Current Issues in Linguistic Theory (vols. 1–335, 1975–2015)

This monograph offers the first in-depth lexical and semantic analysis of motion verbs in their development from Latin to nine Romance languages — Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Catalan, Occitan, Sardinian, and Raeto-Romance — demonstrating that the patterns of innovation and continuity attested in the data can be accounted for in cognitive linguistic terms. At the same time, the study illustrates how the insights gained from Latin and Romance historical data have profound implications for the cognitive approaches to language — in particular, for Leonard Talmy’s motion-framing typology and George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory. The book should appeal to scholars interested in historical Romance linguistics, cognitive linguistics, and lexical change.

The universal and typological status of the notion of word class — closely related to part-of-speech systems, morphology, syntax and the lexicon-syntax interface — continues to be of major linguistic theoretical interest. The papers included in this volume offer a fresh look at the variety of current theoretical and descriptive approaches to word class issues, and present original analyses and new data from a number of languages. The primary focus is on methods (including computational ones) and criteria for identifying and representing major word classes and subclasses in specific languages, with considerable attention also directed towards the characterization of the nature and role of minor — or neglected — word classes, including trans-categorization processes. The range of topics and perspectives covered makes this volume of considerable interest to both theoretical linguists and typologists.

This book offers a study of long-term, intensive language contact between more than a dozen Mayan languages spoken in the lowlands of Guatemala, Southern Mexico and Belize. It details the massive restructuring of syntactic and semantic organization, the calquing of grammatical patterns, and the direct borrowing of inflectional morphology, including, in some of these languages, the direct borrowing of even entire morphological paradigms. The in-depth analysis of contact among the genetically related Lowland Mayan languages presented in this volume serves as a highly relevant case for theoretical, historical, contact, typological, socio- and anthropological linguistics. This linguistically complex situation involves serious engagement with issues of methods for distinguishing contact-induced similarity from inherited similarity, the role of social and ideological variables in conditioning the outcomes of language contact, cross-linguistic tendencies in language contact, as well as the effect that inherited similarity can have on the processes and outcomes of language contact.

The problem of form and meaning in morphology has produced an impressive amount of scholarly work over the last hundred years. Nevertheless, many issues continue to be in need of clarification. The present volume assembles 18 selected papers from the 15th International Morphology Meeting (Vienna, 9–12 February 2012) relating to this vast field of research. The introduction provides a detailed overview of the state of the art in the field. It is followed by three articles derived from the plenaries that are dedicated to fundamental issues such as the relationship between morphological meaning and concepts, between word formation and meaning change, as well as indirect coding. The section papers tackle a wide array of issues, including affixal polysemy, pathways of grammaticalization, the processing of compounds, mismatches between form and meaning, synonymy avoidance, or the semantics of specific patterns of noun incorporation, compounding, reduplication and mimetic verbs.

The volume brings together seventeen peer-reviewed, revised papers originally presented at the 16th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (ICEHL 16), held in August 2010 at the University of Pécs, Hungary. This selection aims to show how theoretical and empirical approaches can be combined in the historical investigation of the English language, what insights and exact information can be obtained about language change in the history of English with the help of tools like historical corpora or with inter- and transdisciplinary methods. The volume is arranged around five thematic headings. The first discusses dialects and regional variation from the viewpoint of contact linguistics and phonological, morphological, and lexical change. The second has syntactic variation and grammaticalization as its focus. Papers on grammatical changes in nominal and pronominal constructions are presented in part three. The integration of loanwords in Middle English is discussed in part four, and the last investigates communicative intentions in historical discourse.

The volume should appeal to linguists interested in historical aspects of dialect and discourse studies, historical pragmatics, contact linguistics, grammaticalization theory, corpus linguistics, and of course language change.

The origins of sound change is one of the oldest and most challenging questions in the study of language. The goal of this volume is to examine current approaches to sound change from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives, including articulatory variation and modeling, speech perception mechanisms and neurobiological processes, geographical and social variation, and diachronic phonology. This diversity of perspectives contributes to a fruitful cross-fertilization across disciplines and represents an attempt to formulate converging ideas on the factors that lead to sound change. This book is addressed to scholars in historical linguistics, linguistic typology, and phonology as well as to researchers in speech production and perception, cognition and modeling. Given the theoretical and methodological interest of the contributions as well as the novel instrumental techniques applied to the study of sound change, this volume will interest professionals teaching language typology, laboratory phonology, sound change, phonetics and phonological theory at the graduate level.

This volume brings together eleven studies on the history of language and writing in the North Sea area, with focus on contacts and interchanges through time. Its range spans from the investigation of pre-Germanic place-names to present-day Shetland; the materials studied include glosses, legal and trade documents as well as place names and modern dialects. The volume is unique in its combination of linguistics and place-name studies with literacy studies, which allows for a very dynamic picture of the history of language contact and texts in the North Sea area. Different approaches come together to illuminate a major insight: the omnipresence of multilingualism as a context for language development and a formative characteristic of literacy. Among the contributors are experts on English, Nordic and German language history. The book will be of interest to a wide range of scholars and students working on the history of Northern European languages, literacy studies and language contact

Brought together in this volume are fourteen studies using a range of modern instrumental methods – acoustic and articulatory – to investigate the phonetics of several North African and Middle Eastern varieties of Arabic. Topics covered include syllable structure, quantity, assimilation, guttural and emphatic consonants and their pharyngeal and laryngeal mechanisms, intonation, and language acquisition. In addition to presenting new data and new descriptions and interpretations, a key aim of the volume is to demonstrate the depth of objective analysis that instrumental methods can enable researchers to achieve. A special feature of many chapters is the use of more than one type of instrumentation to give different perspectives on phonetic properties of Arabic speech which have fascinated scholars since medieval times. The volume will be of interest to phoneticians, phonologists and Arabic dialectologists, and provides a link between traditional qualitative accounts of spoken Arabic and modern quantitative methods of instrumental phonetic analysis.

This volume contains a selection of nineteen peer-reviewed papers from the 40th annual Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL) held at the University of Washington in March 2010. In addition to overviews of Romance linguistics by the editor and by Jurgen Klausenburger in the keynote article, contributions cover a variety of linguistic theoretical topics and a range of Romance languages, including Old and Modern French, Italian, Romanian as well as several dialects of Spanish and Portuguese. A number of papers deal with the morphophonology of Peninsular Spanish languages, agreement anomalies, generic interpretation, and the syntax/semantics of determiners, particularly of Romanian. Both the topics and the languages discussed in this volume are tied together by a number of leitmotifs, and several articles present phenomena not previously considered. The volume makes significant contributions both to the documentation of Romance languages and to linguistic theory, and will be of interest to Romance and general linguistics scholars.