A volume combining two special issues of "Papers in Linguistics" contains 10 papers concerning Japanese language use and 12 concerning languages of the U.S.S.R. The papers on Japanese include: "Intrusion in Japanese Conversation,""Japanese Use of English Loans,""Some Discourse Principles and Lengthy Sentences in Japanese,""On the Two Forms of Negative Gerund in Japanese,""Some Politeness Strategies in Japanese,""Pragmatics of Causation in Japanese,""The Status of Kobuji: Usage of Ideographs Unique to Japan,""Subject Ellipsis and Topic in Japanese,""Variation and Change in Japanese Honorific Forms,""Presuppositional Culture Spaces: Language Use in Everyday Life." The papers concerning languages in the U.S.S.R. include "Predicate Instrumental and Agreement in Lithuanian: A Contrastive Analysis,""A Sketch of Vowel Harmony in the Tungus Languages,""Universal and Particular Properties of the Ewenki Case System,""On the Penumbra of Questions Surrounding the Internal Reconstruction of Gilyak,""The Phonology of Chukchee Consonants,""The Genetic Affiliation of Kamchadal: Some Morphological Evidence,""N-Agreement in Old Georgian,""On Derived Inceptives in Georgian,""The Causative: Daghestanian Variations on a Theme,""Subject Marking in Some Languages of Daghestan,""The Organization of a Voice-Neutral Verb: An Example in Avar;" and "Grammatical Subject and the Problem of the Ergative Construction in Lezgian." (MSE)