For Aquinas, the very meaning of perfection demands that there could be no absolute perfection that was not shared by three Persons. My first aim in this paper is to establish this point, which has been acknowledged only rarely by readers of Thomas, yet which follows unavoidably from Thomas's theology of the Word. I show as much by engaging with scholars who, rightfully attentive to Thomas's teaching on faith and reason, and to his rejection of “necessary reasons” for the Trinity, deny or fail to recognize this link between the meaning of perfection and the necessity of the Trinity. Such scholars, however, all end up running aground on claims that Thomas consistently registers. I hope to show, therefore, that new approaches to this area of Thomas's Trinitarian thought are needed: approaches that can acknowledge his presentation of perfection as necessarily Triune without violating the limits he places on natural reason.

Much of Yves M-J. Congar's O.P. (1904-1995) later work concentrates more explicitly on pneumatology, most famously his three-volume I believe in the Holy Spirit (1979-80). Writing shortly after its publication, Congar notes that “if he could draw only one conclusion from [his] studies on the Holy Spirit, it would concern the Spirit's bond with the Word. There is no breath without speaking or articulating something.” Congar later argues in The Word and the Spirit (1984) that the doctrines of pneumatology and Christology should not be treated separately but should inform and shape each other. This led him to develop what he termed a pneumatological Christology and a Christological pneumatology. A criticism that Congar dealt with on several occasions was that Catholic theology suffered from a form of Christomonism, whereby the Holy Spirit appeared to be subordinated to the Son, with dire consequences for the ecclesial life of the church. This essay briefly examines the accusation of Christomonism and evaluates Congar's response to it. It primarily does this by critically engaging with Congar's image of the Son as the Word and the Spirit as the Breath. As well as evaluating Congar's approach, this essay also suggests how his language could be expanded further.

Words can be matched with the concept of sign (correspondence of a signifier to a signified) as long as they act as symbol-words endowed with some semantic self-sufficiency. But in discourse, they lose their wholeness as symbol-words and metamorphose into wording-symbols. They, suddenly, appear as mere signifier entities with a more or less loose allusion to their status as cultural symbols. In discourse, words are no longer signs but tools covering ephemeral collections of neurosemes: the link of the sign breaks as soon as discourse takes over. The referential potential is no longer the schematic meaning issued from culture, but the universe of discourse under construction. This is why any attempt to account for meaning in language must integrate the neural process of meaning creation. It is now established that meaning is not the result of language activity but the result of cognition. However, what language does, via discourse, is to make this meaning communicable. For all these reasons, the task of linguistics should be to investigate the relationship between cognition and linguistic output in order to shed light on all the cognitive traces left within the surface strings. The role of morphosyntax thus has to be re-evaluated in this light.

Parts of a new model of phonology-morphology-lexicon interplay is presented to account for the complex distribution of the Modern Danish stød (a syllabic prosody). Stød, which is sometimes productive for speakers, is analysed as a signal of the second mora of bimoraic syllables not subject to the Non-Stød Principle (NSP). The author's cross-language model for Systematically Graded Productivity of Endings (section 3) is shown to account for the application of NSP (section 4), and a detailed typology of lexemes with respect to stød-alternations, derived from the model, is presented in section 5. In section 6, a simple case of stød-alternations in inflection, viz. regular plurals of nouns, is given, and section 7 exemplifies stød and non-stød as a key to morphology for the addressee.