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

The region of Najd in Central Arabia has always been regarded as inaccessible, ringed by a belt of sand deserts, the Nafūd, Dahana and the Rub’ al-Khāli and often with its population at odds with the rulers of the outer settled lands. It is however the centre of a purely Arabian culture based on a partnership between bedouin camel husbandry and settled palm cultivation. Possibly as a result of overpopulation the bedouin have periodically spread over into the lands of the Fertile Crescent. Because of their isolated position the Najdi dialect is of a very interesting and archaic type showing very little non-Arabic influence, which has led to the reputation of the Arabian bedouin as preservers of the original Classical form and considerable prestige being attached to the Najdi type. Consequently the region is a powerhouse of dialect influence so that Najdi based dialects are spoken all along the Gulf Coast and throughout most of the Syrian Desert.

Interest in these dialects has led to a number of recent studies of their oral literature and of the morphology and phonology. Ingham's work concentrates on the grammatical system, syntax and usage and is based on a number of trips to the region over the last fifteen years. The data base includes bedouin oral narrative, ordinary conversation and radio plays.

The papers in this volume reflect the renewed interest in the semantics of grammatical categories and the issues of invariance and variation in grammar. In particular, this collection presents the current understanding of invariance of grammar with respect to the synchronic and diachronic analyses of specific languages, and as realized in work on typology and universals.The book is divided into five sections: The Question of Invariance; Invariance and Grammatical Categories; Grammar and Discourse; Grammar and Pragmatics; Typology and Universals.

The 29 papers in this volume cover a wide variety of topics, ranging from the Glottalic Theory and Lachmann's Law to the hermeneutic analysis of text-structure in Tacitus' Germania. The volume focuses on three themes specifically: the morphology and semantics of lexical formation; the internal and external syntax of the noun phrase; and the pragmatics of textual cohesion. The papers are descriptive rather than historical in approach, and most of the contributors are Latinists by training. For this reason the volume will be of interest not only for philologists and general linguists but also for those working with the Latin language.

This volume unites papers given by members of the North American Association for the History of the Language Sciences (NAAHoLS) at meetings held in Washington, D.C., in March and December 1989, respectively. They represent the scope and breadth of interest of North American scholars in this growing field, ranging from linguistic concepts, ideas, and theories in the Classical Greek and Roman period to developments in grammatical theory and sociolinguistics in the second half of the 20th century, and from the study of American Indian languages in the 17th through the present century and the philosophy of language from Aristotle to John Locke, to F.B. Skinner and Chomsky. A detailed Index of Authors, including life-dates, rounds off the volume.

The text of this volume has also been published in Historiographia Linguistica XVII:1/2.

This volume challenges and extends the definition of right and right-wing discourse as traditionally conceived in male scholarship. The eleven papers share a common perspective: a critique of the ideology of 'natural difference' as the basis for oppression of the dominated group. In a radical feminist analysis, the relation of domination between the sexes is seen as central to the projects of the right, in which the constructions of 'nations', 'races' and 'gender' present variations in time and space. In its linking of oppressions, this books makes an important and timely contribution to feminist theory and puts the case for a radical and altogether coherent rethinking of right-wing political space.

Jucker endeavors to test pragmatic concepts (such as Grice’s principles of conversational inference) by applying them to concrete data. This application leads to suggestions for various modifications in the available pragmatic methodology. While pursuing this theoretical goal, he makes a significant contribution to descriptive pragmatics by offering a detailed picture of linguistically relevant aspects of news interviews, which show communicative behavior in ‘laboratory conditions’ where as many influencing factors as possible are kept stable while the influence of one specific factor at a time can be tested.

This volume is about the nature of categories in cognition and the relevance of these in language description, especially classifier systems. The classical view of categories was that they were discrete and based upon clusters of properties which were inherent to the entities. In recent years this conception has been challenged in different fields. By now prototype theory has established itself as one of the main approaches in linguistics. This volume brings classifier systems to the attention of cognitive psychologists dealing with the phenomenon of human categorization. For the general linguist it shows what can be learned from classifier systems into any theory on the nature of language organization, it will challenge some of the most entrenched notions in the field of linguistics, notions of what language is made of and how it functions.

Non-declarative sentences such as interrogatives, imperatives and exclamations are analyzed together as a single class. The author gives a general characterization of all three types and shows that there are no other types of non-declarative sentences. Definitions are offered for the notions of declaration and presupposition. These definitions are applicable to all types of sentence, both declarative and non-declarative. A defining characteristic of non-declarative sentences is that only strongly intensional operators can apply to them to form complex sentences. It is shown that this property of non-declaratives implies that such sentences do not have declarations. A particular case of the relation between questions and conditionals is studied in more detail.