In the first issue of this journal, Fred W. Householder discussed two papers of ours which he found defective in various respects. We feel that the issues involved are important and deserve the fullest clarification. We will therefore discuss Householder's objections and the underlying issues in some detail, reiterating points that have been made in the aforementioned papers and elsewhere and making no attempt to avoid redundancy if this can contribute to clarity.

The term word-and-paradigm grammar (Hockett, 1954; Robins, 1959) may be used of any grammar which preserves the traditional distinction between morphology and syntax. This distinction is usually drawn as follows. Following the classical formulation (Dionysius Thrax in Uhlig, 1883:22, line 4; Priscian in Keil, 1855: 53, line 8), any sentence is said to have as its minimal elements a set of [grammatical] words. Such words are of two main types. Some are invariable: examples are the Latin conjunctions et and atque or the prepositions per and in. Others, for example the verb amo or the noun dominus, are variable: they appear in a variety of forms (amo, amabas, amatus, ….; dominus, domino, dominorum, ….) with different syntactic properties. The ‘function’ and distribution of these variants, in relation to each other and to the invariables, is handled by the syntactic sections of the grammar; their phonological or graphological ‘shape’, on the other hand, is stated by the morphology. It is, for instance, a syntactic rule which states that the preposition per must govern a noun in the ACC [usative]2 case, but it is a subject of morphology that dominum, terram, etc. are ACC forms of their respective nouns. The field of grammar, as opposed to phonology, semantics, etc., is thus divided into two separate but interconnected sub-fields: one dealing with what may be called the ‘external’, the other with the ‘internal’ characteristics of grammatical words.