Browse Books

From the author’s preface: "I once facetiously stated: 'Syntax is to semantics as the hole of the doughnut is to the whole of the doughnut.' Semantics without syntax thus is like a doughnut without a hole. This was in the heyday of generative semantics and having heard that my major interest was syntax someone was able perhaps also facetiously to respond: 'Does it exist?' Most of the papers collected here originated in those days and previously appeared in various linguistic journals and anthologies. The reader may note that the topics dealt with in these papers all have their roots in syntax but in most cases relate to its boundary areas. The boundary areas are not restricted to semantics but the above analogy of the doughnut might still apply to what syntax is to those boundary areas. Hence the title of the book."

This two-volume collection of papers was brought together in honor of Oswald Szemerényi on the occasion of his 65th birthday. The volumes contain 70 papers most of which deal with Indo-European (historical) linguistics.

This guide provides brief descriptions and evaluations of the best reference grammars and comprehensive works on the syntax of contemporary French Italian Portuguese Spanish Catalan and Rumanian.

Over the past few years interest and research in experimental linguistics has shifted more toward centre stage perhaps because of the growing recognition that purely theoretical formulations and speculations about language must necessarily be tested against the empirical facts of language knowledge use and acquisition. To highlight some aspects of empirical linguistics a conference was organized in 1978 at University of Alberta at which six prominent scholars were invited to present substantial contributions. These papers are included in this volume together with an epilogue summing up and discussing the recurrent themes of the conference and a general bibliography.

The volume attempts to deal with equational sentences in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic and their remote structure. In this unique monograph Mohamed Sami Anwar oes to show that equational sentences in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic are derived from underlying sentences that have transitive or intransitive verbs and that the verb be in its overt form is only a tense marker. The chapter following the introduction deals with the equational sentences functioning as conveyers of stative ideas. The third chapter deals with the verb be in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic and how it functions only as a tense marker. The fourth chapter is an analysis of determination as regards the subject and why in some cases the predicate at the surface structure has to occur before the subject. The final chapter deals with the predicate slot and its types of fillers and analyzes also the remote structure of the equational sentences to interpret the phenomenon of the presence and absence of agreement in number and gender between the subject and the predicate.

The term ‘word order studies’ designates an area of syntax which has become an increasingly central theme in linguistic research. Since in at least a narrow sense syntax is the study of how meaningful elements are put together to form sentences a preoccupation with word order would seem inherent in any syntactic study. However the focus implied by ‘word order studies’ is anything but trivial going as it does to the heart of two vital areas of linguistic theory: language universals and the form of linguistic models. The present collection of papers offers the reader an opportunity to examine some of the more recent ideas in this broad area concentrating on some of the more controversial issues within the generative-transformational model.

The essays in this two-volume anthology provide the reader with an overview of current Czech Polish and Hungarian research in language literature and meaning as well as some new perspectives on the major theoretical contributions of Roman Ingarden Georg Lukács and Jan Mukařovský. For the most part the emphasis is on Poetics and Literary Theory; however in some of the essays the focus shifts to such related disciplines as Aesthetics Linguistics and Semiotics. The heterogeneity of this collection reflects the broad spectrum of interests and approaches to problems of theory being pursued at present in Poland Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Much of the work being done in these countries remains relatively unknown outside of Eastern Europe. This anthology is an attempt to rectify this situation and make better known the nature and extent of research which promises new insights into a whole range of phenomena in language literature and culture.

The purpose of this study is to apply experimentally the principles of recent grammatical theories to the facts of the Basque language. This study aims to test out those principles and endeavours to discover the best form for a grammar of Basque.

This volume contains 18 papers derived from presentations by Dutch linguists at the Eighth International Congress of Slavists.

Creole studies embrace a wide range is disciplines: history ethnography geography sociology etc. The phenomenon of creolization has come to be recognized as widespread; creolization presupposes contact and that is a human universal. The present anthology discusses social historical and theoretical aspects of over twenty pidgins and creoles. Part one deals with general theoretical issues especially those relating to pidgin language formation and expansion. Part two deals with those pidgins and creoles lexically related to indigenous African languages and with incipient features of creolization in African languages themselves; part three with those related to Romance languages and part four with those related to English. Throughout the volume several current debates are taken up including the still unsettled issues of creole language origins and classification.