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

Zellig Harris had a profound influence in formal systems and applied mathematics, in demonstrations of the computability of language, and in informatics. Volume 2 begins with a commentary by André Lentin on Harris's grounding in constructivist, intuitionist mathematics, drawing a parallel between Harris's central insights and those of Gödel and others which were of like import in the foundations of mathematics. An international array of scholars describe further developments and relate this work to that of others. Fernando Pereira argues that Harrisian 'linguistic information' can effect a reunion of linguistics with information theory that has not been considered possible since Chomsky's declaration of irrelevance in 1957. Chapters by Richard Oehrle and by Terence Langendoen develop two novel formal systems with intriguing properties. Chapters by Naomi Sager and Ngo Thanh Nhan, by Aravind Joshi, and by Stephen Johnson describe the history of work on the computability of language and project exciting prospects ahead. Karel van den Eynde and colleagues describe use of distributional methods, refined beyond those of Harris, to develop comprehensive computer dictionaries for several languages. The chapter by Benoît Habert and Pierre Zweigenbaum surveys the field of automatic acquisition of information categories, and that by Richard Kittredge surveys work on text generation. Richard Smaby shows how distributional analysis can even inform design of computer user interfaces.

This is a sequel to the author's Semitic and Indo-European: The Principal Etymologies (1995). That volume provided the key examples of morphological correspondences between the Semitic and the Indo-European languages. In this sequel, the author analyzes correspondences of structure, either within a certain group of languages or belonging to a distantly related group, by looking at inflectional morphology, case, grammar, and phonology. Thus are uncovered the prehistoric means of oral communication, linking the forerunners of ancient societies in Asia, Africa, and Europe, as they talked about livestock or revealed some inner sentiment.

This volume presents a selection of the best papers from the 2000 'Going Romance' conference, held in Utrecht. The papers discuss current topics in formal syntax in Romance languages.

This volume contains a selection of refereed and revised papers, originally presented at the 30th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages, focussing on the areas of phonology and language variation. The papers address issues in phonology such as the emergence of the unmarked, representational structure in phonology and morphology, intonation in Spanish, and issues in variation including dialectal differences, codeswitching, foreigner talk, and language death. The papers in this volume include discussions of the major Romance languages (Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish), pidgins and creoles resulting from contact with Romance languages, and relationships with languages from other families, such as English and Dutch.

This volume offers a selection of papers from the Eleventh International Conference on English Historical Linguistics held at the University of Santiago de Compostela. From the rich programme (over 130 papers were given during the conference), the present twelve papers were carefully selected to reflect the state of current research in the fields of English historical syntax and morphology. Some of the issues discussed are the emergence of viewpoint adverbials in English and German, changes in noun phrase structure from 1650 to the present, the development of the progressive in Scots, the passivization of composite predicates, the loss of V2 and its effects on the information structure of English, the acquisition of modal syntax and semantics by the English verb WANT, or the use of temporal adverbs as attributive adjectives in the Early Modern period. Many of the articles tackle questions of change through the use of methodological tools like computerized corpora. The theoretical frameworks adopted include, among others, grammaticalization theory, Dik’s model of functional grammar, construction grammar and Government & Binding Theory.

This book presents an enlightening collection of papers contributing to theoretical discussions across many topics within the study of Romance Languages and Linguistics. The work originates from the 29th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages held in 1999 at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, although only a small subpart of the proceedings papers are included in this volume. The selected papers have been reworked for the current publication.

This volume brings together new research on theoretical Romance Linguistics; its intended audience is scholars in the field of formal grammar, especially those specializing in Romance languages. It represents the latest work on the structure of Romance languages, with relevant comparisons to other languages such as English and Basque. As the volume's title indicates, two related themes recur in these studies: the role of grammatical features in sub-modules of the grammar, and the interaction of sub-modules with each other and with external systems at the “interfaces”. The contributions to this volume, all framed within current theoretical models, explore these and related problems in the analysis of Romance. The volume contains studies on morphology, phonology, syntax and semantics, and includes language and subject indices.

