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

The area around the Baltic Sea has for millennia been a meeting-place for people of different origins. Among the circum-Baltic languages, we find three major branches of Indo-European —Baltic, Germanic, and Slavic, the Baltic-Finnic languages from the Uralic phylum and several others. The circum-Baltic area is an ideal place to study areal and contact phenomena in languages. The present set of two volumes look at the circum-Baltic languages from a typological, areal and historical perspective, trying to relate the intricate patterns of similarities and dissimilarities to the societal background. In Volume II, selected phenomena in the grammars of the circum-Baltic languages are studied in a cross-linguistic perspective.

This volume contains revised and extended versions of a selection of the papers presented at “The Amsterdam Workshop on Language Contact and Creolization.” These studies apply the concept of relexification to creoles as well as other contact languages; highlight the relevance of strategies of second language learning for theories of pidgin/creole genesis; critically discuss the notions levelling (koine formation) and convergence; the relation between types of contact situations and processes of crosslinguistic influence; as well as the linguistic consequences of the social structure of the plantation system. In addition to discussing English-, French-, and Dutch-related creoles, the papers cover a wide range of contact languages spoken throughout Africa, Asia, and Europe. The breadth and coverage makes this an indispensable title for research in the field of contact linguistics.

The book defines the concept of Semantic-Communicative Structure [= Sem-CommS]-a formal object that is imposed on the starting Semantic Structure [= SemS] of a sentence (under text synthesis) in order to turn the selected meaning into a linguistic message. The Sem-CommS is a system of eight logically independent oppositions: 1. Thematicity (Rheme vs. Theme), 2. Givenness (Given vs. Old), 3. Focalization (Focalized vs. Non-Focalized), 4. Perspective (Foregrounded vs. Backgrounded), 5. Emphasis (Emphasized vs. Non-Emphasized), 6. Presupposedness (Presupposed vs. Non-Presupposed), 7. Unitariness (Unitary vs. Articulated), 8. Locutionality (Communicated vs. Signaled). The values of these oppositions mark particular subnetworks of the starting SemS and thus allow for the distinction between sentences such as (a) A man killed a dog vs. The dog was killed by a man, (b) John washed the window vs. It was John who washed the window or (c) It hurts! vs. Ouch! The proposed Sem-Comm-oppositions are conceived as an attempt at sharpening the well-known notions of Topic ~ Comment, Focus, etc. Possible linguistic strategies for expressing the values of the Sem-Comm-oppositions in different languages are discussed at some length, with linguistic illustrations.

The book offers a combined discussion of the main theoretical, methodological and application issues related to corpus work. Thus, starting from the definition of what is a corpus and why reading a corpus calls for a different methodology from reading a text, the underlying assumptions behind corpus work are discussed.

The two main approaches to corpus work are discussed as the “corpus-based” and the “corpus-driven” approach and the theoretical positions underlying them explored in detail. The book adopts and exemplifies the parameters of the corpus-driven approach and posits a new unit of linguistic description defined systematically in the light of corpus evidence. The applications where the corpus-driven approach is exemplified are language teaching and contrastive linguistics. Alternating between practical examples and theoretical evaluation, the reader is led step-by-step to a detailed understanding of the issues involved in corpus work and, at the same time, tempted to explore for himself some of the major applications where a corpus-driven methodology can reveal unprecedented insights into linguistic patterning.

This book contains fourteen articles that reflect current ideas on the phonology, morphology, and syntax of clitics. It covers the forms and functions of clitics in various typologically diverse languages and presents data from, e.g. European Portuguese, Macedonian, and Yoruba. It extensively deals with the prosodic structure of clitics, their morphological status, clitic placement, and clitic doubling. The form and behavior of clitics with respect to tonal phenomena and in verse are discussed in two articles (Akinlabi & Liberman, Reindl & Franks). Other articles address the prosodic representation of clitics in Irish (Green), the differences in the acquisition of clitics and strong pronouns in Catalan (Escobar & Gavarro), the similarities between clitics and affixes or words in Romance and Bantu languages (Cocchi, Crysmann, Monachesi, Ortman & Popescu), the semantics of clitics in the Greek DP and in Spanish doubling (Alexiadou & Stavrou, Uriagereka), and complex problems concerning verbal clitics in Romanian and Balkan languages (Legendre, Spencer, Tomic).

