This study discusses the following two problems using experimental data from modern Hebrew: the relationship between the duration of vowels and the concepts of so-called “long vowel”, “short vowel” and “mobile sheva” as phonological vowel signs and the relationship be-tween the syllable on which stress falls and the duration of vowels within a word. The duration of vowels in normal speech was measured in twentytwo segolate nouns and thirteen “QAL” verbs with the root “KTV”. The informant was a female native Israeli. The test words were presented separately and with a carrier sentence. The speech sound recorded in an anechoic room was analyzed using a soundspectrograph, the speech wave form and the SPSS program on VAX-11/780 system. The difference in the length of vowels was examined via t-tests. It was found that the duration of vowels was longer in stressed syllables, but was not always related to the phonological vowel signs called “long vowel” or “short vowel”. The duration of “mobile sheva” was not shorter than the other vowels when it could be regarded as a vowel on the spectrogram. In some cases, no duration with vowel quality was observed for “mobile sheva”. It became clear that duration of vowel was controlled by the stressed syllable of the word.

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In recent linguistic studies, the internal structure of English infinitives has proved to be highly controversial. One of the most important topics in analyzing them is the categorical status of the infinitival marker to.
This paper claims that the category VP belongs to a set of universal syntactic categories, such as VP, NP, AP, PP, and S, and that VP is essential for the syntax of English infinitives, although some theories including the GB Theory refute the existence of VP. Various pieces of evidence are adduced to show that VP is a major phrasal category in English syntax.
Furthermore, it is argued that VP is a projection of INF, but not of VP, and that to is a head of VP. In other words, to is a lexical item with semantic content, and belongs to the category INF.
Finally, we show that INF can be incorporated into the system of complementizers, and that English complementizers are classified into clausal complementizers (e. g.: that, for, or WH) and phrasal complementizers (e. g.: to). This analysis enables us to account for otherwise unexplained syntactic and semantic behavior of the infinitival marker to in English.

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An attempt at an areal division by means of grammatical characteristics of dialects of Japan is presented here. The data is part of a preliminary report of a national linguistic survey of grammatical forms, which was codified into a form available for computation.
The data was adapted to a multi-variate analysis called Hayashi's “Quantificational Theory Type Three” which is similar to “ 1'analyse des correspondences” developed in France.
Ryukyu dialects spoken in Okinawan islands were first characterized as quite different from the other dialects. The Hachijo dialect was next differentiated from the dialects of Mainland Japan. Dialects of Mainland Japan were then divided into two main groups of the western and eastern Japan. Dialects of Kyushu island were characterized as a little different from those of other western dialects. The most impressive result may be that the dividing line between the western and eastern dialects of the Mainland was situated between Gifu and Nagano prefectures, which coincides with many geographical and cultural boundaries.
The result shows that the application of multi-variate analysis to dialectal data is fruitful and significant. The division of dialectal areas should be attempted by considering as much data as is available. The dividing method which makes use of a limited number of bundles of isoglosses may sometimes be misleading.

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