This collection of papers consolidates the observation that linguistic change typically is actualized step by step: any structural innovation being introduced, accepted, and generalized, over time, in one grammatical environment after another, in a progression that can be understood by reference to the markedness values and the ranking of the conditioning features. The Introduction to the volume and a chapter by Henning Andersen clarify the theoretical bases for this observation, which is exemplified and discussed in separate chapters by Kristin Bakken, Alexander Bergs and Dieter Stein, Vit Bubenik, Ulrich Busse, Marianne Mithun, Lene Schøsler, and John Charles Smith in the light of data from the histories of Norwegian, English, Hindi, Northern Iroquoian, and Romance. A final chapter by Michael Shapiro adds a philosophical perspective. The papers were first presented in a workshop on “Actualization Patterns in Linguistic Change” at the XIV International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Vancouver, B.C. in 1999.

The topic of negotiation has turned out to be of crucial interdisciplinary interest for our understanding of what we are doing in language use. Are we exchanging meanings defined in advance and presupposing equal understanding on the basis of a rule-governed system, or are we negotiating meaning and understanding in the framework of an open dialogic universe? Negotiation, on the one hand, can be taken as the name of a specific dialogue type or action game of bargaining. On the other hand, it represents a methodological concept for describing and explaining dialogic interaction which replaces the orthodox view of pattern transference. The papers collected in this volume deal with both versions of the concept of negotiation. This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the International Conference on Pragmatics and Negotiation at Tel Aviv University and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in June, 1999. The dialogic aspect was taken as the key concept to guide the present selection.

In view of its exploratory nature, Chomsky's 'minimalist' model has undergone multiple changes, triggering in response numerous proposals that are consistent with the tendencies that it follows or anticipates, and numerous proposals that offer alternatives to it. A good illustration of the variety of 'parallel' proposals is provided in the present volume. The articles derive from papers read at the “Challenges of Minimalism” session of the Open Linguistics Forum, held in Ottawa, in March 1997. This OLF meeting started as a graduate student initiative, but because of the topic chosen, attracted a wide and international audience. The twenty contributions are grouped in five sections: I. Syntactic Structure, Relations, Operations; II. Syntactic Movement: Cyclicity, Optionality, (Non)overtness; III.Case, Topic, Focus, Interrogativity; IV. Ellipsis, Reconstruction and Related Phenomena; V. DPs: Features and Syntactic Relations.

The author addresses a number of issues in German and general phonology, using a specific problem in German phonology (the ach/ich alternation) as a springboard. These issues include especially the naturalness, or lack thereof, of the prescriptive standard in German, and the importance of colloquial pronunciations, as well as historical and dialect evidence, for phonological analyses of the “standard” language. Other important topics include the phonetic and phonological status of German /r/, the phonetic and phonological representation of palatals, the status of loanwords in phonological description, and, especially as regards the latter, the usefulness of Optimality Theory in capturing phonological facts.The book addresses itself to scholars from the fields of German and Germanic linguistics, as well as those concerned more generally with theoretical phonology (whether Lexical or Optimal). It may even appeal to the orthoëpists and lexicographers of modern German.

Together with its sister volume on Descriptive Cognitive Approaches, this volume explores the contribution which cognitive linguistics can make to the identification and analysis of overt and hidden ideologies. As a theory of language which sees language as the accumulation of the conventionalised conceptualisations of a given linguistic and/or cultural community or sub-group within it, cognitive linguistics is called upon to make its own inroads in the study of ideology. This volume offers theoretical approaches and first discusses the philosophical foundations of cognitive linguistics. The question whether cognitive linguistics is not an ideology itself is not tabooed. The speaker’s deictic centre is the anchoring point, not only for spatial, temporal or interactional deixis, but also for cultural and ideological deixis. Cognitive linguistics is also confronted with a severe Marxist critique, but the potential convergence between the two ‘philosophies’ is highlighted as well. Further the question is raised to what extent the central nervous system and the grammatical system of a language impose sexually biased, and hence ideological representations on cognition. Finally, linguistics itself is seen as a potential bearer of ideological deviations as was the case with the ‘politics of linguistics’ in Nazi Germany, and even with the quest for the Indo-European homeland in comparative and historical linguistics throughout the 19th century and well into the 20th century.

