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

Contrastive Linguistics, roughly defined as a subdiscipline of linguistics which is concerned with the comparison of two or more (subsystems of) languages, has long been associated primarily with language teaching. Apart from this applied aspect, however, it also has a strong theoretical purpose, contributing to our understanding of language typology and language universals. Issues in theoretical CL, which also feature in this volume, are the choice of model, the notions of equivalence and contrast, and directionality of descriptions. Languages used for illustration in this volume include English, German, Danish, and Polish.

The aim of the colloquium, from which this volume derives, was to bring together approaches from general linguistics and language reconstruction, to show how these can benefit from eachother. Although the focus was on Indo-European languages, other language families were present in the discussion, as typological insights may provide useful parallels to IE phenomena and problems. At the core of the discussion was the methodological problem of induction vs deduction.

These papers, from the IPS-77 Congress held in Miami Beach, Florida in 1977, present the state-of-the-art in phonetic science. The volume is subdivided into twelve sections: History of Phonetics, Issues of Method and Theory in Phonetics, Laryngeal Function, Temporal Factors and Intonation, Physiological and Acoustic Phonetics, Speech Production, Neurophonetics and Psychopathology, Speech Perception, Speech and Speaker Recognition, Teaching Phonetics, Children’s Speech and Language Acquisition, and Special Issues in Phonetics.

Over the past few years interest and research in experimental linguistics has shifted more toward centre stage, perhaps because of the growing recognition that purely theoretical formulations and speculations about language must necessarily be tested against the empirical facts of language knowledge, use, and acquisition. To highlight some aspects of empirical linguistics, a conference was organized in 1978 at University of Alberta, at which six prominent scholars were invited to present substantial contributions. These papers are included in this volume, together with an epilogue summing up and discussing the recurrent themes of the conference, and a general bibliography.

This two-volume collection of papers was brought together in honor of Oswald Szemerényi on the occasion of his 65th birthday. The volumes contain 70 papers, most of which deal with Indo-European (historical) linguistics.

Interest in word-meaning is on the increase among mainstream linguists again after a half-century of neglect. During this interval progress in phonology and syntax was great, but further progress in these sub-disciplines will remain blocked until it is recognized that the prime functional unit of speech is the word, that the central problem of language theory is lexis. Word-meaning is typically complicated by changes across time; for a theory of language creativity, these effects must be discerned from spontaneous creation. The articles brought together in this volume attempt to illuminate, on the basis of particular lexical studies, the dynamics of perception and word-meaning, of language and mind.

The aim of this essay is to present a phonological analysis of Lushai, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in the Mizoram province of India, in terms of componential features applying – as mutation rules – to the morphophonological level. An analysis of this nature becomes possible if the concepts of phonological extension systems and redundancy-free representations are introduced. Alongside with the phonemic aspect, a semantic analysis of morpheme structure is required yielding the smallest significant units at different morphological or syntactic levels. Though based on criteria implying concepts like ‘rule’, ‘underlying representation’, and so forth, of the standard theory of generative phonology, this essay tries to implement the concepts of ‘phoneme’ on the phonemic, and of ‘morphophoneme’ on the morphophonological levels, and to bring about a methodologically sound classification of phonological rules.