinguals). A listening test was administered which consisted of stimuli based on the minimal pair "is" [i:s] and "iss" [is:]. Findings include the following: (1) vowel length is a more salient clue than consonant length in the perception of the quantity opposition; (2) significant support is found for the third hypothesis which predicts confusion in the perception of the bilinguals; and (3) there is a significant difference in the perception of the quantity system of Icelandic between monolingual and bilingual native speakers of the language. (AM)

The eight papers in this issue are addressed to issues in pragmatics, semantics, syntax, discourse analysis, morphology, and particularly to issues touching on two or more of these areas at once. The final paper touches on phonology as well. The papers are: "The Myth of Semantic Presupposition," by Steven Boer and William Lycan; "A Reconsideration of Conditional Perfection," by Marion R. Johnson; "Impositive Speech Acts," by Patricia A. Lee; "Questions and Requests," and "Canadian 'Eh'," by Marion R. Johnson; "Discourse Phenomena and Linguistic Theory," by Robert Kantor; "A Re-Analysis of NEG-Raising in English," by Jay Pollack, and "Toward a Definition of the Ideophone in Bantu," by Marion R. Johnson. (CLK)

Evidence exists that, in the past, phonetic variants functioned as sociolinguistic variables, just as they do today, at least in societies with comparable stratificational patterns. This paper presents the significant details of the sociolinguistic environment within which the beginnings of the Great English Vowel Shift were embedded. An attempt is made to demonstrate how an understanding of the sociolinguistic situation surrounding historic changes leads to an understanding of the transition from earlier to later pronunciations. It is demonstrated that: (1) contemporaneous changes in the social and linguistic profiles of England during the 14th century led to a situation in which two regional dialects were juxtaposed and realigned as social dialects; and (2) the different phonological histories of the convergent dialects provided the raw material for sociolinguistic variation at that particular time, when older sociolinguistic barriers were disintegrating in England. It is hypothesized that the type of cross-dialectal phonological restructuring that has been observed in contemporary settings would have led to the initial phase of the Great Vowel Shift as a matter of course, given the phonetic variation and socio-dialectal alignment pattern that have been reconstructed for Early Fifteenth Century London English. (CLK)

A question of both theoretical and practical importance for the study of phonological development is whether there is a difference in the status of productions rendered spontaneously by the child and those repeated by the child after either an adult model or his own production. The relevant theoretical questions are: (1) Are all the child's productions mediated by his current phonological system? (2) What is the role of the adult model in phonological acquisition? The spontaneous and repeated utterances of four children were examined, and it was found that there were differences between the spontaneous and echoic forms produced. The child's productions immediately following those of the adult did not necessarily approach the model more closely than did spontaneous productions. In certain cases a "trade-off" occurred, i.e., a sound segment in an echoic form more closely approached the model while another sound segment fell short of the target. This suggests that echoic and other repeated forms are not "phonologically progressive," as had been proposed. (Author/CFM)

In this paper, one aspect of nonverbal behavior concomitant with verbalizations produced by mothers interacting with their young children is analyzed. The purpose is to examine the frequency and type of nonverbal cues accompanying verbalizations directed to the young child and to observe how these cues vary with the response of the child as well as with his or her linguistic sophistication. The paper is part of a larger study designed to specify the informational sources, clues to meaning, available to the child as he proceeds to learn language. The data examined in this paper are based on videotaped recordings of nine mother-child dyads. Three of the children were one-year-olds, three were two-year-olds, and three were three-year-olds. The gestures concomitant with one type of illocutionary act, the request for action, are focused on. The frequency and explicitness of the mother's concomitant gestures varied with the age and responsiveness of the child. It can be concluded from the study that the adult adopts certain nonverbal strategies, such as modeling and pointing, as an adjustment to the child's limited understanding of the meaning being conveyed in the utterances. (Author/CLK)

This study is a detailed analysis of the phonological development of Sylvia, a bilingual child, in her acquisition of American English and Brazilian Portuguese from the age of 1 year, 7 months to 3 years, 8 months. The study is divided into four stages: ages 1.7 - 1.9; 1.9 - 2.1; 2.1 - 2.3; and 2.3 - 2.8. Up to the age of 1.9, the same phonological substitutions applied to Sylvia's production of phonetically identical segments in both English and Portuguese. After the age of 1.9, phonological differentiation developed, and with it a distinct set of substitutions became associated with each language. Although this study involves only one child, it does suggest that child phonology can reveal significant things about the adult system. It also suggests that the two languages have quite different trends for future change. Evidence for this can be found from dialect comparisons as well as from Sylvia's different treatment of the two languages. Perhaps a language's tendency toward a specific type of change is governed by a language specific speech posture and a specific set of phonological processes which is a natural consequence of such a posture. (Author/CFM)