These articles provide new explorations into phonological patterns attested in the minor Romance languages (‘dialects’) spoken in Italy. The goal of this book is both theoretical and empirical. First, it aims to introduce non-Italianists to the phonological structures of the Italian dialects, including northern Gallo-Romance dialects, central and southern dialects, plus a Francoprovençal dialect spoken in southern Italy and a Catalan dialect spoken in Sardinia. Second, the collection provides readers with sophisticated analyses of complex and poorly understood and under-studied phonological phenomena. Over half of the articles contain data collected by the authors, and most of the data have not been available in English language publications. The richness of the empirical material and the sophistication of the theoretical analyses make this collection a particularly important contribution to both phonology and Romance language studies.

This book is a detailed study of French-English linguistic borrowing in Prince Edward Island, Canada which argues for the centrality of lexical innovation to grammatical change. Chapters 1–4 present the theoretical and methodological perspectives adopted along with the sociolinguistic history of Acadian French. Chapter 5 outlines the basic features of Acadian French morphosyntax. Chapter 6 provides an overview of the linguistic consequences of language contact in Prince Edward Island. Chapters 7–9 consider three particular cases of grammatical borrowing: the borrowing of the English adverb back and the semantic and syntactic reanalysis it has undergone, the borrowing of a wide range of English prepositions, resulting in dramatic changes in the syntactic behaviour of French prepositions, and the borrowing of English wh-ever words, resulting in the emergence of a new type of free relative. Chapter 10 argues for a theory of grammar contact by which contact-induced grammatical change is mediated by the lexicon.

This is the first typologically-oriented collection on Romani that is devoted to a particular thematic domain — that of noun phrase grammar. The approach taken is unique in that it places this typologically hybrid language in the centre of a general linguistic, universal discussion of the relevant noun phrase phenomena. The book is also the first assembly of articles to deal with Romani as a whole on the basis of cross-dialectal samples, offering areal-typological, dialectological, and historicalinterpretations. The individual contributions discuss morphological and syntactic aspects of nominal and pronominal inflection, definite articles, demonstratives, genitive compounding, external possession, pronominal object doubling and morphosyntactic alignment. Contributors include leading experts in the fields of noun phrase grammar, Romani dialectologists, typologists and historical linguists.

Studies on the syntactic consequences of event type in languages have shown that Aktionsart plays a role in Universal Grammar. This book contributes to the exploration of the syntax/semantics interface by presenting a thorough comparison of event and predicate types in English and Spanish. The mapping between event and syntactic predicate types, including detransitives, is given a minimalist account based on the functional categories that embed event features and on a careful analysis of the features checked by objects. As the book delves into the theoretical issue of how parameters are characterized, it presents the most comprehensive account to date of event type phenomena in Spanish, an innovative analysis of the clitic SE and a re-definition of unaccusativity. The theory is then applied to the ongoing issues in the sentence processing literature. A proposal is made for an update of the current data in light of these latest linguistic discoveries.

This volume brings together revised versions of a selection of papers presented at the Second International Conference on “Recent Advances in Natural Language Processing” (RANLP’97) held in Tzigov Chark, Bulgaria, September 1997. The aim of the conference was to give researchers the opportunity to present new results in Natural Language Processing (NLP) based both on traditional and modern theories and approaches. The conference received substantial interest — 167 submissions from more than 20 countries. The best papers from the proceedings were selected for this volume, in the hope that they reflect the most significant and promising trends (and successful results) in NLP.

The contributions have been grouped according to the following topics: tagging, lexical issues and parsing, word sense disambiguation and anaphora resolution, semantics, generation, machine translation, and categorisation and applications. The volume contains an extensive index.

Each of the contributions in this volume expresses in some way the hope that it is possible to achieve an integrity of linguistics, understood as a science of man, in its psychological, sociological, pragmatic and cultural context. The first section focuses on the history of language study, the second section on the integrative description of facets of language, and the last section on the need for the study of language in context.

This volume consists of selected and revised papers from the Seventh International Morphology Meeting, held in 1996 in Vienna. It presents advances in morphological theorizing, such as the foundations of sign-based morphology, the morphology-syntax interface, the boundaries between compounding and derivation, derivation and inflection, and the emergence of morphology from premorphological precursors in early first-language acquisition. The contributions deal with morphological analyses in various fields of the ever-widening domain of morphology and its relevance to the lexicon.

