Le but du présent article est de présenter, sous une forme explicite, et d’illustrer trois des principes de base qui régissent la description sémantique des unités lexicales dans un dictionnaire explicatif et combinatoire (DEC). Il s’agit des principes suivants: principe d’adéquation, principe de pont sémantique, et principe d’uniformité. Le premier principe concerne un lexeme isolé; le deuxième, tous les lexemes appartenant à un vocable; et le troisième, les vocables différents qui sont sémantiquement apparentés.

Il convient de souligner que les principes énoncés sont depuis longtemps bien connus en lexicographie. Ce que nous revendiquons comme originalité, c’est le caractère formel et précis de leur formulation et, beaucoup plus important encore, le caractère strict et systématique de leur application.

In Chilcotin, an Athapaskan language of northern British Columbia, surface alternations of vowels are determined by a process called “flattening” (Krauss 1975, Cook 1976a). So far, the process of flattening, and indeed almost all other aspects of Chilcotin phonology, remain virtually unknown to phonologists in general. In this article, I provide a descriptive introduction to Chilcotin flattening. The first two sections describe the vowel and consonant systems, respectively, in terms of autonomous phonology, and the third section describes the flattening process and introduces some of the theoretical issues associated with it.

A general problem in Algonquian verb derivation is the role of various morphemes conveying abstract meanings, in contrast to those conveying the main concrete meaning of the verb. Usually, the specific action taking place is quite well described by the root, medial and concrete final, but other morphemes appear such as pre-medials, post-medials and abstract finals which have much more abstract but nonetheless vital meanings. The abstract morphemes are especially important because they are few in number, but occur frequently, so that the abstract meaning of any one of them is a component of the meaning of large numbers of verbs. In previous papers I have tried to show what some of these abstract meanings are. In Denny and Mailhot (1976) we showed that, in Cree-Montagnais, pre-medial -ā- indicates that the root expresses an extrinsic property of the object referred to by the medial, e.g., ossisk ā kam-āw ‘cypress-EXTRINSIC-lake-it.is = it is a cypress lake,’ whereas lack of pre-medial -ā- indicates that the root expresses an intrinsic property, e.g., čino-kam-āw ‘long-lake-it.is = it is a long lake.’

Haida is a linguistic isolate spoken on Prince of Wales Island in south-east Alaska and on the Queen Charlotte Islands of British Columbia. Swanton (1911:267) asserts there is one basic order for Haida sentences having noun constituents (Subject-Object-Verb) and another for sentences with pronoun constituents (Object-Subject-Verb). When nouns and pronouns both occur, it is the noun that precedes, regardless of whether it is the syntactic Subject or Object. Eastman claims there is “no one basic order typology in terms of the order of meaningful elements in sentences, although both an SOV and OSV order are common” (1979:148). Edwards (1978:7) suggests that “in Haida linear ordering with respect to Subject is less important than the classification of the element as noun or pronoun and its communicative importance.” In this paper, constituent order will be seen to be a determinant of information focus in Haida utterances from the point of view of the analyst.

The Hispanic peoples of pre-Roman Spain and Portugal employed a curious semi-syllabic writing system whose orthographic signs were derived from Graeco-Phoenician and Aegean sources (Anderson 1975). The script seems to have been brought to the Iberian Peninsula by Eastern Mediterranean seafarers sometime during the middle or early half of the first millennium B.C.

Of interest here are several ancient signs of rare occurrence, namely, and ↑ or found, for example, in inscriptions from southern Portugal and Andalucia. A partial illustration of a text from Portugal which reads and one from Andalucia, the Gador lead tablet, which contains the sequences places the signs in question in brief context.