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

This volume combines papers selected for their affinity with work on discourse analysis and language typology. The methodological platform is the authors' conviction that all linguistic work needs to be empirical in the sense that (1) generalizations are to be made on the basis of spoken texts in larger contexts, (2) generalizations are correct only as long as pertinent linguistic material does not contradict them, and (3) that linguistic categories and rules are of a temporal nature. In this sense, the contributions represent 'functional typological' comparison, often of languages not frequently investigated. The papers are arranged in 5 groups: Transitivity and voice; Clausal modality; Typology and discourse categories; Language and Culture; Functionality.

Today, the notion of 'diglossia' occupies a prominent place in sociolinguistic research. Since the 1960s, when the dominant sense of 'diglossia' was the complementary sociofunctional distribution of two varieties of the same language, the term has been applied — often controversially — to a growing number of diverse sociolinguistic situations. As a consequence of this extension of the scope of the concept, in combination with an increasing interest in the relationship between the role of language and the social structure, the number of publications in this field has risen exponentially over the last decades. However, despite the growing importance of the notion, up till now there was no adequate bibliography devoted to diglossia, while coverage in other bibliographies does not do justice to the number of works actually published in this area. This first comprehensive bibliography of the subject includes almost 3,000 entries; although the time span covered is 1960-1990, the book includes several dozens of entries from before 1960 and also a substantial number of very recent publications from the period 1990-1992. The selection of items has not been restricted to a specific definition of diglossia: all available publications in which the term (or one of its offsprings) appears have been included; moreover, when considered appropriate, some material relevant to the subject has been added even though the term is not explicitly used. The usefulness of the bibliography has been enhanced significantly by six indexes: (1) index of languages, (2) diglossia in literature, (3) historically oriented works, (4) pedagogically oriented works, (5) theoretical works, and (6) theses and dissertations.

Many linguists have believed that there is no connection between culture and language structures. This study reviews some of the literature supporting vocabulary connections, hypotheses for other connections, and critical views of this type of hypothesis. Precisely such a connection is developed employing a functional view of language and grammaticization principles. Using a world-wide probability sample of forty-nine languages, an association between culture and the grammatical coding of deictics is tested and statistically found to be corroborated to a very significant extent. Suggestions are included on how some of the concepts used and developed in this study might be extended.

Discourse Description presents in one convenient volume a variety of approaches to text description that have been proposed in the linguistic literature in the last decade or so. The book is organized to make it easy to understand and compare the various approaches. Since all of the researchers are analyzing the same text, their differences are readily seen.

The text they analyze is a letter, mailed in bulk by a Washington-based lobbying organization which is supported by contributions from donors. Far from simply informing the readers, the letter seeks to appeal to them on many levels, intellectual, emotional, and financial. It is a fascinating study in how texts do their work.

Discourse Description is expected to serve both as a research document and as a case textbook for graduate and undergraduate courses in discourse and text analysis, as well as a resource for text analysts.

Philip Luelsdorff's highly original approach to the grammar of orthography is to analyse in detail how German pupils learn about written English. In this collection of essays and experiments we are presented with the rich finds of a decade of programmatic research. The context is set with an exposition of current cognitive models of reading and spelling. Cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics meet in Luelsdorff's concept of linguistic error. This concept forms the basis from which it is possible to derive the grammar that governs our largely unconscious and vast knowledge of written words. It is proper to talk about a grammar for both orthographic and syntactic aspects of language. This is because spelling knowledge is not piecemeal or erratic but bears all the hallmarks of a system. Through second language orthography the author is showing us a new view of this advanced stage of spelling knowledge and its acquisition. This view is exciting because it seems now possible to form very detailed hypotheses as regards first language spelling about the order in which purely orthographic knowledge is developed.

This collection of original essays is intended to both celebrate Derek Bickerton's sixty-fifth birthday and honor his long and eminent career. Each author included in the volume is a noted scholar who has distinguished him/herself in some area of linguistics and has professionally or personally interacted with Bickerton and been influenced by his work. While the papers make independent thematic contributions, they also discuss, augment, present alternatives to, or are inspired in some way by Bickerton's seminal ideas or penetrating analyses. The book is organized into 5 sections, each a reflection of a major research period in Bickerton's career: Section 1: Identifying Creoles; Section 2: Language Variation; Section 3: Creole Processes; Section 4: Creole Syntax and Semantics; Section 5: Serial Verbs.

L'objectif affiché du colloque 'Le Discours aspectualisé' était d'examiner à quelles conditions on peut passer d'une conception phrastique et linguistique de l'aspect à une théorie de l'aspectualisation discursive en sémiotique. La confrontation de plusieurs disciplines et de plusieurs méthodes — linguistique générale, linguistique historique, sciences cognitives, sémiotique, entre autres — devait permettre de cerner les effets théoriques de ce changement d'objet et de dimension, et d'en mesurer, dans la mesure du possible, les répercussions épistémologiques.

This is a theoretically oriented study of the pragmatics of Vietnamese person reference (kinship terms, personal pronouns, naming set and status terms). Drawing upon linguistic data from a radically different non-Western society and the seminal insights of Volosinov, Bakhtin, and Leach, it offers a critical analysis of the major theoretical premises of dominant approaches to denotation and connotation, to knowledge of language and to knowledge of the world. The study suggests that the pragmatic presuppositions of Vietnamese person-referring forms figure in the native definitions of linguistic meanings as prominently as any denotative features. It is argued that the significance of pragmatic implications should be analyzed in relation to the native speaker's conception of the world.

Throughout the years the extent of the contributions by A. Dees to the renewal of philology, has become progressively more evident. In his Etudes sur l'evolution des demonstratifs en ancien et en moyen français (1971) Dees has developed a framework within which language evolution in the past can be reconstructed in detail. A comparison of the data of the two Atlases compiled by Dees with the manuals of Old French shows the extraordinary richness of these Atlases with respect to both the visual representation and the documentation not used previously. The first section of this volume is devoted to language variation and distribution. The renewal of the stemmatology started by Dees goes back to the early 1970s. Dees proves that there is a mathematical solution to the problem of reconstructing a genealogical tree for a text. The application of this theory to manuscripts in various languages forms the second theme of this volume.