The comparative aspect is reflected in the above-mentioned areas, and through the variety of languages investigated: Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages of Europe, and Asian, African and American languages. This breadth allows valuable insights into current problems of morphological research in America, Western and Eastern Europe.

This volume presents a selection of papers from the 3rd Conference on Afroasiatic Languages, held in Sophia Antipolis, France, in 1996. The languages discussed include (varieties of) Arabic, Hebrew, Berber, Chaha, Wolof, and Old Egyptian.

This volume has its origins in a theme session entitled: “Lexical and Grammatical Classification: Same or Different?” from the Fifth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference. It includes theme session presentations, additional papers from that conference, and several invited contributions. All the articles explore the relationship between lexical and grammatical categories, both illustrating the close interaction, as well as questioning the strict dichotomy, between them. This volume promotes a holistic view of classification reflecting functional, cognitive, communication, and sign-oriented approaches to language which have been applied to both the grammar and the lexicon.

The volume is divided into two parts. Part I, Number and Gender Systems Across Languages, is further subdivided into three sections: (1) Noun Classification; (2) Number Systems; and (3) Gender Systems. Part II, Verb Systems and Parts of Speech Across Languages, is divided into two sections: (1) Tense and Aspect and (2) Parts of Speech. The analyses represent a diverse range of languages and language families: Bantu (Swahili), Guaykuruan (Pilagá), Indo-European (English, Russian, Polish, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Spanish) and Semitic (Hebrew).

About a century after the year Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) was born, his theory complex is still the object of keen interest to linguists. Rencently, scholars have argued that it was not his theory complex itself, but an over-simplified, reduced section taken out of context that has become known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that has met with so much resistance among linguists over the last few decades. Not only did Whorf present his views much more subtly than most people would believe, but he also dealt with a great number of other issues in his work. Taking Whorf’s own notion of linguistic relativity as a starting point, this volume explores the relation between language, mind and experience through its historical development, Whorf’s own writing, its misinterpretations, various theoretical and methodological issues and a closer look at a few specific issues in his work.

This volume contains functional approaches to the description of language and culture, and language and cultural change. The approaches taken by the authors range from cognitive approaches including Stratificational grammar to more socially oriented ones including Systemic Functional linguistics. The volume is organized into two sections.

The first section ‘Functional Approaches to the Structure of Language: Theory and Practice’ starts with contributions developing a Stratificational model; these are followed by contributions focusing on some related functional model of language; and by articles describing some particular set of language phenomena.

In the second section ‘Functional Approaches to the History of Language and Linguistics’ general studies of language change are addressed first; a second group of contributions examines language change, lexicon and culture; and the last cluster of contributions treats the history of linguistics and culture.

This volume contains papers on general issues of language change, as well as specific studies of non-Germanic languages, including Romance, Slavonic, Japanese, Australian languages, and early Indo-European. A second volume, edited by Richard M. Hogg and Linda van Bergen, contains papers on Germanic.

The book contains eleven articles on theoretical problems in Albanian, Hungarian, Polish, (Old) Russian, Romanian, and the South Slavic languages of Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian, and Slovenian. They cover topics such as clitics, head and phrasal movement, the structure of the DP, and clause structure. A number of papers refer to and make systematic comparisons with languages outside the region, including Breton, German, Hebrew, and Welsh. Since the papers were selected from an international conference in Spring 1998 in Szeged, Hungary, they represent the crossing of boundaries in three senses: the physical sense, by comparing genetically unrelated languages, and by examining properties of movement across categories.

The papers in this volume deal with various topics in Arabic Linguistics. Most of the papers focus on new issues and introduce new empirical generalizations that haven't been studied before within the context of Arabic linguistics. The syntax and morphosyntax papers explore issues ranging from the nature of extraction strategies to various types of Construct State representations and the proper analysis of the distribution of the nominal, adjectival and verbal mophological features. The computational linguistics papers focus on the challenge posed by the non-concatenative nature of Arabic morphology. The authors illustrate how their programs can handle Arabic morphology. The papers in morpho-phonology and historical linguistics deal with the development of the Arabic complementizer system and the empirical and theoretical problems that arise in the context of hypocoristic formation in Arabic. The sociolinguistics papers take up the issues of sociolinguistic variation as they pertain to the phenomenon of diglossia and regional uses of the Standard variety of Arabic.

