The Summer School of Linguistics, 1970, was held in Mysore City under the joint auspices of the Linguistics Society of India, University of Mysore and Central Institute of Indian Languages, with generous financial assistance from the University Grants Commission.

During the School, a two-day seminar was organized and the registrabts, the faculty members and members of the staff of CIIL were invited to present their papers. Most of the papers in this volume were thus presented in this seminar. The emphasis was on India as a Linguistics area with the aim of identifying Regional Universals of Indian languages which include four important language families of the world. Most of these papers on Regional Universals concentrated on a single category of grammar, namely 'Negation', and tried to describe it in terms of its form, function and process as found in several Indian languages. The paper on Sindhi Negation by Dr. Khubchandani which was not presented in the seminar is also included here because of its relevance to the subject matter under investigation. A few other papers had language families as scope for their study. It was hoped that a beginning like this would encourage Indian linguists to study systematically the Regional Universals of Indian languages. The theoretical model of description to be followed was left to the choice of participating scholars and thus this has resulted in the application of several currently available models to the aspects of Negation in Indian languages.

The basic theoretic and methodological issues involved in the investigation of language universals are manifold. A systematic treatment of these issues is available in Universals of Language edited by J. H. Greenberg. This volume is based more or less on the dictum of Bloomfield in his classic Language that 'the only useful generalizations about language are inductive generalizations'. A different approach is available in Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory of Syntax (and repeated elsewhere) which proposes to divide linguistic universals into two categories namely formal universals that determine the structure of grammars and the form and organization of rules, and substantive universals that define the sets of elements that may figure in particular grammars. Though these approaches were noted in the discussion which ensured after the presentation of papers on Negation, the papers presented in the seminar aimed mostly at providing data which could be profitably used at a later stage for arriving at generalizations about universals of Indian languages on a regional basis.

The second set of papers were presented in the seminar by the registrants. These ranged from the study of historical inscriptions to dialectal studies and reflected in a general way the areas of interests of the registrants.

A notable features of the School was the series of lectures delivered by several visiting scholars. These scholars were requested to send a formal version of their request are also included in this volume.

We are grateful to the University Grants Commission for their generous financial assistance to the Summer School, which originally did not envisage he publication of a volume like this. Subsequently the UGC extended financial assistance for the publication of this volume and we are grateful to the UGC for this kind gesture.