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The present volume contains articles of well-known representatives of the Meaning-Text Theory (MTT) and other related linguistic theories.

Founded by I. Mel’cuk and A. Zholkovsky in the sixties in Moscow MTT soon became known in the West as a “prominent outsider” theory. The picture changed since then though. MTT gained importance in several areas of linguistics and computational linguistics. It influenced the design of new grammar formalisms such as Dependency Tree Grammars. Also specific parts of MTT have been directly overtaken into other theories; consider for example the work on integrating Lexical Functions into Pustejovsky’s Generative Lexicon.

The present volume is a further convincing demonstration of MTT’s liveliness and relevance to the field’s “burning” issues. The focus of the volume is on semantics semantic representation and relation of semantics to surface in MTT. Six out of eight articles (Polguère; Escalier & Fournier; Paducheva; St.-Germain; Beck; Bogulavsky) deal with problems related to these topics while the last two articles of the volume (Sgall and Rambow; Joshi) throw a bridge between MTT or more precisely between dependency-based theories of which MTT is one instantiation and other linguistic theories.

The publication of this edited volume comes at a time when interest in the acquisition of phonology by both children learning a first language and adults learning a second is starting to swell. The ten contributions from established scholars and relative newcomers alike provide a comprehensive demonstration of the progress being made in the field through the theory-based analysis of both spontaneous and experimental acquisition data involving a number of first and second languages including English French German Korean Polish and Spanish. Aimed at those active in phonology and its acquisition yet written to be accessible to the non-specialist as well the volume carefully lays out the various theoretical frameworks in which the authors work such as Feature Geometry Lexical Phonology Non-Linear Phonology Prosodic Phonology and Optimality Theory.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>

Symmetries and asymmetries have always played an important role in linguistic theorizing. From the early works on potentially universal properties of transformational processes differences between rightward and leftward movement processes were noted and constituted a challenge to theories of conditions on transformations. The upward boundedness of extraposition rules vs. the successive cyclic character of question word movement for example remains a vexing problem. An idea which has gained considerable prominence in the most recent syntactic work in particular Noam Chomsky's 'Minimalist Program' and Richard Kayne's 'Antisymmetry' proposal is that rightward movement simply does not exist. This means in essence that what looks like an element that has been moved rightward is either base-generated in its surface position or it is actually moved leftward but all its surrounding materials have been moved leftward even further. Clearly these radical proposals have generated a large number of new analyses of the relevant phenomena and they have fostered considerable controversy about the viability and desirability of this type of approach. The present volume brings together a representative group of articles discussing a variety of aspects of (apparent) rightward movement processes including considerations having to do with parsing and representing the various opposing lines of thought on this matter. Empirically they cover a wide array of constructions (extraposition scrambling quantifier-floating etc.) and languages ( American Sign Language Bengali Dutch French Frisian German Hindi Japanese Marathi etc.). <br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>

Contributions to this collection focus on the unity and diversity of the language of the Roma (Gypsies) the only Indic language spoken exclusively in Europe. Properties discussed include the distinct inflectional and derivational patterns applied to Asian and European lexical layers the distribution of inflectional agglutinative and analytic formation among syntactic categories regularities in the ongoing shift from inflectional to analytic case formation suppletion aspects of syntactic convergence and patterns of morphological transitivization and de-transitivization (causatives and passives). These phenomena are considered in the light of contemporary discussions on language universals with reference to a variety of different approaches including Prague School Typology Functional Sentence Perspective Functional Grammar functional-pragmatic typology and general grammaticalization theory.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Chapters partly adopt a comparative approach covering all major dialects of the language and are partly devoted to single-dialect corpuses. Special attention is given to the Czech/Slovak and Hungarian varieties to previously undescribed dialects from Bulgaria and Turkey to codified varieties in Macedonia and to the variety of dialects discussed in the popular works of the Victorian author George Borrow. An extensive Introduction outlines the principal morphosyntactic features of the language and provides a classification of Romani dialects including an overview of those mentioned in the volume.<br/>

This monograph investigates a number of central issues in the Syntax of Adverbs with special reference to Greek in the light of Kayne's (1994) Antisymmetry Hypothesis. It examines the conditions on the placement of the various adverb types their licensing requirements and their relation to adjectives. The author advances an analysis according to which adverbs are licensed as Specifiers of functional projections in the clausal domain. As such they enter a matching relation with the relevant features of the respective functional head. Adverbs are either directly merged at the relevant functional projection (for instance Aspectual and Speaker Oriented adverbs) or alternatively they are moved to this position from the complement domain of the verb (for instance manner adverbs). Furthermore the volume examines the phenomenon of Adverb Incorporation. It is proposed that Incorporation is obligatory for those VP internal Adverbs which are 'structuraly non-complex' in Chomsky's 1995 terms. Finally the similarities and differences between adverbs and adjectives clausal and nominal structure are investigated and a number of asymmetries between the two are highlighted.

