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

An in-depth investigation of constraints on error variables in grammar with special reference to bilingual misspelling orthographies. A corpus of errors is examined in minute detail. In the course of this analysis, received categories and standard assumptions about linguistic errors are critically scrutinized; some are sharpened, and others are abandoned. Many conceptual snarls having to do with the notion of error in linguistic performance are untangled in this book.

The Charmides is among Plato's most intriguing and perplexing dialogues. The range of subjects touched or treated is extremely wide: matters logical, epistemological, moral, ethical, political, and religious. In many cases, these are discussed in a highly inconclusive and aporetic way, especially when it comes to the subject of knowledge. Finally, the dialogue is also difficult on almost every level of its expression; mock-reasonings, misunderstandings, ironies, paradoxes, and perplexities abound. As a result, the run of its many arguments, both on the short and the long range, and its overall structure are not easy to discern. If a text of such a character is to be made completely accessible, a full-scale commentary is required; it is much to be regretted, therefore, that there is no commentary in which the difficulties of the Greek, the argument, and the place of the philosophical problems in the development of Plato's thought are comprehensively and coherently explained. This monograph does not aspire to that status, but makes an essential contribution towards achieving that aim (in addition to the many other works in the field, Lamb's scrupulous translation of 1927 and Bloch's penetrating study of 1973 in particular) by presenting a detailed examination of forty-two passages of which the interpretation is disputed; many more minor problems are dealt with along the way. In all matters of interpretation, special attention has been paid to defining the exact place of the passage within the run of the, often intricate, argument. The result of this attention can also be observed in an analytical 'Summary of the contents of the Charmides'.

This monograph is about the semiotics of lexical signs, and is of particular interest for historical linguists, in particular those interested in etymology. Specialists in linguistic change have long noticed that certain classes of words seem to be in part exempt from regular patterns of sound change, or perhaps more likely to undergo unusual analogical shifts. The problem is far worse for the etymologist, since the lexicon of every language contains some hundreds of semiotically problematic vocables which must, if the etymological dictionaries are ever to be completed, be explained somehow. Always been struck by the sheer capriciousness of etymologies in which some sort of unusual form-meaning relations are involved, the author, with the help of C.S. Peirce, provides answers to crucial questions in his search to make sense of those capricious etymologies.

This volume presents a rather complete survey of the research activities of the Prague group of algebraic linguistics. Some of the papers included bear witness to the fact that algebraic linguistics, or the formal description of language, is not the only domain in which the Prague group is active. Typological and empirically oriented discussions are represented as well, and so are accounts of some of the experimental systems from the domains of computational linguistics and natural language comprehension. Most of the papers included here have been published (partly in Czech) in periodicals and miscellanies, some of which are not easily accessible; a smaller part consists of papers written specifically for the present volume. The volume is divided into four sections, the first of which contains generally oriented papers. The second section consists of contributions devoted to the core of the empirical problems of sentence structure. The third section includes papers concerning specific questions of the syntax of Czech, and section four is oriented towards the experimental systems prepared by the Prague group.

This volume is about the Anglophone creoles to be found on the Caribbean coast of Central America (Belize, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama), and its offshore islands (Providencia, San Andrés and the Caymans) . The study of these Anglophone varieties is comparatively recent and based on current field work from Belize to Panama. One of the interesting features that emerges is the tentative map of diachronic and synchronic relationsships among the Anglophone creoles of the Caribbean, as illustrated partly by the lexicon and partly by grammatical constructions. The studies in this book are based on phonetic transcriptions of speech acts in their social and linguistic context.

René Thom, the famous French mathematician and founder of catastrophe theory, considered linguistics an exemplary field for the application of his general morphology. It is surprising that physicists, chemists, biologists, psychologists and sociologists are all engaged in the field of catastrophe theory, but that there has been almost no echo from linguistics. Meanwhile linguistics has evolved in the direction of René Thom’s intuitions about an integrated science of language and it has become a necessary task to review, update and elaborate the proposals made by Thom and to embed them in the framework of modern semantic theory.

This monograph fills a gap in our understanding of a so-called free word order language. Thus far many observations have been made on Latin word order, particularly within the noun phrase. Yet a more systematic investigation with respect to the order of the sentence consituents was still lacking, that is, till the arrival of the current monograph The Communicative Perspective in the Sentence: A Study of Latin Word Order. This excellent research monograph on the order of the sentence consituents in a particular, typologically ambivalent language, will be welcomed by both Latinists and general linguists.

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.

New edition, prepared with a bio-bibliographical account of Hehn and a survay of the research into Indo-European prehistory by James P. Mallory.

It was Hehn who for the first time combined the tools of comparative linguistics and the direct historical approach in order to discover the origins of domesticated animals and cultivated plants in the ancient world, tracing their diffusion from one culture to another. Hehn abandoned his contemporaries’often idealized and nationalistic image of the ancient Indo-Europeans, seeking instead to reconstruct early Indo-European society in agreement with the ethnological research of his day.