These new studies by prominent neuroscientists, psychologists and philosophers work toward a coherent framework for understanding emotion and its contribution to the functioning of consciousness in general, as an aspect of self-organizing, embodied subjects. Distinguishing consciousness from unconscious information processing hinges on the role of motivating emotions in all conscious modalities, and how emotional brain processes interact with those traditionally associated with cognitive function. Computationally registering/processing sensory signals (e.g. in the occipital lobe or area V4) by itself does not result in perceptual consciousness, which requires subcortical structures such as amygdala, hypothalamus, and brain stem. This interdisciplinary anthology attempts to understand the complexity of emotional intentionality; why the role of motivation in self-organizing processes is crucial in distinguishing conscious from unconscious processes; how emotions account for ‘agency’; and how an adequate approach to emotion-motivation can address the traditional mind-body problem through a holistic understanding of the conscious, behaving organism.

(Series B)

Discourse anaphora is a challenging linguistic phenomenon that has given rise to research in fields as diverse as linguistics, computational linguistics and cognitive science. Because of the diversity of approaches these fields bring to the anaphora problem, the editors of this volume argue that there needs to be a synthesis, or at least a principled attempt to draw the differing strands of anaphora research together. The selected papers in this volume all contribute to the aim of synthesis and were selected to represent the growing importance of corpus-based and computational approaches to anaphora description, and to developing natural language systems for resolving anaphora in natural language.

This book is concerned with a number of central issues in the theory of clitics, a topic that has become much debated in recent years. Mainly written within a recent generative framework, its contrastive approach discusses these issues against the background of a number of European languages, among which the Balkan Slavic languages figure prominently. The question as to whether clitics are to be located in the syntax or in the phonology or in both is addressed in articles by Boškovič, Progovac and Franks, who also provides a thorough introductory essay to the volume. There are detailed studies on clitic behavior in Greek relative clauses (Alexiadou and Anagnostopolou), Bulgarian and English DPs (Dimitrova-Vulchanova), the various Romance languages (Franco), Slovene (Golden and Milojevič Sheppard), Albanian and Greek (Kallulli) and Macedonian (Tomič). Finally, the book contains a discourse-related description of clitic doubling in Balkan Slavic languages (Schick). The book should be of interest to any scholar, theoretical or descriptive, whose research touches upon the central phenomenon of cliticisation.

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.

Cognitive linguistics is nothing if not an interdisciplinary and comparative enterprise. This collection addresses both the implications OF and the implications FOR cognitive linguistics of psycholinguistic, computational, neuroscientific, cross-cultural and cross-linguistic research.

Until very recently, coherence (unlike cohesion) was widely held to be a ‘rather mystical notion’. However, taking account of new trends representing a considerable shift in orientation, this volume aims at helping relieve coherence of its mystifying aura. The general bibliography which concludes the book bears witness to this intriguing development and the rapidly changing scene in coherence research. Preceding this comprehensive up-to-date Bibliography on Coherence are 13 selected papers from the 1997 International Workshop on Coherence at the University of Augsburg, Germany. They share a number of theoretical and methodoligical assumptions and reflect a trend in text and discourse analysis to move away from reducing coherence to a product of (formally represented) cohesion and/or (semantically established) connectivity. Instead, they start from a user- and context-oriented interpretive understanding and rely on authentic data throughout in relating micro-linguistic to macro-linguistic issues. The first group of papers looks at the (re-)creation of coherence in, inter alia, reported speech, casual conversation, argumentative writing, news reports and conference contributions. The second group describes the negotation of coherence in oral examinations, text summaries and other situations that require special efforts on the part of the recipient to overcome misunderstandings and other disturbances. The third group discusses theoretical approaches to the description of coherence.

