ABSTRACT
Certain linguistic items, capable of contrast in some environments, have the property of being apparently free variants in others. This can be accounted for, if in a given item, one or more semantic features can be regarded as ‘latent’, i.e. susceptible of being activated in some contexts and suppressed in others. The technique of ‘forced-choice’ selection testing can be used to investigate the phenomenon, and the hypothesis has been found to be valid in respect of (a) the two preterit forms of wet, (b) the infinitive and present participle in environments where both can occur, and (c) (as will be shown in Chapter 17) pairs of quasi-synonyms. 1
