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This paper examines individual differences in constraints on linguistic variation in light of Labov's (2007) proposal that adult change (diffusion) disrupts systems of constraints and Tamminga, MacKenzie, and Embick's (2016) typology of constraints. It is shown that, in pooling data from multiple speakers, some of the complexity in structured community variation may be overlooked. Data on rhoticity from speakers of Bristol English are compared to 34 previous studies of rhoticity in varieties of English around the world. Constraints found to be consistent across varieties are also found to be consistent across speakers of Bristol English, whereas those that differ between varieties also differ between individuals, implying that only those which differ are truly part of the grammar, and that these are indeed disrupted by diffusion.

© 2017, Ural University Press. All rights reserved. This article reflects on a recent spate of books on English place-names produced by a nonprofessional writer, showing in considerable detail, for five counties, in what ways these books are deficient, and do not perform what ought to be the praiseworthy service of bringing the fruits of 90 years of academic research to an interested general audience. It also attempts an understanding of the reasons for this phenomenon. It is noted that toponymists these days are more adept at bringing their work to that wider audience, but their efforts are likely to be subverted by the flood of inadequate books already in the market-place. The relatively small number of credible, scientifically valid popular books produced by professional toponymists, on the one hand, and the opacity of their special publications aimed at historians and philologists, on the other, compel the non-professional audience to use low quality books that often provide unreliable information and contain numerous inaccuracies making those books useless, if not harmful. Until this gap is filled, the situation can hardly change for the better. The author suggests that new publicly funded toponymic projects ought, as a matter of course, to have a requirement built into them that the fruits of the work and new findings should be made accessible to a wide audience.

The name of a witch’s familiar, Pyewacket, was reported by the Witchfinder General of England, Matthew Hopkins, at the height of the witch persecution in the middle of the seventeenth century. It has eluded explanation so far. It is suggested that it derives from the name of a village presently in the State of Maine, and that it became known in England through family connections between Hopkins and the Governor of Massachusetts John Winthrop.

The three current theories of the origin of the name of the American state of Maine are reviewed and rejected. The connection of the colonist Sir Ferdinando Gorges with Ireland is explored, and a possible origin is proposed in the circumstances of the Anglo-Irish wars of 1594–1603 and their impact on his thoughts and motives.

The quality of being proper is always presumed, for perfectly understandable reasons to do with its function in acts of reference, to be restricted to nouns or noun phrases. This article is an exploration of the idea that a defensible case can be made for the real, if often ephemeral, existence of proper verbs. Evidence is presented from four categories of usage, mainly in English, but also in French and Dutch.

International audience; A recent workshop entitled ‘‘The Family Name as Socio-CulturalFeature and Genetic Metaphor: From Concepts to Methods” was held inParis in December 2010, sponsored by the French National Centre forScientific Research (CNRS) and by the journal Human Biology. Thisworkshop was intended to foster a debate on questions related to the familynames and to compare different multidisciplinary approaches involvinggeneticists, historians, geographers, sociologists and social anthropologists.This collective paper presents a collection of selected communications.

The issue addressed is that of whether singular definite expressions with unique denotata, e.g. the zodiac, are proper names or not. These are analyzed as special cases of a class of expressions ambiguous between a proper and a common meaning, e.g. the w/West b/Bank. The ambiguity of this type is held to be a function of different modes of reference, grounded in different intentions of the speaker or hearer: onomastic reference, i.e. intension-free; or semantic reference, i.e. reference mediated by word meaning in the standard way. Under different intentions, therefore, the expressions in question are either proper or common. Properhood is therefore a function of the former type of reference, and not a structural category. A problem in the philosophy of science that this view provokes is addressed.

i. The industry of explaining away apparent cases of extrinsic rule-ordering in phonology has been in recession recently. Kenstowicz and Kisseberth, in a recent textbook (I979), make rather soothingly conservative noises about ordered-rule solutions. In this lull, during which (it is clear) ordered-rule solutions are still reckoned to be a possibility, Vago's claim (I977) to be able to substantiate such a position has gone unchallenged. He presents evidence for why phonological theory needs to retain extrinsic ordering as a possibility; in so doing he aligns himself with the tradition of

The ideas I shall present in this paper are set within a framework which I find it convenient to refer to as real phonology. This is no more than a handy label to suggest that it is a ruthlessly concrete form of phonology, more so than what is often called natural generative phonology (cf. for example Hooper, 1976) for reasons which will become apparent below. At the same time, the label ‘real phonology’ is intended to suggest an explicit commitment to the goal of producing analyses of natural language which correspond to some reality—most obviously, to the reality of grammars in the heads of language users. This is a variety of God’s-truth or projectionist linguistics. I adhere to it because I do not find the purely static mathematical characterization of language systems to be of any compelling interest, nor indeed of any particular relevance for understanding the nature of language. The very essence of language not considered as a world-3 object lies in the fact that it is used, instantiated, created-with and modified, and the static mathematical description of individual systems in ideal users points up some facts which are contingent rather than essential patterns, epiphenomenal rather than constitutive. The close relation of mathematical descriptions of language systems to the concerns of aesthetics is shown by their fundamental reliance on unreduced appeals to loveliness criteria: simplicity (Halle, 1964), elegance (Foley, 1977). If reality should turn out to be an aesthetic notion, I still do not retract, for I am committed to going down fighting for something whose ramifications go beyond linguistics. Since recent linguistics has wielded Occam’s razor rather undiscriminatingly, I shall at the end of this article formulate a corollary which I hope will serve as a balance to it, for Occam’s razor, without restraint of some sort, cuts the throat of what I take to be legitimate concerns of the discipline.

Coates Richard. Note on the Name of Jersey in Jérriais. In: Romania, tome 107 n°426-427, 1986. pp. 380-382.