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

Textual Parameters in Older Languages takes a contemporary approach to the inherent limitations of using older texts as data for linguistic analysis, drawing on methods of text analysis, pragmatics and sociolinguistics to supplement traditional historical and philological methods. The focus of the book is on the importance of controlling for textual parameters-defined by the editors as dimensions of variation associated with texts and their production, including text type, degree of poeticality, orality, and dialect-in the analysis of older language data. Failure to do so can result in invalid generalizations; recognizing the influence of textual parameters, conversely, raises a myriad of issues for the practice and theory of historical linguistics.

The 12 essays in this collection apply this approach in analyses of anaphora, non-finite verbal forms, particles, punctuation, word order and other phenomena in a wide range of languages including Ancient Tamil, Sanskrit, Latin, Heian Japanese, Medieval Greek, Old French, Old Russian, Middle English, and Modern Danish. An in-depth introduction by the editors lays out the goals of the textual parameters approach, and considers the methodological and theoretical consequences of the evidence presented in the book as a whole.

The shift towards a sociolinguistic approach to the analysis of language in the last few decades has necessitated new definitions for a number of concepts that linguists have taken for granted for a long time. This volume attempts to demystify the important notions of ‘text’ and ‘context’ by providing clear definitions and examples within the assumptions of Systemic Functional (SF) linguistics. After a discussion of the role and significance of context by three eminent SF linguists in section one, the influence of context on text is dealt with in section two ‘From Context to Language’. Section three ‘From Language to Context’ considers textual features and their relationship to contextual factors. All the contributors base their analyses on data collected from a variety of spoken and written registers of contemporary English.

This volume brings together 11 original papers on a variety of themes in Greek linguistics, covering phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics, both synchronically and diachronically.Collectively, these papers report on recent advances in the study of Greek grammar within the framework of generative grammar, and provide insights into such diverse topics as the analysis of consonant clusters, the representation of stress, the status of inflectional features, the relationship between compounds and projection, derived nominals, the occurrence of weak clitic pronouns in questions, small clauses, focus constructions, word order, the placement of clitics in Cappadocian dialects, and Medieval Greek relativisation strategies.

Together, they show that Greek is a vital contributor to issues of current controversy in grammatical theory.

Contributions to this collection focus on the unity and diversity of the language of the Roma (Gypsies), the only Indic language spoken exclusively in Europe. Properties discussed include the distinct inflectional and derivational patterns applied to Asian and European lexical layers, the distribution of inflectional, agglutinative, and analytic formation among syntactic categories, regularities in the ongoing shift from inflectional to analytic case formation, suppletion, aspects of syntactic convergence, and patterns of morphological transitivization and de-transitivization (causatives and passives). These phenomena are considered in the light of contemporary discussions on language universals, with reference to a variety of different approaches including Prague School Typology, Functional Sentence Perspective, Functional Grammar, functional-pragmatic typology, and general grammaticalization theory.

Chapters partly adopt a comparative approach covering all major dialects of the language, and are partly devoted to single-dialect corpuses. Special attention is given to the Czech/Slovak and Hungarian varieties, to previously undescribed dialects from Bulgaria and Turkey, to codified varieties in Macedonia, and to the variety of dialects discussed in the popular works of the Victorian author George Borrow. An extensive Introduction outlines the principal morphosyntactic features of the language and provides a classification of Romani dialects, including an overview of those mentioned in the volume.

This monograph presents a general picture of the evolution of IE verbal systems within a coherent cognitive framework. The work encompasses all the language families of the IE phylum, from prehistory to present day languages.

Inspired by the ideas of Roman Jakobson and Gustave Guillaume the authors relate tense and aspect to underlying cognitive processes, and show that verbal systems have a staged development of time representations (chronogenesis). They view linguistic change as systemic and trace the evolution of the earliest tense systems by (a) aspectual split and (b) aspectual merger from the original aspectual contrasts of PIE, the evidence for such systemic change showing clearly in the paradigmatic morphology of the daughter languages.

The nineteen chapters cover first the ancient documentation, then those families whose historical data are from a more recent date. The last chapters deal with the systemic evolution of languages that are descended from ancient forbears such as Sanskrit, Greek, and Latin, and are completed by a chapter on the practical and theoretical conclusions of the work.

This volume presents a collection of 23 papers by renowned linguists on current research in the field of theoretical linguistics. The book focuses on linguistic theory and metatheory, and on fundamental concepts and assumptions of modern linguistics.

This collection of twelve essays, some of which have been written specifically for this volume by well-known European and North-American sociolinguists, reflects an increasing recognition within the field that sociological and theoretical innocence can no longer be underwritten by it, and offers a multi-pronged and multi-methodological way to move towards a critical, reflexive, and theoretically responsible socio-linguistics. It explores, with courage and sensitivity, some very important areas in the enormous space between Bloomfieldian 'idiolect' and Chomskyan 'UG' in order to situate the human linguistic enterprise, and offers valuable insights into human linguisticality and sociality. These explorations expose the limits of correlationism, determinism, and positivistic reificationism, and offer new ways of doing sociolinguistics. Intended for both practicing and future sociolinguists, it is an ideal text-book for the times, particularly for graduate and advanced undergraduate students.

This volume brings together 65 papers which were presented at this Conference, the aim of which was to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas between scholars with expertise in various aspects of the Greek language. For this reason the volume contains the majority of the contributions. It should provide the linguistic community with a comprehensive work presenting the state-of-the-art in Greek Linguistics and covering a wide multidisciplinary spectrum of current research. The papers are organised into six sections. Section I contains the papers of the four invited speakers. George Babiniotis discusses the contribution of linguistic theory to the teaching of Greek, Dimitra Theophanopoulou-Kontou and Angeliki Malikouti-Drachman each present an overview of the relevance of, respectively, syntactic and phonological theories to Greek, and Brian D. Joseph explores a specific theoretical issue, the pro-drop parameter. Section II brings together papers on syntax, semantics and pragmatics which examine theoretical and descriptive issues within current models such as Principles & Parameters, HPSG, Relevance Theory and others. Section III covers phonology and phonetics and also presents research on theoretical issues such as government phonology, the phonology-morphology interface, as well as descriptive issues including the instrumental investigation of selected phonetic phenomena. Section IV covers discourse and style and deals with spoken and written discourse including miscommunication, metaphor and issues on politeness. Section V on variations and extensions consists of papers on Ancient and Modern Greek dialects such as Macedonian, Cypriot, and Pontic, as well as issues on social and geographical varieties, diglossia and language acquisition. Section VI presents papers relating to the use of computers for the analysis, translation and teaching of Greek. Finally, an index of authors, languages and main key words completes the volume.

This nineteenth edition of LSRL proceedings contains a selection of papers on variety of Romance idioms and includes current topics in established areas of study. The phonology papers focus mostly on syllabic and higher-level prosodic structure. The morphology section deals primarily with compounding. The syntax contributions principally treat infinitival clauses, extraction phenomena, and binding. While synchronic data serve as the point of departure in most of the studies, historical perspectives are also considered in each major section. Included in the volume are two invited contributions, by Violeta Demonte (on linking and case with prepositional verbs) and Shana Poplack (on variation in the form and function of the subjunctive in Canadian French).

This volume presents new developments in cognitive grammar and explores its descriptive and explanatory potential with respect to a wide range of language phenomena. These include the formation and use of locationals, causative constructions, adjectival and nominal expressions of oriented space, morphological layering, tense and aspect, and extended uses of verbal predicates. There is also a section on the affinities between cognitive grammar an early linguistic theories, both ancient and modern.