After a brief survey of the perception of morphological change in the standard works of the Hispanic tradition in the 20th century, the author first attempts to refine concepts such as analogy, leveling, blending, contamination, etc. as they have been applied to Spanish. He then revisits difficult problems of Spanish historical grammar and explores the extent to which various types of morphological processes may have operated in a given change. Selected problems are examined in light of abundant textual evidence. Some include: the resistance to change of Sp. dormir ‘to sleep’, morir ‘to die’, the vocalic sequence /ee/, the reduction of the OSp. verbal suffixes -ades, -edes, -ides, -odes, and the uncertain origin of Sp. eres ‘you are’. Important notions such as the directionality of leveling, phonological vs. morphological change in the nominal and verbal paradigms, the morphological spread of sound change, and the role of morphological factors in apparent syntactic change are discussed.

This volume contains fifteen articles on current theoretical issues in Basque and Romance linguistics. Even though Basque and Romance languages are typologically different and have different genetic origins, one thousand years of coexistence have shown certain parallelisms in their respective grammars. It is Mario Saltarelli that first offered a formal linguistic account of phonological and syntactic phenomena that occur in these two language groups. Thus, this compilation of articles in both Basque and Romance linguistics not only pays tribute to Saltarelli‘s work by acknowledging his formalization of this relational insight, but also comprises state of the art research on languages with strong geographical and historical kinship.Fifteen reviewed articles written by sixteen top scholars in the field provide fresh analyses of long standing challenging phenomena in Romance and Basque linguistics such as geminates, the evolution of Basque plosives, clitic doubling, clitic clustering, directionality of clitization, the role of agreement, focus, the interaction of voice and aspect, unaccusativity, semantic interpretation and syntactic structure of Determiner Phrases, obviation, control, and anaphoric and pronominal binding. This variety of topics however is unified by limiting the contributions to the four major formal areas of linguistics, and to one single framework, Generative Grammar, although in some of its many incarnations such as Minimalism, Optimality Theory, and Relational Grammar. All this, along with the number of languages covered by the authors (Aragonese, Basque, Catalan, French, Galician, Gascon, Italian and many of its dialects (Ligurian, Piedmontese, Tuscan...), Classical and Late Latin, Occitan, Brazilian and European Portuguese, Romanian, Old and Modern Spanish among others), makes the book of great value to any linguist working in Romance or Basque linguistics.

This volume presents current research in the formal treatment of linguistic phenomena in the Romance languages. It focuses on a variety of issues in phonology, second language acquisition, semantics, and syntax. Topics in phonological theory include the analysis of geminates, assimilation, rhotics, aspiration, syllabification, the interaction of phonology with morphology, the phonology-phonetics interface, and issues of transderivation and allomorphy selection. The primary question addressed in the area of second language acquisition theory is the issue of learners' access to Universal Grammar. The studies in semantic theory examine the proper analysis of indefinites, bare plurals, and specificity, with a particular emphasis on the syntax-semantics interface. Finally, the essays on syntactic theory discuss issues pertaining to argument structure, functional projections, phrase structure and adjunction, feature checking, and the syntactic representation of tense.

This volume presents selected papers from the 5th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference within the area of discourse analysis.

The topics addressed include pronominal anaphora in English and Russian narratives, the subtleties of the definite article in English and Spanish, the use of discourse particles in Dutch, and the function of prosody as a marker of text structure in spoken narratives.

The papers illustrate the potential of the emerging cognitive linguistic paradigm to provide fresh, revealing insights in the study of discourse.

The present volume consists of nine articles dealing with the role of the constituent ‘phonological word’ (or ‘prosodic word’) in various typologically diverse languages. These languages and their respective families subsume Indo-European (Dutch, German, English, European Portuguese), Bantu (SiSwati, KiNande), Algonquian (Cree), Siouan (Dakota), and Salishan (Lushootseed). One contribution examines the phonological word in a sign language.