This volume presents a functional perspective on grammatical relations (GRs) without neglecting their structural correlates. Ever since the 1970s the discussion of RGs by functionally-oriented linguists has focused primarily on their functional aspects such as reference cognitive accessibility and discourse topicality. With some exceptions functionalists have thus ceded the discussion of the structural correlates of GRs to various formal schools.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Ever since Edward Keenan’s pioneering work on subject properties (1975 1976) it has been apparent that subjecthood and objecthood can only be described properly by a basket of neither necessary nor sufficient properties — thus within a framework akin to Rosch’s theory of Prototype. Some GR properties are functional (reference topicality accessibility); others involve overt coding (word-order case marking verb agreement). Others yet are more abstract involving control of grammatical processes (rule-governed behavior).<br/>Building on Keenan’s pioneering work this volume concentrates on the structural aspects of GRs within a functionalist framework. Following a theoretical introduction the papers in the volume deal primarily with recalcitrant typological issues: The dissociation between overt coding properties of GRs and their behavior-and-control properties; GRs in serial verb constructions; GRs in ergative languages; The impact of clause union and grammaticalization on GRs.<br/>

This book breaks new ground in translation theory and practice. The central question is: In what ways are translations affected by text types? The two main areas of investigation are: A. What are the advantages of focusing on text types when trying to understand the process of translation? How do translators tackle different text types in their daily practice? B. To what extent and in what areas are text types identical across languages and cultures? What similarities and dissimilarities can be observed in text types of original and translated texts?Part I deals with methodological aspects and offers a typology of translations both as product and as process. Part II is devoted to domain-specific texts in a cross-cultural perspective while Part III is concerned with terminology and lexicon as well as the constraints of mode and medium involving dubbing and subtitling as translation methods. Sonnets sagas fairy tales novels and feature films sermons political speeches international treaties instruction leaflets business letters academic lectures academic articles medical research articles technical brochures and legal documents are but some of the texts under investigation.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>In sum this volume provides a theoretical overview of major problems and possibilities as well as investigations into a variety of text types with practical suggestions that deserve to be weighted by anyone considering the relation between text typology and translation. The volume is indispensable for the translator in his/her efforts to become a “competent text-aware professional”.

This volume is based on contributions from the First International Conference on “Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing” (RANLP’95) held in Tzigov Chark Bulgaria 14-16 September 1995. This conference was one of the most important and competitively reviewed conferences in Natural Language Processing (NLP) for 1995 with submissions from more than 30 countries. Of the 48 papers presented at RANLP’95 the best (revised) papers have been selected for this book in the hope that they reflect the most significant and promising trends (and latest successful results) in NLP.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The book is organised thematically and the contributions are grouped according to the traditional topics found in NLP: morphology syntax grammars parsing semantics discourse grammars generation machine translation corpus processing and multimedia. To help the reader find his/her way the authors have prepared an extensive index which contains major terms used in NLP; an index of authors which lists the names of the authors and the page numbers of their paper(s); a list of figures; and a list of tables.<br/>This book will be of interest to researchers lecturers and graduate students interested in Natural Language Processing and more specifically to those who work in Computational Linguistics Corpus Linguistics and Machine Translation.<br/>

The body of theory on speech production and speech disorder developed prior to Descartes has been so neglected by historians that its very existence is practically unknown today. Yet it provides a framework for understanding the speech process which is not only comprehensive and coherent but of great relevance to current debates on issues of language performance and applied linguistics. Current theoretical difficulties stem largely from initial errors of Descartes; whereas earlier theoretical formulations while outlining a bio-mechanics of speech retain the central role of the human agent.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The discussions explicated in this book come mainly from the natural-philosophic and medical literature of Greco-Roman Antiquity the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and early 17th century. This uncharted territory is mapped by tracing its textual history and diffusion as well as explaining the theory on its own terms but in clear and comprehensible language. Interdisciplinary in perspective the book encompasses topics of interest not only to the language sciences but also to the biosciences medicine philosophy of human movement psychology and behavioral sciences neurosciences speech pathology experimental phonetics speech and rhetoric and the history of science in general.

Although the contributors to this book do not belong to one particular ‘school’ of linguistic theory they all share an interest in the external functions of language in society and in the relationship between these functions and internal linguistic phenomena. In this sense they all take a functional approach to grammatical issues. Apart from this common starting-point the contributions share the aim of demonstrating the non-autonomous nature of morphology and syntax and the inadequacy of linguistic models which deal with syntax morphology and lexicon in separate independent components. The recurrent theme throughout the book is the inseparability of lexis and morphosyntax of structure and function of grammar and society. The third and more specific common thread is case which in some contributions is adduced to illustrate the more general point of the link between word form on the one hand and clausal and textual relations on the other hand while in other papers it is at the centre of the discussion.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The interest of the proposed volume consists in the fact that it brings together the views of leading scholars in functional linguistics of various ‘denominations’ on the place of morphosyntax in linguistic theory. The book provides convincing argumentation against a modular theory with autonomous levels (the dominant framework in mainstream 20th century linguistics) and is a plea for further research into the connections between the lexicogrammar and the linguistic and extralinguistic context.<br/>