Subject collection: Linguistics (2,773 titles, 1967–2015)

I denne bog foretager forfatteren en undersøgelse af de fire afsnit i kong Alfreds The Old English Orosius, hvori gammelt dansk område beskrives.Efter en forskningsoversigt imødegås de forestillinger, som flere tidligere forskere har dannet sig om, at kong Alfred – navnlig i Skandinavien – har anvendt en nordretning, som afviger fra den astronomiske. Ud fra tværfaglige synspunkter følger forfatteren den opfattelse, at forholdet mellem sprog og omverden ikke nødvendigvis er vilkårligt, og der stilles mere indtrængende spørgsmål til de forekommende lokaliteters geografiske beliggenhed end i den hidtidige historiske litteratur.

Ved gennemgangen af teksten følges det system, som først er opstillet af Laborde i 1925, og det vises, at beskrivelsen af østfrankernes og oldsaksernes naboer samt af de nordiske folk kunne være resultatet af rejser, som er foretaget af to af de medarbejdere ved værket, som vi kender navnene på fra de skriftlige kilder (Grimbald og Johannes).

Efter en gennemgang af de to afsnit, der sædvanligvis omtales som 'Ottars og Wulfstans rejsebeskrivelser', vises det, at disse tekster snarere er resultatet af kong Alfreds redaktion af værket.

This volume contains a fragment from Aristotle’s Peri Hermeneias [16a1–17a7], with a translation into English and a commentary. This fragment is crucial to the understanding of Aristotle’s thinking about language. It is followed by (translations of) commentaries on Aristotle’s text by scholars between 500 and 1750, showing how his text was perceived over time. The commentaries are by Ammonius, Boethius, Abelaerd, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Acquinas, Martinus de Dacia, Johannes a S. Thoma, and James Harris. Each commentary is in turn commented upon by the compiler of this volume.

The contributions in the first part ‘Re-modelling logic’ of this volume take account of formal logic in the theory of ‘rational’ argumentation. Part two contains papers that distinguish the various dialogue games for logics in terms of ‘rights’ and ‘obligations’ of the players. The authors following in the third section study the interaction between participants in a dialogue. Here the tools of the logician are used for the wider purpose of studying the nature of dialogue. The fourth section concern modes of argumentation that are actually found in philosopical texts from earlier centuries. To be followed by contributions in Part five that may be read as attempts to retrieve what was left of the spirit of criticism and debate in philosphy after the onslaught of Cartesianism and idealism.

The authors present a comprehensive overview of past research in ambiguity in the field of psycholinguistics. Experimental results have often been equivocal in allowing a choice between the single-reading hypothesis and the multiple-reading hypothesis of processing of ambiguous sentences. This text reviews the arguments and experimental results in support of each of these views, and further investigates the contributions of context and thematic constraints in the process of ambiguity resolution. Commentary is also made on the possible hierarchical ordering of difficulty in the treatment of ambiguity, as well as critically related considerations like bias, individual differences, general cognitive strategies for dealing with multiphase representations, and the inherent differences between lexical and syntactic ambiguity.

This volume provides an analysis of a famous medieval Arabic grammatical text, al-Ājurrūmiya (c. 1300), as commented on by aš-Šhirbīnī (d. 1570). This edition includes the original text and a translation into English, as well as extensive comments and annotations, with the aim of making accessible both to Arabists and non-Arabists the main elements of indigenous Arabic linguistics, and thereby at least partially filling a large blank in the history of linguistics.

Intuitively, it is clear why languages have anaphoric relations: anaphora reduces redundancy, thereby shortening (and hence simplifying) sentences. In order for this simplification to be possible, however, it is necessary that the speaker of a language be able to identify correctly the elements participating in an anaphoric relation and to determine correctly the meaning of the anaphor on the basis of meaning of the antecedent. If a grammar is to reflect the linguistic competence of a native speaker of a language, it must include mechanisms of associating anaphor and antecedent. In this volume the following questions will be considered: What sorts of mechanisms are best suited for representing anaphora in a grammar? What are the conditions on the rule(s) associating anaphors with antecedents? Do the various cases of anaphora form a linguistically significant class of phenomena, and, if so, how can the grammar capture this fact? And what do these answers entail for linguistic theory?

There are indications that interest in the study of adverbs has been growing steadily in recent years, largely due to the so-called Chomskyan revolution in linguistics which put much emphasis on the study of syntax, but probably also because of the position these adverbs and other particles take within a syntactic string has proved to be much more difficult to determine than had previously been thought. Still another reason for the increase of interest in this topic may be found in the recent trend in linguistics which focusses on communicative competence and actual language use in daily discourse. Although this bibliography has no claim to exhaustiveness, it should nonetheless be useful to researchers working on adverbs and comparatives. The titles selected relate in one way or another to the problems the linguist faces with respect to the adverb.

The publication in 1816 of Bopp’s Über das Conjugationssystem can be considered the beginning of a systematic comparison of Indo-European languages, and thus as having led too the development of the study of language as a science, distinct from philology. The Analytical Comparison (1820) represents not merely a translation into English, as has been claimed in the literature, but a significant advance in theoretical clarity and methodological soundness.

This reprint is accompanied by a bio-bibliographical account of Bopp by J. D. Guigniaut, an introduction to Analytical Comparison by Friedrich Techmer, and a letter to Bopp by Wilhelm von Humboldt. Furthermore, the editor, E. F. K. Koerner, has added a Foreword, select bibliography, and index.

Wie die hier vorgelegten Untersuchung zeigen möchte, bietet die Arithmetik aus Euklids Elementen besonders gute Chancen für einen Erfolg bei der Suche nach Spuren, die das Wissen der Völker des Alten Orients in der griechischen Mathematik hinterlassen hat. Dazu kommt, daß uns eine Reihe von Tontafeln aus dem Alten Orient eine erste Einsicht in gewisse Rechen- und Begründungsmethoden bieten, die man dort spätestens seit dem 3. vorchristlichen Jahrtausend anzuwenden wußte. Zu der Vorstufe der Keilschrift, in der diese Texte abgefaßt sind, gehören nämlich Ziffern und metrologische Zeichen, die erkennen lassen, daß ihre Schreiber beim Lösen von arithmetischen Aufgaben Rechensteine zu benutzen pflegten. Dieser operative Umgang mit Rechensteinen, der in, den Schreiberschulen immer neuen 'Schülergenerationen' vermittelt worden ist, führte bereits im Alten Mesopotamien zur Entdeckung und Begründung einer Reihe von Einsichten, die methodisch und inhaltlich zu den Anfängen der griechischen Arithmetik gehören, doch das wird erst im Rahmen der nachfolgend zur Diskussion gestellten Untersuchungen deutlich werden.