The theoretical issues dealt with in the book include: evidence for the phonological word (e.g. rules, phonotactics, syllabification, stress patterns), the connection between morphosyntactic and prosodic structure (e.g. alignment phenomena in Optimality Theory), and the relationship between the phonological word and other prosodic constituents (e.g. the prosodic representation of clitics).The volume will be of interest to all linguists and advanced students of linguistics working on Prosodic Phonology, phonology–morphology and phonology–syntax interface and Optimality Theory.

All of the articles in this volume focus on the interaction of form and meaning. Most of them are developed under the principal thesis of the Minimalist Program. These works show that the theoretical linguistic trend is to discover semantic aspects which are assumed to have visible syntactic repercussions through morphosyntactic and morphosemantic features.

The brain is the organ of knowledge and organizer of our abilities, our means of recognizing a face in a crowd, of conversing about anything we experience or imagine, of forming thoughts and developing ideas, of instantly understanding words coming rapidly in conversation. How does it manage all this? Does it represent information in symbols or in the connectivity of a vast network?Pathways of the Brain builds a theory to answer such questions. Using a top-down modeling strategy, it charts relationships among words and other products of the brain’s linguistic system to reveal properties of that system. Going beyond earlier linguistics, it sets three plausibility requirements for a valid neurocognitive theory: operational, developmental, and neurological: It must show how the linguistic system can operate for speaking and understanding, how it can be learned by children, and how it is implemented in neural structures. Unlike theories that leave linguistics isolated from science, it builds a bridge to biology.

Of interest to anthropologists, linguists, neurologists, neuroscientists, philosophers, psychologists, and any thoughtful person interested in language or the brain.

The author is Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Cognitive Sciences.

The formal aspects of non-concatenative morphology have received considerable attention in recent years, but the diachronic dimensions of such systems have been little explored. The current work applies a modern methodological and theoretical framework to a classic problem in Arabic and Semitic historical linguistics: the highly allomorphic system of ‘stem-internal’ or ‘broken’ plurals. It shows that widely-accepted views regarding the historical development of this system are untenable and offers a new hypothesis.
The first chapter lays out a methodology for comparative-historical research in morphology. The next two chapters present an analysis of Arabic morphology based on contemporary formal linguistic approaches, and applies this analysis to the noun plural system. Chapter Four shows that neither semantic shift nor ablaut-type sound change account adequately for the data. The fifth chapter offers a systematic comparison of the plural systems of Semitic languages, incorporating much new research on the languages of South Arabia and Ethiopia. Chapter Six proposes a new reconstruction.

This monograph aims to close the gap in our knowledge of the nature and pace of grammatical change during the formative period of today’s Indo-Aryan languages. During the 6th-12th c. the gradual erosion of the synthetic morphology of Old Indo-Aryan resulted ultimately in the remodelling of its syntax in the direction of the New Indo-Aryan analytic type.

This study concentrates on the emergence and development of the ergative construction in terms of the passive-to-ergative reanalysis and the co-existence of the ergative construction with the old and new analytic passive constructions. Special attention is paid to the actuation problem seen as the tug of war between conservative and eliminative forces during their development. Other chapters deal with the evolution of grammatical and lexical aspect, causativization, modality, absolute constructions and subordination.

This study is based on a wealth of new data gleaned from original poetic works in Apabhraṃśa (by Svayaṃbhādeva, Puṣpadanta, Haribhadra, Somaprabha et al.). It contains sections dealing with descriptive techniques of Medieval Indian grammarians (esp. Hemacandra). All the Sanskrit, Prakrit and Apabhraṃśa examples are consistently parsed and translated.

The opus is cast in the theoretical framework of Functional Grammar of the Prague and Amsterdam Schools. It should be of particular interest to scholars and students of Indo-Aryan and general historical linguistics, especially those interested in the issues of morphosyntactic change and typology in their sociohistorical setting.