Toward the end of the 20th century, there is both a dissatisfaction with existing formal semantic theories and a wish to preserve insights from other semantic traditions. Cognitive semantics, the latest of the major trends which have dominated the century, attempts to do this by focusing on meaning as a cognitive phenomenon. This book provides different perspectives on meaning as a cognitive phenomenon. Jens Allwood presents an approach where meaning is analyzed in terms of context sensitive cognitive operations. Peter Gärdenfors examines the relationship between cognitive semantics and standard formal extensional and intensional semantics. Peter Harder discusses the relation between functionalism and cognitive semantics. Sören Sjöström and +ke Viberg extend a cognitive semantic approach to new empirical domains like vision and physical contact. Elisabeth Engberg Pedersen extends the use of cognitive semantics even further in order to analyze deaf sign language and, finally, Kenneth Holmqvist and Jordan Zlatev discuss two different possibilities of implementing a cognitive semantic approach using computer programs.

The variety of perspectives on cognitive semantics make this book suitable as course material.

Contrastive lexical semantics was the main topic of an International Workshop at the University of Münster in May, 1997. It was addressed from different perspectives, from the pragmatic perspective of a corpus-oriented approach as well as from the model-oriented perspective of sign theoretic linguistics. Whereas the rule-governed model-oriented approach is necessarily restricted to subsets of vocabulary, the pragmatic approach aims to analyse and describe the whole vocabulary-in-use. After the pragmatic turn, lexical semantics can no longer be seen as a discipline on its own but has to be developed as an integral part of a theory of language use. Essential features of individual languages can be discovered only by looking beyond the limits of our mother languages and including a contrastive perspective. Within a pragmatic, corpus-oriented approach essential new ideas are discussed, mainly the insight that single words can no longer be considered to be the lexical unit. It is the complex multi-word lexical unit a pragmatic approach has to deal with.

This comparative study of Chinese and English metaphor contributes to the search for metaphoric universals by placing the contemporary theory of metaphor in a broad cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective. The author explores to what degree abstract reasoning is metaphorical and which conceptual metaphors are culture specific, wide spread or universal in a cognitive and cultural context.

The empirical studies presented reinforce the view that metaphor is the main mechanism through which abstract concepts are comprehended and abstract reasoning is performed. They also support, from the perspective of Chinese, the candidacy of some conceptual metaphors for metaphorical universals. These include, for instance, the ANGER IS HEAT metaphor, the HAPPY IS UP metaphor (emotions), the TIME AS SPACE metaphor, and the Event Structure Metaphor. It seems that these conceptual metaphors are grounded in some basic human experiences that may be universal to all human beings.

The present volume is a collection of fifteen original articles that include descriptive, typological and/or theoretical studies of a number of morphosyntactic phenomena, such as case, transitivity, grammaticalization, valency alternations, etc., in a variety of languages or language groups, and discussions concerning theoretical issues in specific grammatical frameworks. The collection, written in honor of the Australian linguist Barry J. Blake on his 60th birthday, thematically reflects the field that Professor Blake has worked in over the past three decades. The volume will be of special interest to researchers in morphosyntax, and linguistic typology. In addition, scholars in discourse grammar, historical linguistics, theoretical syntax, semantics, language acquisition, and language contact will find articles of interest in the book.

Conditionals encode speculation. They convey how events could have been different in the past or present, or might be different in the future if particular conditions had been or will be met. While all languages afford the means to speculate or hypothesize about possible events, the ways in which they do so vary. This work explores some of this variation through an analysis of the stucture and semantics of complex conditional sentences in Russian and Macedonian. It addresses typological questions about the general properties of natural language conditionals and examines the role of the grammatical categories tense, aspect, mood and status in the coding of conditional meaning. The book also discusses the relationship between the use of these categories and the shape of a language’s conditional system. For example, the use of tense in counterfactual contexts in Macedonian correlates with the grammaticalization of more shades of conditional meaning than are grammaticalized in Russian, which does not employ tense forms in this way. The study draws on data from a rich variety of sources and thus includes kinds of conditionals overlooked in many other studies. The book addresses issues of concern to Slavists and raises questions for those interested in conditionals and the coding of hypothetical meaning.

