Books

These papers are a selection from papers presented at the 4th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (Amsterdam, 1985). Most studies deal with some aspect of an earlier stage of English, though present day varieties of English are also under investigation. Many of the papers show that there is a growing interest in the question why a certain change has taken place. Furthermore, the volume contains a considerable number of papers on historical syntax.

These papers, deriving from the 7th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL) in Pavia in 1984, provide an overview of the current status of research in this field. They clearly show that new issues are emerging in the theory of linguistic change which tend to incorporate non-autonomous principles like naturalness in phonetic processes, the influence of socio-cultural settings and discourse pragmatics.

The studies in this volume are revised versions of a selection from the papers presented at the Fourth International Conference on Historical Linguistics, held at Stanford University on 26–30 March 1979. Papers at this conference, and in this volume, treat aspects of all current topics in historical linguistics, including topics that are only recently considered relevant, such as acquisition, structure, and language use.

This volume presents a selection of papers from the 6th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL), which was held in 1983, in Poznań, Poland.

This volume presents a selection of – slightly revised versions – of papers from the third International Conference on the History of the Language Sciences (ICHoLS III), Princeton, 1984. The papers are organized under the following headings: I Generalia; II Classical Period; III Medieval Period; IV Renaissance; V 17th Century; VI 18th Century; VII 19th Century, and VIII 20th Century.

Contributors include W. Keith Percival, Aron Dotan, Michael G. Carter, Kees Versteegh, Brian Ó Cuív, Francis P. Dinneen, Manuel Breva-Claramonte, Douglas A. Kibbee, Joseph L. Subbiondo, Rüdiger Schreyer, Marc Wilmet, Robert H. Robins, Jean Rousseau, Ramón Sarmiento, Edward Stankiewicz, Irmengard Rauch, Talbot J. Taylor, Julie Andresen, and many others.

Interest in word-meaning is on the increase among mainstream linguists again after a half-century of neglect. During this interval progress in phonology and syntax was great, but further progress in these sub-disciplines will remain blocked until it is recognized that the prime functional unit of speech is the word, that the central problem of language theory is lexis. Word-meaning is typically complicated by changes across time; for a theory of language creativity, these effects must be discerned from spontaneous creation. The articles brought together in this volume attempt to illuminate, on the basis of particular lexical studies, the dynamics of perception and word-meaning, of language and mind.

The general theory of language of Mikołaj Kruszweski (1851-1887) is, this book argues, a “lost paradigm” in the history of linguistics. The concept of 'paradigm' is understood in a broadly construed Kuhnian sense, and its applicability to linguistics as a science is examined.It is argued that Kruszewski's theory was a covert paradigm in that his major work, Ocerk nauki o jazyke ('An Outline of the Science of Language', 1883), had the potential to be seminal in the history of linguistics, i.e. to achieve the status of a 'classical text', or 'exemplar'. This potential was not realized because Kruszewski's influence was hindered by various historical factors, including his early death and the simultaneous consolidation of the Neogrammarian paradigm, with its emphasis on phonology and language change. The book examines the intellectual background of Kruszweski's thought, which was rooted, in part, in the tradition of British empiricism. It also discusses Kruszewski's relationship to his teacher Jean Baudouin de Courtenay (1845-1929), his attitude towards the Neogrammarian movement in linguistics, the ambivalent reception of his theory by his contemporaries, and the influence of his work on the linguistic theory of Roman Jakobson (1896-1982).

The focus of Paradigms in Word Formation: Theory and applications is on the relevance of paradigms for linguistic description. Paradigmatic organization has traditionally been considered an inherent feature of inflectional morphology, but research in the last decades clearly shows the existence of paradigms in word formation, especially in affixal derivation, often at the expense of other word-formation processes. This volume seeks to address the role that paradigms may play in the description of compounding, conversion and participles. This volume should be of interest to anyone specialized in the field of English morphology and word formation.

