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

The purpose of this book is to illustrate the relevance to linguistics today of Whitehead’s philosophy of organism. Although largely ignored by linguists, Whitehead has in fact much to say as regards the cognitive processes underpinning language pattern. His theory of symbolism conceives of language as the ‘systematization of expression’, and relates meaning to feeling (in the broadest sense). The Whiteheadian perspective allows a synthesis of the psychological and the social approaches to language that does not fall into one or another fashionable form of reductionism. The volume represents a first application of Whitehead’s thinking to a broad range of linguistic phenomena, ranging from speech act theory to the production and comprehension of texts, from language acquisition to historical change and the evolution of language. It is argued that Whitehead’s holistic philosophy is uniquely suited to the view of language as an emergent phenomenon — regardless of whether one’s approach to cognition is via the ‘nativist’ or the ‘functionalist’ route.

It is increasingly clear that, in order to understand language as a phenomenon, we must understand the phenomenon of text. Our primary experience of language comes in the form of texts, which embody the complete communicative events through which our language-using lives are lived. These events are shaped by communicative needs, and this shaping is reflected in certain characteristic patterns in the texts. However, the nature of texts and text is still elusive: we know which forms are typically found in text but we do not yet have a full grasp of how they constitute its textuality, how they make a text “tick”. The twelve contributions to this volume show how texts across a wide range of text types hold together by different patterns of chunking and linking. The common purpose in all the contributions is to explore the nature of text patterning as the functional environment within which language operates.

There is a continual growth of interest among linguists of all-theoretical denominations in grammaticalization, a concept central to many linguistic (change) theories. However, the discussion of grammaticalization processes has often suffered from a shortage of concrete empirical studies from one of the best-documented languages in the world, English. Pathways of Change contains discussion of new data and provides theoretical lead articles based on these data that will help sharpen the theoretical aspects involved, such as the definition and the logical connection of the component processes of grammaticalization. The volume is concentrated around a number of themes that are important or controversial in grammaticalization studies, such as the principle of unidirectionality, the relation between lexicalization and grammaticalization — and connected with these two factors the possibility of degrammaticalization — the way iconicity interweaves with grammaticalization processes, and with the phenomenon of grammaticalization on a synchronic or discourse level, also often termed subjectifization.

This book provides a good overview of philosophical and cognitive approaches to language use and meaning. A synthesis of such approaches leads to a dynamic concept of pragmatic meaning which is on the one hand grounded in cognition and motivated by linguistic and cultural convention and, on the other, creates a framework for studying the interactive and social dimensions of the development of meaning in linguistic communication. Through an experientialist approach based on connectionist models, the author shows that by internalizing pragmatic meaning people become social agents who reproduce, challenge or change their social parameters during interaction.Pragmatic Meaning and Cognition is suitable as a course book in Pragmatics and Semantics and of interest to those concerned with cognitive models and dynamic and social aspects of linguistic communication.

The selected contributions in this volume bring together applications of pragmatics in speech and language pathology, as well as discussions of the applicability of different theoretical strands of the study of human linguistic interaction and its cognitive bases to the field of communication disorders. The authors address practical issues in the classification, assessment and treatment of pragmatic disorders both in developmental and acquired contexts. Further major concerns are the theoretical foundations of clinical pragmatics (such as linguistic pragmatics, functional approaches to language analysis, and cognitive science), and the development of clinical pragmatics.

The papers in this volume deal with various topics in Arabic Linguistics. Most of the papers focus on new issues and introduce new empirical generalizations that haven't been studied before within the context of Arabic linguistics. The syntax and morphosyntax papers explore issues ranging from the nature of extraction strategies to various types of Construct State representations and the proper analysis of the distribution of the nominal, adjectival and verbal mophological features. The computational linguistics papers focus on the challenge posed by the non-concatenative nature of Arabic morphology. The authors illustrate how their programs can handle Arabic morphology. The papers in morpho-phonology and historical linguistics deal with the development of the Arabic complementizer system and the empirical and theoretical problems that arise in the context of hypocoristic formation in Arabic. The sociolinguistics papers take up the issues of sociolinguistic variation as they pertain to the phenomenon of diglossia and regional uses of the Standard variety of Arabic.

This volume is the third one of the revived series of Travaux, which was the well-known international book series of the classical Prague Linguistic Circle, published in the years 1929-39. The tradition of the Circle still attracts attention in broad circles of European and American linguistics.

The book puts forth an exciting hypothesis for the typologist. Its major claim is that languages can generally be regarded as belonging to a tense-prominent, aspect-prominent or mood-prominent language type. This grouping can be based upon the relative prominence that languages attach to one or the other of the three verbal categories, namely tense, aspect and mood, by grammaticalizing the chosen category to a greater degree than others, and by making it more obligatory, more systematic and more pervasive than others. The grouping, however, involves a gradation, as is indeed the case with other typological groupings, with some languages manifesting the relevant characteristic more strikingly than others.

There are several characteristics that can be correlated with the relative prominence that languages attach to verbal categories. For example, tense-prominent languages tend to have mostly active but not stative verbs. They also tend to keep adjectives as a distinct category, or group them with nouns but not with verbs. Verbal forms used for foregrounding generally belong to the most prominent verbal category. These and other similar correlations make this typological classification worth pursuing. The book also contains a descriptive study of the three verbal categories.

Knowing that the so-called voiced and voiceless stops in languages like English and German do not always literally differ in voicing, several linguists — among them Roman Jakobson — have proposed that dichotomies such as fortis/lenis or tense/lax might be more suitable to capture the invariant phonetic core of this distinction. Later it became the dominant view that voice onset time or laryngeal features are more reasonable alternatives. However, based on a number of facts and arguments from current phonetics and phonology this book claims that the Jakobsonian feature tense was rejected prematurely. Among the theoretical aspects addressed, it is argued that an acoustic definition of distinctive features best captures the functional aspects of speech communication, while it is also discussed how the conclusions are relevant for formal accounts, such as feature geometry. The invariant of tense is proposed to be durational, and its ‘basic correlate’ is proposed to be aspiration duration. It is shown that tense and voice differ in their invariant properties and basic correlates, but that they share a number of other correlates, including F0 onset and closure duration. In their stop systems languages constitute a typology between the selection of voice and tense, but in their fricative systems languages universally tend towards a syncretism involving voicing and tenseness together. Though the proposals made here are intended to have general validity, the emphasis is on German. As part of this focus, an acoustic study and a transillumination study of the realization of /p,t,k,f,s/ vs. /b,d,g,v,z/ in German are presented.

The papers in this volume address core areas in contemporary Arabic linguistics: syntax, phonology, and variation studies. The papers in the syntax sections address different topics from the perspective of the Minimalist Program (Chomsky 1995) and subsequent work. The topics in this section are adverbs and adjectives, resumptive pronouns, gapping and VP deletion, and the morphosyntax of reciprocals. The phonology section consists of a contribution on coarticulation effects of uvular(ized) segments, and of a paper on pharyngealization and uvularization within the framework of Optimality Theory. The sociolinguistics papers in the third section of the volume represent three important lines of inquiry: discourse level variation, stylistic variation, and diachronic variation.