In conjunction with two other volumes, which are scheduled to appear later, The Continental Backgrounds of English and its Insular Development until 1154 aims at giving a comprehensive survey of what by the author is seen as the most interesting aspects of the long history of English from its embryonic stages to the language spoken today in England and America. The present volume spans the period up to A.D. 1154, the year inaugurating the Plantagenet era in England and the year of the last events to be recorded in the annals of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

The papers in this volume were originally presented at the Symposium on Conversation, held at the University of New Mexico in July 1995. The symposium brought together scholars who work on face-to-face communication from a variety of perspectives: social, cultural, cognitive and communicative. Our aim for both the symposium and this volume has been to challenge some of the prevailing dichotomies in discourse studies: First, the cleavage between the study of information flow and the study of social interaction. Second, the theoretical division between speech-situation models and cognitive models. Third, the methodological split between the study of spontaneous conversation in natural context and the study of speech production and comprehension under controlled experimental conditions. And fourth, the rigid genre distinction between narrative and conversational discourse.

All four dichotomies have been useful either methodologically or historically. But important as they may have been in the past, the time has perhaps come to work toward an integrated approach to the study of human communication, one that will be less dependent on narrow reductions.

Both the ontological primacy and the methodological challenge of natural face-to-face communication are self evident. Human language has evolved, is acquired, and is practiced most commonly in the context of face-to-face communication. Most past theory-building in either linguistics or psychology has not benefited from the study of face-to-face communication, a fact that is regrettable and demands rectification. We hope that this volume tilts in the right direction.

This study is based on the writings and teaching of Gustave Guillaume (1883-1960), one of the earliest proponents of what is today called Cognitive Linguistics. It offers (1) a much needed presentation in English of Guillaume’s view of the French system, (2) the clarifications added by his successors, and (3) much empirical detail added by the author from his own extensive experience with the material.

The word system in this work, as explained in the very first chapter, is intended in the Saussurian sense of a closed set of contrasts. The method is first briefly applied to English, in order to familiarize the reader with the methodological concepts and terminology, and comparisons are made with the general outline of the French system.

The major sub-systems of the French verb are analysed in the four central chapters (4-7) entitled Aspect, Voice, Tense, Mood, followed by a chapter on systemic comparison, and two final chapters of detailed analysis of the verbal morphology and its relevance to the cognitive system.

Although there is a substantial amount of linguistic research on standard language acquisition, little attention has been given to the mechanisms underlying second dialect acquisition. Using a combination of function-based grammar and sociolinguistic methodology to analyze topic marking strategies, the unguided acquisition of a standard by speakers of nonstandard varieties is examined in two distinct linguistic and geographical situations: in a Caribbean creole situation (Belize), with special attention to the acquisition of acrolects by native speakers of basilects, and in a noncreole situation (PRC), documenting the acquisition of standard Chinese (Putonghua) by speakers of nonstandard varieties represented in Cultural Revolution literature, Wuhan Chinese, and Suzhou Wu story-telling style. In both cases psychosocial factors, linguistic bias toward nonnative renderings of the standard varieties, the social status of their speakers, and related political and educational consequences play an important role in the development of second dialects. The broad-ranging analysis of a single feature of oral discourse leads to the formulation of cross-linguistic generalizations in acquisition studies and results in an evaluation of the putative uniqueness of creole languages. Related issues addressed include the effect of linguistic bias on the development and use of language varieties by marginalized groups; the interaction of three major language components — semantics, syntax, and pragmatics — in spontaneous communication; and the development of methods to identify discourse units. The ultimate goal underlying the comparison of specific discourse variables in Belizean and Chinese standard acquisition is to evaluate the relative merits of substratal, superstratal, and universal explanations in language development.