This is the first interdisciplinary book-length treatment of paralanguage, briefly defined as: nonverbal vocal or narial communication. After sensitizing the reader to our sound-generating movements and to all human external and environmental sounds for their unquestionable communicative qualities, it realistically combines an anatomical-physiological auditory approach to voice production (identifying many neglected articulations) with the analysis of its visual manifestations as the triple reality of speech: language-paralanguage-kinesics. The primary qualities of speech (loudness, pitch etc.) are extensively discussed, as are the many voice qualities. The longest chapter in the book deals with paralinguistic differentiators: laughter, crying, sighing, yawning, coughing, sneezing etc. Finally the author presents a model for analyzing paralinguistic alternants, word-like independent constructs (such as Pooh, Aah and Brrr). Throughout the discussion of these paralinguistic phenomena, extensive attention is given to cultural, social and psychological aspects. This first, ground-breaking interdisciplinary work on paralanguage will serve as a source of data and a theoretical/methodological model for phoneticians, linguists, anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, speech therapists etc.

In this volume the subject of parametrization is addressed from various, though interrelated perspectives, ranging from learnability, the form and nature of parametrization, the role of the interface between morphology and syntax and the parameters of X-bar syntax, to the lexical parametrization hypothesis.

La importancia del estudio de la fraseología en general, y de la paremiología en particular, viene avalada tanto por el interés que han suscitado las unidades fraseológicas desde la Antigüedad como porque los investigadores del tema ponen de manifiesto que se trata de la piedra angular del lexicón y acervo cultural de toda lengua. En este marco, esta monografía presenta un breve recorrido histórico de la paremiografía y paremiología en España y Francia; comprueba si existe un vacío cuantitativo y cualitativo en el tratamiento lexicográfico de las paremias en diccionarios sintagmáticos y generales tanto monolingües como bilingües; evidencia si son similares las características sintácticas de las paremias de las estructuras a/à y quien/qui en español y francés; determina si hay un tipo de variante paremiológica que predomine sobre las demás y establece los tipos de correspondencias paremiológicas existentes aplicables al ámbito traductológico.

The importance of studying phraseology in general, and paremiology in particular, is justified by the interest that phraseological units have aroused since ancient times, but also by the fact that researchers on the subject have shown that PUs are the cornerstone of the lexicon and the cultural heritage of any language. In this context, this monograph provides a brief historical overview of paremiography and paremiology in Spain and France; it determines whether there is a quantitative and qualitative gap in the lexicographical treatment of paremias in both monolingual and bilingual syntagmatic and general dictionaries; it determines whether the syntactic characteristics of the paremias of the structures a/à and quien/qui in Spanish and French are similar; it identifies whether there is one type of paremiological variant that is predominant over the others, and it defines the types of existing paremiological equivalences applicable to the field of translation.

It has often been claimed that the aim of semiotics is to establish a general theory of systems of signification. However, as Jean-Claude Coquet notes in a recent collection of essays, what distinguishes one school of semiotics from another is the initial definition given of sign. If, for certain semioticians, the sign is first of all an observable phenomenon, for the Paris School it is first of all a construct and this point of departure has crucial theoretical and practical consequences. The essays appearing in these two volumes are representative of recent work carried out by members of this semiotic school. Essays in Volume I study problems more closely related to theoretical issues, while Volume II focuses more specifically on various fields of application.

In this brilliant overview of parodic praxis in the Spanish-American novel during the years 1960-1985, Elzbieta Skłodowska examines several aspects of parody: its role in the renovation of anachronistic forms of discourse (mock-epic) and the re-writing of the canon of the historical novel; its function in transgressing literary formulas (detective novel); its subversive quality in the counter-discourse of women writers; and the relation between parody, satire, irony, humor, and metafiction. This sound analysis of some twenty-five novels, carefully illustrated by works little treated in critical discourse, takes as its theoretical basis the works of the Russian Formalists and Linda Hutcheon's theory of parody.

This book brings together new research on the practices of newsmaking. Participation, engagement and collaboration have long been heralded as a vision, goal or emerging practice in the news. The claim in this volume is that they have now become sedimented as the common-sense baseline for everyday newsmaking routines. The issue for newsmakers is not ‘whether’ to engage with readers and users, but ‘how’ to engage with them. The contributions span a wide range of newsmaking contexts, including analytics-based online headline testing, the communication efforts of a Brussels-based free marketeer thinktank, collaborative science journalism and rapidly changing journalistic sourcing and writing routines from legacy to social media. Together they argue for a postfoundational perspective, which observes how participation, engagement and collaboration have emerged as a ‘foundation’ which is no longer questioned, but which can lead to new tensions in newsmaking. As such, the book provides inspirational reading for anyone in the social sciences and humanities who is interested in understanding how the ubiquity of participation, engagement and collaboration in the making of the news impacts on issues of power, transparency and control in the twenty-first century.

