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The papers in this volume are revised versions of presentations at the conference on Language Universals and Language Typology in March 1985 at the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee. They include new proposals of universals results of investigations to validate or refine previously proposed universal generalizations and discussions concerning the explanation of universals. The volume will be of great interest to researchers in syntax and in language universals. In addition scholars in pragmatics philosophy of linguistics psycholinguistics anthropological linguistics and semantics will also find articles of interest in the book.

The doctrines of transformational-generative grammar (as promulgated in 1957 with frequent later emendations) have on occasion been criticised sometimes severely. Such criticism have however appeared mostly in article-form and mostly in relatively inaccessible places. Discussions in bookform have been rare. In this book the criticism offered by Professor Hall over more than twenty years have been brought together. They cover the range of linguistic structure (phonology morphosyntax and semantics) general theory and the history of linguistics. In these essays the many short-comings of transformational-generative grammar are revealed by critical examination with inevitably negative conclusions. The two final essays of the book deal with parallel aberrations in current literary theory especially Derridian “radical skepticism concerning language” and “deconstruction” as viewed from a linguistic stand-point.

In this monograph the nature of processing strategies is explored in some detail with an attempt to cut through the maze of often contradictory and confused proposals concerning the nature and form of various strategies. Once a preliminary conception of the nature of cognitive strategies and a hypothesis of how they interact with linguistic structures has been reached it will be explored how such strategies are employed by examining experiments which address the role played by certain of these strategies in the comprehension and production of sentences. The authors draw a distinction between a strategy on the one hand and a grammatical structure on the other. They argued that in principle strategies ought to be formulated as language-independent cognitively based operations which are involved in cognitive domains other than language but which in language processing interact with language-specific structures to facilitate processing. Moreover strategies are not linguistic rules since unlike rules they permit exceptions and express tendencies rather than firm yes-no choices.

Justice's first aim in this volume is to demystify the Arabic language which is widely perceived as difficult to learn and has been characterised as ambiguous and confusingly polysemous. The central concern of this three-dimensional portrait of Classical Arabic is a version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that language is a determinant of other aspects of culture. But rather than focusing on the possible influences of language on thought Justice is intersted in connections between language and language use or langue and parole. Among the topics treated are: the difficulty of Arabic; morphosyntax and Whorfian semantics; the role of duality in Arabic; iconicity; a population profile of vocabulary; the syntactic cut' of Arabic; and the relation between causatives and verbs that ascribe qualities to an object. This erudite and thought-provoking volume will be of interest not only to Arabists but to linguistic anthropologists in general.

Usan is a Papuan language. In this monograph on the grammatical structures of Usan and their function the author shows the unique features of this language: how speakers can exploit certain principles for communicative purposes how the language reflects their physical environment. Uniqueness can only be shown in the context of communality with other languages. This monograph offers numerous occasions to observe similarities and differences between Usan and other language those that can be called Papuan in particular.

Natural Morphology is the term the four authors of this monograph agreed on to cover the leitmotifs of their common and individual approaches in questions of theoretical morphology. The introduction summarizes the basic concepts and strategies of Natural Morphology to be followed by Mayerthaler who deals with universal properties of inflectional morphology and Wurzel with typological ones which depend on language specific properties of inflectional systems and Dressler with universal and typological properties of word formation. The final chapter by Panagl is an indepth study of diachronic evidence for productivity in word formation and for the overlap of word formation with inflectional morphology.

The author presents empirical arguments in favor of a joint syntactico-semantic treatment within the framework of a functional generative description of a range of adverbial expressions which should be viewed as belonging to a single lexically heterogeneous but functionally homogeneous class exhibiting scoping properties and functioning as ‘complementation of attitude’ (CA). These CA-expressions do not only share their underlying functional properties but also certain surface-syntax properties.

Some fundamental questions regarding sentence structure in linguistics concern whether all languages at some level of abstraction have the same structure and what are the basic categories with which to describe sentence structure. The contributors of this volume are specialized in two quite different languages: Hungarian and German. Of the German papers three are mainly about focus (Abraham Jacobs and Stechow-Uhman) whereas the remaining ones (Haider and Scherpenisse) are mainly about V-second. The Hungarian papers are all about focus of which those of Kálman Kiefer Marácz and De Mey-Marácz are about focussing in the stricter sense. Hunyadi Kenesei and É. Kiss focus on the pre-verbal area in general and the interpretation of operators in Hungarian in particular. The remaining papers (Horvath Komlósy and Szabolczi) are on the position of the PRE-V the position immediately after the finite verb.

This book is the first attempt to describe the syntax of Contemporary English exclusively in terms of dependencies (most American works on the subject being in terms of phrase structure or constituency). The three main features of it are: (1) a fully formal presentation (2) a reasonably complete coverage of English surface syntax and (3) an exposition oriented towards human readers (rather than computers).<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The book can be recommended for several categories of readers: specialists in English syntax linguists interested in general and theoretical syntax computational linguists researchers in related fields (including psychology and artificial intelligence) concerned with automatic processing (both synthesis and analysis) of English texts.

This volume contains a selection of papers originally presented at the 12th Conference on New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAVE) held in Montréal in 1983. It is divided into three sections: 1. Varieties of English and their history; 2. Change and variation in Romance; 3. Functions and discourse.