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

The volume brings together a selection of papers from a symposium on Conditionality held in the University of Duisburg on 25-26 March 1994.

Ten years after the Stanford symposium, the Proceedings of which were edited by Traugott et al. (1986), the area of conditionality is revisited in a synthesis of issues and aspects with insights drawn from the wider framework of general processes of conceptualisation. One major question is therefore what conceptual categories fall under conditionality or how far the notion of conditionality can be extended.

The volume represents the up-to-date research on most aspects of conditionality some of which include the relationship between conditionality, hypotheticality and counterfactuality, polarity, historical perspectives, concessives, the acquisition of conditionals.

Extraction has traditionally been one of the main topics in generative grammar, and it retains this status in current variants of the theory. German provides a good testing ground for traditional as well as current theories of extraction. The nine contributions to this volume document the recent lively discussions on the adequate analyses of extraction constructions, on the impact of extraction on semantic interpretation, and, above all, on the question of which constructions are to be analysed as extractions and which not.

Uli Lutz gives an overview of extraction theory. Marga Reis challenges the standard analysis of extraction from verb-second clauses and opts for a parenthetic analysis. Franz d’Avis confronts current approaches to wh-islands with the facts in German and investigates the semantic properties of topicalization from wh-clauses. Sigrid Beck derives various negative island effects from a constraint on Logical Form. Jürgen Pafel relates the differences between two kinds of extraction from noun phrases to the structure of the noun phrases. Daniel Büring and Katharina Hartmann argue for the traditional analysis of extraposition as rightward movement, based on a detailed comparison with alternative accounts. Gereon Müller derives the peculiar restrictions on extraposition from a theory of improper movement. Hubert Haider defends his analysis of extraposition as a base-generated construction against his critics. Chris Wilder develops a minimalist account of extraposition and takes extraposition and coordination ellipsis to be instances of the same process.

The ten papers in this volume focus on Subject and Theme. Theme began its life as a semantic notion in the work of Vilém Mathesius, while Subject has traditionally been seen as just a syntactic entity. More recently two related perspectives on these concepts have attracted linguists' attention: the formal criteria for their recognition and the relations between the two concepts. Using the systemic functional model as their point of departure, the papers in the present volume consider the two notions in a wider context by relating them to the interpersonal and textual metafunctions of language. By contrast with the current linguistic approaches, the primary focus here is neither simply on formal recognition criteria nor on the relation of these elements to each other; instead, the notions of Subject and Theme are examined from the point of view of their function in the economy of discourse, with studies of their significance in English and French, as well as in a range of non-Indo-European languages. Definitions of the concepts are offered on the basis of their discourse functions, which are also important in selecting the formal recognition criteria and in understanding their mutually supportive role vis à vis each other.

Most of the papers in the volume are a selection from presentations made at the 19th International Systemic Functional Congress at Macquarie University.

This volume examines the relationship between young children's degrees of bilingualism and features of the verbal input which these children receive from their parents. In particular, it seeks to explore the following question: to what extent are families who follow the 'one parent-one language' principle and whose children become active bilinguals this way, different from families who take the same approach but whose children never develop an active command of the minority language? Case studies of six first-born children growing up with German and English were done during the children's third year of life. The input the children received was examined for parents' consistency of language choice, parents' insistence that the children use the appropriate language, parents' sensitivity towards the children's interactional and attentional needs, and parents' orientation towards the teaching of formal aspects of the linguistic system. The findings support the notion that raising one's children bilingually according to the 'one parent-one language' principle involves great efforts on the side of the minority language-speaking parent. Importantly, they indicate that these efforts must be invested in the child's education turn-by-turn.

The Danish scholar Jan Pinborg (1937-1982) made outstanding contributions to our understanding of medieval language study. The papers in this volume clearly demonstrate the wealth of Pinborg's scholarly interests and the extent of his influence.Though centered on medieval theories of grammar and language, the collection ranges in time from the fourth century B.C. to the seventeenth century A.D.; theories of the pronoun, of mental language, of supposition, of figurative expressions and of mereology are among the topics discussed; and the papers deal with both humble anonymous teachers of grammar and with such well-known men as Aristotle, Plotinus, Augustine, Peter of Spain, Roger Bacon, Robert Kilwardby, Thomas Aquinas, Dante, William of Ockham, Domingo de Soto, and Suárez. The papers are in English, German, or French.

This is the first book to give a comprehensive view of the work of Otto Jespersen (1860-1943), the Danish linguist who is perhaps best known for his monumental work A Modern English Grammar on Historical Principles. The articles in this volume show the wide range of Jespersen's interests and discuss the influence of his contribution to the study of language.

Collected here are eleven papers devoted to various aspects of the orthography/phonology interface. Topics include spelling-to-sound correspondence for English, French, and Russian, the design of a generative phonology for orthography data-base access, the linguistic sign and orthographic and phonological error, the analysis of Greenlandic school children’s spelling errors, the orthographic representation of phonemic nasalization and its implications for prosodic theory, the psycholinguistics of phonological recoding in reading, orthography as a variable in psycholinguistic experiments, spelling and dialect, orthography and the typology of phonological rules, and orthography and historical phonology.

This essay concerns the analysis of speech act verbs. It offers a range of ideas which form theoretical preliminaries to the analysis of this phenomenon.