This book offers a new account of the transitive particle verb construction in English. The main emphasis is on the alternation between the two word orders possible in English (continuous: hand in the manuscript vs. discontinuous: hand the manuscript in). The central aim is to show that the choice of the word order is not optional as has often been claimed in related literature on the topic and that a syntactic analysis should thus not be based on optional movement operations or optional feature selection. The author argues in some detail that the choice of the word order is determined to a great extent by the information structuring of the context in which the relevant construction is embedded. The syntactic structure she develops is based on a substantial combination of empirical facts, evidence from theoretical research and the results of two experimental studies on the intonation patterns of the construction.

Parts of Speech are a central aspect of linguistic theory and analysis. Though a long-established tradition in Western linguistics and philosophy has assumed the validity of Parts of Speech in the study of language, there are still many questions left unanswered. For example, should Parts of Speech be treated as descriptive tools or are they to be considered universal constructs? Is it possible to come up with cross-linguistically valid formal categories, or are categories of language structure ultimately language-specific? Should they be defined semantically, syntactically, or otherwise? Do non-Indo-European languages reveal novel aspects of categorical assignment? This volume attempts to answer these and other fundamental questions for linguistic theory and its methodology by offering a range of contributions that spans diverse theoretical persuasions and contributes to our understanding of Parts of Speech with analyses of new data sets.

These articles were originally published in Studies in Language 32:3 (2008).

This unique volume comprises a monograph and a set of articles by renowned typologist Emma Geniušienė which all focus on the topic of morphologically passive constructions in Lithuanian. It is the first translation into English of the author’s original work from the 1970s. It offers a rich treasury of data, a detailed structural description of all morphologically passive constructions, and an examination of the functions which these constructions have in the discourse. The addition of modern interlinear morpheme-by-morpheme glosses to hundreds of linguistic examples and expert editorial work have turned the hard-to-access material into a timeless resource available for the first time to a broad international readership. The volume will be of value to descriptive linguists, typologists, morphologists and formal syntacticians, as well as to scholars of information structure and functional text analysis. It is an exciting addition to the linguistic literature and a fitting tribute to the author.

Is the passive a unified universal phenomenon? The claim derived from this volume is that the passive, if not universal, has become unified according to function. Language as a means of communication needs the passive, or passive-like constructions, and sooner or later develops them based on other voices (impersonal active, middle, reflexive), specific semantic meanings such as adversativity, or tense-aspect categories (stative,perfect, preterit). Certain contributors review the passives in various languages and language groups, including languages rarely discussed. Another group of contributors takes a novel theoretical approach toward passivization within a broad typological perspective. Among the languages discussed are Vedic, Irish, Mandarin Chinese, Thai, Lithuanian, Mordvin, and Nganasan, next to almost all European languages. Various theoretical frameworks such as Optimality Theory, Modern Structuralist Approaches, Role and Reference Grammar, Cognitive Semantics, Distributed Morphology, and Case Grammar have been applied by the different authors.

The main focus of generative language development research in recent decades has been the logical problem of language acquisition - how learners go beyond the input to acquire complex linguistic knowledge. This collection deals with the complementary issue of the developmental problem of language acquisition: How do learners move from one developmental stage to another and how and why do grammars develop in a certain fashion? Building on considerable previous research, the authors address both general and specific issues related to paths of development. These issues are tackled through considering studies of L1 and L2 children and L2 adults learning a range of languages including Dutch, English, French, German, Greek and Japanese.

The brain is the organ of knowledge and organizer of our abilities, our means of recognizing a face in a crowd, of conversing about anything we experience or imagine, of forming thoughts and developing ideas, of instantly understanding words coming rapidly in conversation. How does it manage all this? Does it represent information in symbols or in the connectivity of a vast network?Pathways of the Brain builds a theory to answer such questions. Using a top-down modeling strategy, it charts relationships among words and other products of the brain’s linguistic system to reveal properties of that system. Going beyond earlier linguistics, it sets three plausibility requirements for a valid neurocognitive theory: operational, developmental, and neurological: It must show how the linguistic system can operate for speaking and understanding, how it can be learned by children, and how it is implemented in neural structures. Unlike theories that leave linguistics isolated from science, it builds a bridge to biology.

