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

The papers collected in this volume reflect the numerous interests in the field of Romance languages and Romance linguistics today. A far-ranging amount of Romance data are presented: French, Italian, and Spanish dialect data are crucial to several authors' arguments, Rumanian is the focus of two papers, and many of the papers included discuss overall Romance developments. It is noteworthy that formal approaches to syntax are here regularly applied to historical data (three papers specifically deal with pro-drop phenomena in Old French). Of the papers on phonology, syllabification and linking processes receive much attention.

This is a memorial volume for Albert Ehrman. The contributions of this Gedenkschrift testify to his scholarly excellence in the field of Judaic-Semitic lexicography and etymology, and do full justice to the richness and thought inspiring qualities of his publications. Besides the papers in honour of Ehrman the volume contains four reprints of the Aramaic 'Fucus, Red Lichen', and a full bibliography of the works of Albert Ehrman.

The theory of neutralization and the archiphoneme is well known to have been expounded by the Prague School. It is now being fully accepted and practised by A. Martinet and his associates, to whom Akamatsu refers as the neo-Prague School. The objective is to propose a maximally functionalist theory of neutralization and the archiphoneme by submitting to critical discussion from a functional point of view all the principal notions pertaining to this theory in its traditionally professed form. The author comes up with a theory of neutralization and the archiphoneme which is fundamentally based on but is clearly different from that which is normally associated with the Prague School and the neo-Prague School.

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.

The papers in this volume derive from the 4th International Hamito-Semitic Congress, held in Marburg in 1983. The papers deal with the (morpho)phonology or syntax of individual languages or language (sub)families, and many have a diachronic angle.

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.

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.

This volume seeks to present ‘Germanic philology’ with its main linguistic, literary and cultural subdivisions as a whole, and to call into question the customary pedagogical division of the discipline.

Dynamic phonology is the natural consequence of the combination of the latest developments in physiological and acoustic phonetics and the traditional structural/functional theories of linguistics. In phonetics, the segmental approach has long since given way to dynamic phonetics, leaving linguists in the position of either ignoring the dynamic evidence and continuing with segmental and semi-segmental phonology or of adopting the dynamic evidence within their overall theories of language structure and function. The author of this book has chosen the latter and here present a model for such a dynamic phonology.

These papers are a selection from papers presented at the 4th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (Amsterdam, 1985). Most studies deal with some aspect of an earlier stage of English, though present day varieties of English are also under investigation. Many of the papers show that there is a growing interest in the question why a certain change has taken place. Furthermore, the volume contains a considerable number of papers on historical syntax.