Fusing insights from cognitive grammar, systemic-functional grammar and Government & Binding, the present work elaborates and refines Davidse’s view that the English grammar of lexical causatives is governed by the transitive and ergative paradigms, two distinct models of causation (Davidse 1991, 1992). However, on the basis of extensive synchronic and diachronic data on verbs of killing (e.g. kill, execute, choke or drown), it is shown that ‘transitivity’ and ‘ergativity’ are not absolute but prototypical characteristics of verbs which may be overruled by the semantics of the construal in which they occur. The variable transitive or ergative character of the verbs reveals the complex interaction between the semantics of the construction and that of the verb. The diachronic analyses further illustrate how in the course of time verbs may change their paradigmatic properties, either temporarily (e.g. the ergativization of strangle, throttle and smother) or permanently (e.g. the ‘causativization’ of starve or the partial transitivization of abort). The analyses show that these changes are semantically well-motivated and further illustrate the cognitive reality of the two causative models. The work explores the experiential basis of the prototypical paradigmatic behaviour of verbs (e.g. the ergative predilection of the SUFFOCATE verbs). In addition, it attempts to shed more light on the semantics and restrictions of certain constructions, such as the medio-passive, the derivation of adjectives in –able, or the derivation of agentive nominals in –er.

The “Nostratic” hypothesis — positing a common linguistic ancestor for a wide range of language families including Indo-European, Uralic, and Afro-Asiatic — has produced one of the most enduring and often intense controversies in linguistics. Overwhelmingly, though, both supporters of the hypothesis and those who reject it have not dealt directly with one another’s arguments. This volume brings together selected representatives of both sides, as well as a number of agnostic historical linguists, with the aim of examining the evidence for this particular hypothesis in the context of distant genetic relationships generally.

The volume contains discussion of variants of the Nostratic hypothesis (A. Bomhard; J. Greenberg; A. Manaster-Ramer, K. Baertsch, K. Adams, & P. Michalove), the mathematics of chance in determining the relationships posited for Nostratic (R. Oswalt; D. Ringe), and the evidence from particular branches posited in Nostratic (L. Campbell; C. Hodge; A. Vovin), with responses and additional discussion by E. Hamp, B. Vine, W. Baxter and B. Comrie.

This volume contains selected papers from the 27th Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages (LSRL-27), which was held at the University of California, Irvine, on February 20-22, 1997. The 22 papers deal with current issues in linguistic theory as they can be illuminated by the close analysis and comparative study of Romance languages. A majority of the articles tackles topics in syntax and semantics; the rest is divided among topics in language acquisition, phonology, morphology, and sociolinguistics. Among the well-represented Romance languages examined are (Old) French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese.

From the papers presented at the 26th LSRL, this volume offers a selection of a contributions on phonological issues and on syntax. Most of the grammatical phenomena discussed are treated within the frameworks of the Minimalist Program, Distributed Morphology, or Optimality Theory. It was apparent from the diversity of the papers delivered, that these approaches are exposing novel phenomena, which enrich and widen our knowledge and understanding of language. The analyses undertaken in these articles range over a variety of (dialects of) Romance languages.

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.

In the last decade, there has been a revival of interest regarding negation and polarity, with much cross-fertilization between semantic and syntactic approaches. The papers in the present volume address key issues regarding the syntax and semantics of negation and polarity, including both synchronic and diachronic perpectives. Central to the discussions are the distribution of negative markers and the structure of the clause, negative concord phenomena, licensing of polarity items, similarities between Neg-movement and wh-movement. The papers, by main contributors to the field, reflect different theoretical frameworks, including Principles and Parameters and Minimalist approaches, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Formal Semantics, or approaches interested in pragmatics. The volume is of interest to syntacticians, semanticians, historical linguists, typologists, and philosophers.

Although the contributors to this book do not belong to one particular ‘school’ of linguistic theory, they all share an interest in the external functions of language in society and in the relationship between these functions and internal linguistic phenomena. In this sense they all take a functional approach to grammatical issues. Apart from this common starting-point, the contributions share the aim of demonstrating the non-autonomous nature of morphology and syntax, and the inadequacy of linguistic models which deal with syntax, morphology and lexicon in separate, independent components. The recurrent theme throughout the book is the inseparability of lexis and morphosyntax, of structure and function, of grammar and society. The third and more specific common thread is case, which in some contributions is adduced to illustrate the more general point of the link between word form on the one hand and clausal and textual relations on the other hand, while in other papers it is at the centre of the discussion.