The purpose of this study is the systematic description of a set of data called Adjectives in Korean, which reduces to a minimum theoretical preoccupations and abstract formalisations with no practical applications. The framework of our research is the Lexicon-grammar, whose fundamental idea is that the minimal meaningful unit is the simple sentence and not an isolated word. This work is constituted as follows: given that the corpus extracted from current dictionaries is insufficient for our purpose, we will reconstitute a complete corpus: first, with a formal definition, and then according to some other principles discussed in the first section. With this more complete corpus (5300 items), we will examine in the second section general syntactic properties of adjectival constructions. The third section is devoted to the description of 15 classes of adjectival structures. These syntactic classes will be represented in the form of tables in the annex. The results obtained in this work are indispensable at least for the following activities: first, the elaboration or verification of a linguistic theory demands a priori examination and systematic description of empirical data; furthermore, a syntactic description of lexical data, which is as exhaustive as possible, has a particular interest in the perspective of the elaboration of a lexicon suitable for computer processing of natural language.L’objectif de cette étude est la description systématique d’un ensemble de données dit Adjectifs en coréen, en réduisant au minimum les préoccupations théoriques et les formalisations abstraites et éloignées des faits. Notre démarche s’inscrit dans le cadre du Lexique-grammaire, dont l’idée fondamentale est que l’unité minimale de sens est la phrase simple et non le mot isolé. Ce travail est constitué de la manière suivante: étant donné que le corpus extrait des dictionnaires actuels est insuffisant pour notre objectif, on reconstituera un corpus complet: d’abord avec une définition formelle, et ensuite selon certains autres principes dont nous parlerons dans la première partie; une fois ce corpus constitué (5300 items), on examinera dans la deuxième partie, les propriétés syntaxiques générales des constructions adjectivales; la troisième partie est consacrée à décrire 15 classes de structures adjectivales. Ces classes syntaxiques se présentent sous la forme des tables dans l’annexe. Les résultats que nous avons obtenus dans ce travail sont indispensables au moins pour les deux activités suivantes: d’abord, une élaboration ou une vérification d’une théorie linguistique exige préalablement l’examen et la description systématique de données empiriques; par ailleurs, une description syntaxique des données lexicales, aussi exhaustive que possible, a un intérêt particulier dans la perspective de l’élaboration d’un lexique adéquat au traitement informatique du langage naturel.

This collection of papers offers an alternative to mainstream functional linguistics on two points. Especially in American linguistics, function and structure are often viewed almost as polar opposites; in addition, structure is often understood as being only a matter of linguistic form — or expression — as opposed to content. The book tries to illustrate why function and structure must be understood as mutually dependent in relation to language — and why the most interesting aspect of language structure is the way it structures the content side of language. In this, the book represents a reaffirmation of traditional concerns in structural linguistics, especially with respect to the structural integrity of individual languages — but with a reversal of traditional priority: structure is not autonomous, but must be understood on the basis of function. Without being hostile to typological and universal generalizations, the articles suggest that similarities between languages can only be responsibly discussed on the basis of an understanding that includes a respect for language differences.

The book contains discussions of a number of different languages including Nahuatl, Danish Sign Language, French, and Tlapanec, and focuses on the way meaning is organized in the grammar of Danish. A final section sums up theoretical perspectives.

The language of the First Riustring Manuscript, dating from ca. 1300 AD, represents the most archaic stage of Old Frisian. The mainly legal texts are famous for their historical value. However, a grammatical treatise of this important codex is still lacking. This book is meant to meet this need. It contains an inventory of the linguistic evidence as well as a synchronic study of the grammar. Moreover, historical linguistic problems are discussed wherever relevant. The book is intended for all students of Old Frisian, not just linguists but also legal historians, philologists, historians, and others.

The objective of this book is to better acquaint English-speaking linguistics with a corpus of texts hitherto untranslated, containing the cognitive-based research in formal linguistics of one of the most important theoreticians in the field: Antoine Culioli (b. 1924). Culioli's viewpoint is grounded in Emile Benveniste's (1902-1976) revolutionary answer to Saussure's opposition between competence (langue) and performance (parole) captured in the idea of énonciation, in which the relationship between an individual and a language is one of appropriation. The translation has been prepared to provide the reader with as obstacle-free a path as one can clear to a theory that requires, and indeed commands, a very close, attentive reading. As an additional aid to understand Culioli's argument, footnotes throughout the work show similarities and differences with the work of the cognitive linguist Ronald W. Langacker.