Browse Books

This book deals with speech acts especially performatives that are regarded as ‘operative’ in legal discourse. After a detailed exposition of speech act theory in relation to legislative texts the author discusses the legal document as a communicative act; potential speech acts and delegated legislation; wills the marriage ceremony and statutes as reversible performatives; and the distinction between the deictic function of this and the anaphoric function of that in legal documents. The final chapter is concerned with another text type case reports and addresses the question whether the judge makes or merely declares the law. This is discussed from the point of view of certain syntactic structures in particular modal verbs.

With reference to a brief description of inherent properties of the international news reporting process in a free press tradition Verschueren criticizes their being neglected in linguistic approaches to the language of the media. In an attempt to illustrate the potential contribution of functional linguistic analyses to a better understanding of the printed media as a channel for international communication he investigates the use of metapragmatic metaphors (in particular metaphorical verbs of speaking) in the reporting by The New York Times on the U-2 incident in May 1960. The framing of the incident as a communicative event is evaluated along the dimensions of factual truth interpretational accuracy and understanding.

This is a comparative study on the subject of interrogativity presenting broad and narrow attributes on this subject in diverse languages: Russian Mandarin Georgian Bengali Bantu Japanese West Greenlandic and Ute. Each contribution presents first the basic facts about the language in question its more recent provenience facts about numbers of speakers writing systems and related areal and sociolinguistic points. An overview of the typological hallmarks follows together with a sketch of the grammar broadly construed. Finally the grammar of interrogativity is described and the semantics and pragmatics of it are explored.

This book aims to give an indication of the extent of derivational morphology in English; of how much immanent internal structure must be presumed for words -- even apparently simplex ones. This is done by showing that three (morpho-)phonological processes which tend to hide surface sound-meaning relationships must be taken into account when constructing a synchronic grammar of Modern English: ablaut obstruent shift and vowel shift.

The papers in this volume deal with the languages of ancient Italy and the Romance dialects that grew from them. The arrangement of papers in the volume is topical starting with ancient Italy and moving upward in time and outward in space through general Romance to Italian French and Provençal Spanish Romanian and Sardinian.

Vowel harmony is a well known phonological phenomenon found in a large number of languages spoken mainly in Eurasia and the African continent. In simple terms vowel harmony is a law which governs the co-occurrence of vowels within a span of utterance nearly always the word. The contributions of this volume focus on various (not always uncontroversial) aspects of vowel harmony that include typological investigations phonetic/acoustic experimental studies descriptions of individual systems genetic and historical ramifications and implications for a variety of theoretical models. This volume will prove to be a useful guide to the multifaceted issues posed by an often discussed and quite significant phonological process. This volume will stimulate further discussion and better understanding of the issues raised by the intricate process called vowel harmony.

The first 'Kolloquium zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Romanistik' (Trier 1975) was held to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the death of Friedrich Diez the founder of Romance philology. The colloquium offered Romanists and historians of linguistics the opportunity for intense discussion which is continued in the papers in this volume.

Techmer’s Internationale Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft (1884–1890) served at a time of neogrammarian domination in the linguistic scene of the late 19th century as an international forum for the discussion of general linguistics topics the Humboldtian philosophy of language and the promotion of non-Indo-European linguistic research.

This essay starts with information on the founder and sole editor of the journal Friedrich Techmer then analyzes the most significant contributions to the journal surveying in the same part the range of publications as well as the international character of both the Advisory Board and the contributors and in the concluding chapter shows how IZAS is of relevance even for the linguistic pursuits of today.