The interest of the proposed volume consists in the fact that it brings together the views of leading scholars in functional linguistics of various ‘denominations’ on the place of morphosyntax in linguistic theory. The book provides convincing argumentation against a modular theory with autonomous levels (the dominant framework in mainstream 20th century linguistics) and is a plea for further research into the connections between the lexicogrammar and the linguistic and extralinguistic context.

The basic tenet of cognitive linguistics is that every linguistic expression is a construal relation. The first section of this volume focuses on issues of such construal and presentation of information, including figure-ground relations, image-schematic structures, and the role of syntactic constructions in information structure.In sections two and three papers are presented on cross-categorial polysemy between lexical and grammatical uses of a morpheme, and between different grammatical senses, and on the relationship between earlier lexical senses and later grammatical ones.

The final section of the volume brings together studies which shed further light on transitivity and argument structure. The study of transitivity necessarily entails exploration of the relationship between syntactic constructions and the pragmatics and semantics conveyed by such constructions.

As a whole, this collection of papers gives new evidence on the complexity and motivation of the mapping between linguistic form and function and offers a wealth of new directions for research on the construction of meaning at every level of the sentence.

This is a two-volume collection of original research papers designed to reflect the breadth and depth of the impact that William Labov has had on linguistic science. Four areas of 'Labovian' linguistics are addressed: First is the study of variation and change; the papers in sections I and II of the first volume take this as their central theme, with a focus on either the social context and uses of language (I) or on the the internal linguistic dynamics of variation and change (II). The study of African American English, and other language varieties in the Americas spoken by people of African descent and influenced by their linguistic heritage, is the subject of the papers in section III of the first volume. The third theme is the study of discourse; the papers in section I of the second volume develop themes in Labovian linguistics that go back to Labov's work on narrative, descriptive, and therapeutic discourse. Fourth is the emphasis on language use, the search for discursive, interactive, and meaningful determinants of the complexity in human communication. Papers with these themes appear in section II of the second volume.

The volume brings together a selection of papers from a symposium on Conditionality held in the University of Duisburg on 25-26 March 1994.

Ten years after the Stanford symposium, the Proceedings of which were edited by Traugott et al. (1986), the area of conditionality is revisited in a synthesis of issues and aspects with insights drawn from the wider framework of general processes of conceptualisation. One major question is therefore what conceptual categories fall under conditionality or how far the notion of conditionality can be extended.

The volume represents the up-to-date research on most aspects of conditionality some of which include the relationship between conditionality, hypotheticality and counterfactuality, polarity, historical perspectives, concessives, the acquisition of conditionals.

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 includes twelve papers selected from the Ninth Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics, held at Georgetown University, Washington D.C., 1995. Three of the papers deal with codeswitching with Arabic, two with the acquisition of Arabic, and four with different aspects of Arabic grammatical structure. The volume also includes three papers presenting data on negation in some Arabic dialects (including those of Yemen, Morocco, Egypt).

The topics are diverse and include Arabic and constraints on codeswitching, verb embeddings and collocations in codeswitching, ellipsis in child language acquisition, clitic left dislocation, parameter resetting in second language acquisition, accessing pharyngeal place, and the derivation of imperatives.

In putting ‘morphonology’ up for adoption as a chapitre particulier in 1929, Trubetzkoy started a debate regarding the boundary between phonology and morphology that has not ended yet. Essentially a record of a roundtable devoted to that boundary (Montréal, October 1994), Trubetzkoy’s Orphan is a full and fascinating picture of some very important contemporary attempts to define it. In addition to papers that focus on it, the volume also contains important papers on the closely related topics of ‘morphoprosody’ and the ‘lexicon’, views from ‘the floor’ and ‘the outside’, and edited transcripts of the discussions that took place at the Montréal Roundtable.

Intended both for practicising and future phonologists and morpho-logists, Trubetzkoy’s Orphan is a valuable record of a very important debate regarding one of the most central questions in phonology and morphology.