A collection of papers on morphology in relation to other grammar components and on the morphology-syntax interface includes: "Locative Plural Forms in Classical Sanskrit" (Belinda Brodie); "On Explaining Morpheme Structure" (Donald G. Churma); "Lexical Relatedness, Head of a Word and the Misanalysis of Latin" (Brian D. Joseph and Rex E. Wallace); "Heads" (Arnold M. Zwicky); "Why -skI? A Study of Verbal Aspect in Conchucos Quechua" (Anne M. Stewart); "The Syntax-Phonology Boundary and Current Syntactic Theories" (Geoffrey K. Pullum and Arnold M. Zwicky); "'Reduced Words' in Highly Modular Theories: Yiddish Anarthrous Locatives Reexamined" (Arnold M. Zwicky); "Attachment of Articles and Prepositions in German: Simple Cliticization or Inflected Prepositions" (Erhard W. Hinrichs);"A Non-Endoclitic in Estonian" (Joel A. Nevis); "Clitics and Particles" (Arnold M. Zwicky); and "Five Morphemes in Finnish: Possessive Suffixes or Anaphoric Clitics" (Joel A. Nevis). (MSE)

A collection of essays marking the retirement of Ilse Lehiste, chair of the Department of Linguistics at Ohio State University (1967-71 and 1985-87) includes the following contributions by her colleagues: "On Incomplete Mutations in Breton"; "Perceived P-Center Location in English and Japanese"; "Ordering Paradoxes and Lexical Phonology"; "The Slovenian Orphan Accusative, Component Interfaces, and Covert Grammatical Categories"; "Parameters and Markedness in the Acquisition of Syntax"; "Notes toward a Semantic Simulation of a Fragment of Child Language"; "Some Literary Manifestations of Language Contact"; "'Concessive' as a Discourse Relation in Expository Written English"; "Adverbs, Polysemy, and Compositional Semantics"; "Lake Miwok Naturalization of Borrowed Phonemes"; "What Is 'Karaka'? A Probe into Panini's Analytical Procedure"; "Codeswitching in 'War and Peace'"; "A Greek-Bulgarian Mischsprache in the Rhodope?"; "Feminism in Morphology"; "Paragraph Perception by Seven Groups of Readers"; "Pronouns and People: Some Preliminary Evidence That the Accessibility of Antecedents in Processing Can Vary with Clause Relation and Biology"; "Some Implications of Issues in Social Dialectology for Linguistic Reconstruction"; "The Phonological Domains of Final Lengthening"; "On Situation Adverbs"; "On the Phrasing of Coordinate Compound Structures"; "Closure Duration in the Classification of Stops: A Statistical Analysis"; and "Silent Features and Syntactic Analysis." (MSE)

A collection of papers relevant to historical linguistics and description and explanation of language change includes: "Decliticization and Deaffixation in Saame: Abessive 'taga'" (Joel A. Nevis); "Decliticization in Old Estonian" (Joel A. Nevis); "On Automatic and Simultaneous Syntactic Changes" (Brian D. Joseph); "Loss of Nominal Case Endings in the Modern Arabic Sedentary Dialects" (Ann M. Miller); "One Rule or Many? Sanskrit Reduplication as Fragmented Affixation" (Richard D. Janda, Brian D. Joseph); "Fragmentation of Strong Verb Ablaut in Old English" (Keith Johnson); "The Etymology of 'bum': Mere Child's Play" (Mary E. Clark, Brian D. Joseph); "Small Group Lexical Innovation: Some Examples" (Christopher Kupec); "Word Frequency and Dialect Borrowing" (Debra A. Stollenwerk);"Introspection into a Stable Case of Variation in Finnish" (Riitta Valimaa-Blum); and "Diglossia in Ancient India" (Gina M. Lee). (MSE)

The papers collected here concern the interfaces between various components of grammar (semantics, syntax, morphology, and phonology) and between grammar itself and various extragrammatical domains. They include: "The OSU Random, Unorganized Collection of Speech Act Examples"; "In and Out in Phonology"; "Forestress and Afterstress"; "The Principle of Phonology-Free Syntax: Introductory Remarks" (with G. K. Pullum); "Two Spurious Counterexamples to the Principle of Phonology-Free Syntax" (with G. K. Pullum); "The Unaccented Pronoun Constraint in English"; "WH Constructions in English"; "Free Word Order in GPSG (Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar)"; "Immediate Precedence in GPSG" (with Joel Nevis); "Incorporating the Insights of Autolexical Syntax"; "Government in Unexpected Places"; "Agreement Features: Layers or Tags?"; "Suppressing the Zs"; and "What's Become of Construction Types?" (MES)