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Contains key papers by the founders of the Prague School; including Vilém Mathesius famous article “Functional Linguistics” (1929) the theses presented at the First Congress of Slavists in Prague (1929) an earlier paper by Mathesius “On the potentiality of the phenomena of language” (1911) Jan Mukařovský's “Standard language and poetic language” (1932) and other historical contributions by B. Havránek V. Skalička and B. Trnka.

The period of 1965 to 1978 was an extremely productive time for U.S. (Russian born) Romance etymologist and philologist Yakov Malkiel whose specialty was the development of Latin words roots prefixes and suffixes in modern Romance languages particularly Spanish. Malkiel will be known as the great champion of etymology in linguistics as evidenced by several of the selected essays in From Particular to General Lingusitics. But here Malkiel also moves in several other subfields of linguistics and proves that whatever the subject of discussion is it is characterized by a tenaciously comprehensive use of evidence.

The functional notion of “topic” or “topicality” has suffered traditionally from two distinct drawbacks. First it has remained largely ill defined or intuitively defined. And second quite often its definition boiled down to structure-dependent circularity. This volume represents a major departure from past practices without rejecting both their intuitive appeal and the many good results yielded by them. First “topic” and “topicality” are re-analyzed as a scalar property rather than as an either/or discrete prime. Second the graded property of “topicality” is firmly connected with sensible cognitive notions culled from gestalt psychology such as “predictability” or “continuity”. Third we develop and utilize precise measures and quantified methods by which the property of “topicality” of clausal arguments can be studied in connected discourse and thus be properly hinged in its rightful context that of topic identification maintenance and recoverability in discourse. Fourth we show that many grammatical phenomena which used to be studied by linguists in isolation all partake in one functional domain of grammar that of topic identification. Finally we demonstrate the validity of this new approach to the study of “topic” and “topicality” by applying the same text-based quantifying method to a number of typologically-diverse languages in studying actual texts. Languages studied here are: Written and spoken English spoken Spanish Biblical Hebrew Amharic Hausa Japanese Chamorro and Ute.

This monograph explores the relationship between method and language. The notion of method is inherent in everything we can claim to understand. The language conventions which make a question meaningful cannot be challenged at the same time the problem is posed. Problems exist only relatively to accepted ways of thinking and doing; verification or falsification can take place only when we agree what hypotheses are in question. Our ability to be rational and critical — that is to apply logic to our beliefs — depends on the kinds of distinctions we are able to make in our language.

The book sketches a systematics of non-verbal communication. It contains the following separate chapters: movement potential and expression repertoire; clinical literature on the eye’s movement potential; eye movement viewed from the perspective of communicative action; eye communication as part of non-verbal communication; detailed analysis of deliberate avoiding the addressee’s eye focus.

This volume contains papers on Hungarian general linguistics. ‘Hungarian’ here means that the work of these authors either centers around the Hungarian language or has close ties to present-day Hungarian linguistics or both. Topics include: philosophy of language psycholinguistics historical linguistics history of (Hungarian) linguistics phonology syntax typology.

The study of complementation has received considerable attention in generative studies. Following Rosenbaum's (1967) pioneering study of the English complement system there are extensive studies by Lakoff (1965) Ross (1967) Perlmutter (1971) and a large number of publications. More recent detailed studies are Emonds (1970) and Bresnan (1972) . These studies have increased enormously the body of factual knowledge about the complement system of English and about the phenomenon of complementation in general. As a consequence there are a number of empirical hypotheses about the structure of human languages which must now be tested against facts of different languages. Of these hypotheses perhaps the most interesting is that the grammars of all languages make use of the principle of the transformational cycle. Testing this hypothesis constitutes one of the main concerns of the present book. Furthermore these studies have also raised numerous interesting empirical issues of great importance for linguistic theory most of which are still awaiting fresh evidence from different languages in order to be settled. This study is directed towards resolving some of these issues by adducing relevent data primarily from Portuguese.

René Thom the famous French mathematician and founder of catastrophe theory considered linguistics an exemplary field for the application of his general morphology. It is surprising that physicists chemists biologists psychologists and sociologists are all engaged in the field of catastrophe theory but that there has been almost no echo from linguistics. Meanwhile linguistics has evolved in the direction of René Thom’s intuitions about an integrated science of language and it has become a necessary task to review update and elaborate the proposals made by Thom and to embed them in the framework of modern semantic theory.

The papers in this volume are divided into two sections. Part 1 Quantitative Linguistics contains contributions by Marie Těšitelová; Jiří Kraus; Ján Horecký & E. Nemcová; J. Sabol; Z. Lišková; V. Smetáček & M. Königová; J. Štěpán; L. Klimeš; P. Vašák. Part 2 Algebraic Linguistics contains contributions by M. Novotný; L. Nebeský; Petr Sgall; Eva Hajičová; Petr Pitha; J. Weisheitelová; Jarmila Panevová A. Goralčíková & Eva Hajičová.

This volume brings together a number of ground-breaking papers in the theory of phonology.