Of interest to anthropologists, linguists, neurologists, neuroscientists, philosophers, psychologists, and any thoughtful person interested in language or the brain.

The author is Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Cognitive Sciences.

The purpose of this book is to illustrate the relevance to linguistics today of Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. Although largely ignored by linguists, Whitehead has in fact much to say as regards the cognitive processes underpinning language pattern. His theory of symbolism conceives of language as the ‘systematization of expression’, and relates meaning to feeling (in the broadest sense). The Whiteheadian perspective allows a synthesis of the psychological and the social approaches to language that does not fall into one or another fashionable form of reductionism. The volume represents a first application of Whitehead’s thinking to a broad range of linguistic phenomena, ranging from speech act theory to the production and comprehension of texts, from language acquisition to historical change and the evolution of language. It is argued that Whitehead’s holistic philosophy is uniquely suited to the view of language as an emergent phenomenon — regardless of whether one’s approach to cognition is via the ‘nativist’ or the ‘functionalist’ route.

Patterns and Meanings consists of case studies which make use of corpora and concordance technology. Each case study elaborates a problem area, makes reference to both the descriptive and applied literature thus far, and then suggests ways of exploiting corpus data to shed light on the problem. Language phenomena investigated include word sense, phraseology and syntax, metaphor and creative use, text reference, idiom, and translation. Emphasis is given to information that usually cannot be found in dictionaries, grammars, language textbooks or other resources, but which the study of corpus data makes available. This work is particularly important not only for its language description insights, but also for pedagogical application. Further useful suggestions are included on setting up a medium-sized corpus on a personal computer.

This book is a phonological investigation of place assimilation phenomena in two major Arabic dialects: Cairene Egyptian and Baghdadi Iraqi. The studied phenomena involve interactions between consonants (various types of local assimilation), between vowels (monophthongization), or between consonants and vowels (emphasis spread and labialization). Throughout the content chapters, the patterns for each of these processes are carefully described and validated by ample data, and then analyzed representationally using a minimalist model of feature geometry. The analysis follows a holistic approach, as the representations are consistently used for all the segmental phenomena within a dialect. The first exclusive treatment of place assimilation in colloquial Arabic, this book will be of particular interest to scholars and advanced students of Arabic linguistics and dialectology, and to phonologists in general, and can be a point of reference for researchers examining the details of such phenomena in other dialects of Arabic as well.

Eighteenth-century English is often associated with normative grammar. But to what extent did prescriptivism impact ongoing processes of linguistic change? The authors of this volume examine a variety of linguistic changes in a corpus of personal correspondence, including the auxiliary do, verbal -s and the progressive aspect, and they conclude that direct normative influence on them must have been minimal.

The studies are contextualized by discussions of the normative tradition and the correspondence corpus, and of eighteenth-century English society and culture. Basing their work on a variationist sociolinguistic approach, the authors introduce the models and methods they have used to trace the progress of linguistic changes in the “long” eighteenth century, 1680–1800. Aggregate findings are balanced by analysing individuals and their varying participation in these processes. The final chapter places these results in a wider context and considers them in relation to past sociolinguistic work.

One of the major findings of the studies is that in most cases the overall pace of change was slow. Factors retarding change include speaker evaluation and repurposing outgoing features, in particular, for certain styles and registers.

This collection of papers explores some facets in the areas of Corpus Linguistics and Phraseology which have gone unnoticed so far. With the aid of a range of different corpora and new-generation software tools, the authors tackle specialized domains and discourse in specialized settings, utilizing some innovative approaches to the study of recurrent features and patterns in the languages of economics, history, linguistics, politics, and other fields. The papers critically examine contemporary discourses in which experts and laypersons are equally involved, showing that the spoken and written texts, selected from various specialized corpora, can be seen as collective memory banks. The series of reflections and specialized meanings uncovered in these texts are closely tied to particular sequences of patterned chunks in language and offer exciting insights into the inseparability of lexis and grammar.

The contributions to this volume were previously published in International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 13:3 (2008).