Books

Themes play a central role in our everyday communication: we have to know what a text is about in order to understand it. Intended meaning cannot be understood without some knowledge of the underlying theme. This book helps to define the concept of ‘themes’ in texts and how they are structured in language use.

Much of the literature on Thematics is scattered over different disciplines (literature, psychology, linguistics, cognitive science), which this detailed collection pulls together in one coherent overview. The result is a new landmark for the study and understanding of themes in their everyday manifestation.

This book represents a detailed discussion and corpus analysis of Theme in English and German originals and translations. The empirical results are based on thousands of clauses from four different registers, cover a variety of linguistic aspects including multiple Themes, marked Themes, participant roles, agency, and identifiability, and are tested statistically using regression analyses. The book sheds light on one of the most elusive concepts of the systemic functional linguistics framework, Theme, by comparing it with different approaches, related concepts, and realizations in different languages and by examining empirically different Theme models, contrastive differences, and translation effects. Given that Theme in English and German is realized formally by being the first clause constituent and is thus, effectively, a syntactic phenomenon, this monograph is not only relevant for functional linguists, but any interested in English and German word order differences and their effects on translations.

This volume brings together 65 papers which were presented at this Conference, the aim of which was to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas between scholars with expertise in various aspects of the Greek language. For this reason the volume contains the majority of the contributions. It should provide the linguistic community with a comprehensive work presenting the state-of-the-art in Greek Linguistics and covering a wide multidisciplinary spectrum of current research. The papers are organised into six sections. Section I contains the papers of the four invited speakers. George Babiniotis discusses the contribution of linguistic theory to the teaching of Greek, Dimitra Theophanopoulou-Kontou and Angeliki Malikouti-Drachman each present an overview of the relevance of, respectively, syntactic and phonological theories to Greek, and Brian D. Joseph explores a specific theoretical issue, the pro-drop parameter. Section II brings together papers on syntax, semantics and pragmatics which examine theoretical and descriptive issues within current models such as Principles & Parameters, HPSG, Relevance Theory and others. Section III covers phonology and phonetics and also presents research on theoretical issues such as government phonology, the phonology-morphology interface, as well as descriptive issues including the instrumental investigation of selected phonetic phenomena. Section IV covers discourse and style and deals with spoken and written discourse including miscommunication, metaphor and issues on politeness. Section V on variations and extensions consists of papers on Ancient and Modern Greek dialects such as Macedonian, Cypriot, and Pontic, as well as issues on social and geographical varieties, diglossia and language acquisition. Section VI presents papers relating to the use of computers for the analysis, translation and teaching of Greek. Finally, an index of authors, languages and main key words completes the volume.

How characteristic were the elements used in Theodor Storm’s (1817–1888) fiction? What were the rich fund of symbols and myths that he used? Few Storm interpreters have addressed themselves seriously to these questions. This study tries to fill this gap.

From the papers presented at the 26th LSRL, this volume offers a selection of a contributions on phonological issues and on syntax. Most of the grammatical phenomena discussed are treated within the frameworks of the Minimalist Program, Distributed Morphology, or Optimality Theory. It was apparent from the diversity of the papers delivered, that these approaches are exposing novel phenomena, which enrich and widen our knowledge and understanding of language. The analyses undertaken in these articles range over a variety of (dialects of) Romance languages.

This volume and its companion oneRethinking grammaticalization: New perspectives offer a selection of papers from the Third International Conference New Reflections on Grammaticalization, held at the University of Santiago de Compostela in July 2005. The overall aim of the book is to enrich our understanding of what grammaticalization entails via detailed case studies in combination with theoretical and methodological discussions. Some of the theoretical issues discussed in the sixteen articles included in the volume are the nature of grammaticalization and related processes such as anti-, re- and degrammaticalization, the relationship between grammaticalization and lexicalization, the role of frequency in grammaticalization and the interplay between information structure and grammaticalization. Other topics covered are the grammaticalization of composite predicates in English, the emergence of modal particles in German and particle clusters in Dutch and the grammaticalization of various modal auxiliaries in Spanish and in Swedish.

This edited volume is devoted to expanding the theoretical basis of Processability Theory, a theory of second language development that combines insights in the way speakers generate language and store their language knowledge to predict, describe and explain developmental sequences (Pienemann 1998, 2005). The aim of the book is to provide a forum for new perspectives focusing on three intersections: (1) the interface between morpho-syntax and discourse/pragmatics/semantics, (2) constraints on processing and receptive processing and (3) developments in instructed second language learning. Each part also includes a response paper, in which the new perspectives, in terms of the theoretical challenges and/or the empirical results of the preceding chapters are discussed. This collection of articles and response papers will be very relevant to students and researchers interested in theoretical aspects of second language acquisition, and more specifically Processability Theory, and clearly indicates that the field is lively and open.

The present volume has its origin in the GLOW conference on Universals hosted in Berlin in March 1999. The papers in this volume are concerned both with formal as well as with substantive universals. All the contributions attempt to identify universal properties of the language faculty, as well as the source of cross-linguistic variation. They cover a wide range of empirical phenomena across languages such as locality, deletion, verb classes, XP-split constructions, Quantifier Raising, the EPP, the Person Case Constraint etc. Some of the articles pay particular attention to the organization of the grammar, the type of operations that are effective, the role of features in determining variation, and primitive notions of phrase-structure (c-command, Agree etc.). Others show how structural differences capture semantic and morphological differences within a language and across languages, and how these are the ultimate source of linguistic variation. The book is of primary interest to researchers and students in syntactic theory, comparative syntax, and linguistic variation.

Contrastive Linguistics, roughly defined as a subdiscipline of linguistics which is concerned with the comparison of two or more (subsystems of) languages, has long been associated primarily with language teaching. Apart from this applied aspect, however, it also has a strong theoretical purpose, contributing to our understanding of language typology and language universals. Issues in theoretical CL, which also feature in this volume, are the choice of model, the notions of equivalence and contrast, and directionality of descriptions. Languages used for illustration in this volume include English, German, Danish, and Polish.

The analysis of French verbs presented in this monograph is neither a synchronic nor a diachronic description, but rather a theoretical achronic analysis whose goal is the explanation of the historical phonetic development of the French verb in terms of changes in the underlying abstract morphological forms. One of the basic premises of this book is that the French superficial phonetic forms are not derived from the Latin superficial phonetic forms, but that both are derived from abstract etymological forms.