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

The year 1989 brought political upheavals in Central, Eastern and Southern Europe, the effects of which have not yet ended. The political discourse of the Cold War period disintegrated and gave way to competing alternatives. The contributors to this book are linguists, discourse analysts and social scientists, from all corners of the continent, whose tools of analysis shed light on the crucial two years of transition during which political concepts and political interaction changed in dramatic and sometimes violent ways.

This study investigates the phonological behavior of coronal consonants, i.e. sounds produced with the tip or blade of the tongue. The analysis draws on data from over 120 languages and dialects. A definition of coronality is proposed that rejects the current view holding that palatals are positively marked for this feature. The feature [coronal] is assumed to be privative; the natural class of noncoronals is captured with the feature [peripheral], which dominates [labial] and [velar] in feature geometry. The book contains a detailed examination of the phonological patterning of segments belonging to each of the six coronal subplaces (i.e. interdental, dental, alveolar, retroflex, palatoalveolar, and alveolopalatal). A universal set of features is posited that accounts for these facts. Inventories of coronal consonants are treated in depth and impossible contrasts are accounted for with several if-then statements. The present study also contains a lengthy analysis of the phonology of rhotic consonants. A set of features is postulated which captures natural classes involving rhotics and nonrhotic consonants and which distinguishes the various stricture types among rhotics (i.e. trill vs. tap vs. approximant).

This volume includes twelve papers selected from the Ninth Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics, held at Georgetown University, Washington D.C., 1995. Three of the papers deal with codeswitching with Arabic, two with the acquisition of Arabic, and four with different aspects of Arabic grammatical structure. The volume also includes three papers presenting data on negation in some Arabic dialects (including those of Yemen, Morocco, Egypt).

The topics are diverse and include Arabic and constraints on codeswitching, verb embeddings and collocations in codeswitching, ellipsis in child language acquisition, clitic left dislocation, parameter resetting in second language acquisition, accessing pharyngeal place, and the derivation of imperatives.

This volume includes ten papers selected from the Eighth Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics, held at the University of Masschusetts, Amherst, 1994. Six of them deal with the syntax of Arabic two with phonology, and two with variation. The topics represented in the volume include binding in Arabic, the analysis of negation and negative polarity items, pronoun doubling in codeswitching, linguistic variation and language change, voice assimilation in Arabic dialects, among others.

The volume includes contributions by the following: Mahasen Abu Mansour; Maher Bahloul; Raja Bahloul; Elabbas Benmamoun; Naomi Bolotin; Mushira Eid; Mark LeTourneau; Michael McOmber; Bernadette Plunkett; Keith Walters

This book is about the limits of machine translation. It is widely recognized that machine translation systems do much better on domain-specific controlled-language texts (domain texts for short) than on dynamic general-language texts (general texts for short). The authors explore this general — domain distinction and come to some uncommon conclusions about the nature of language. Domain language is claimed to be made possible by general language, while general language is claimed to be made possible by the ethical dimensions of relationships. Domain language is unharmed by the constraints of objectivism, while general language is suffocated by those constraints. Along the way to these conclusions, visits are made to Descartes and Saussure, to Chomsky and Lakoff, to Wittgenstein and Levinas. From these conclusions, consequences are drawn for machine translation and translator tools, for linguistic theory and translation theory. The title of the book does not question whether language is possible; it asks, with wonder and awe, why communication through language is possible.

The Practice of Court Interpreting describes how the interpreter works in the court room and other legal settings. The book discusses what is involved in court interpreting: case preparation, ethics and procedure, the creation and avoidance of error, translation and legal documents, tape transcription and translation, testifying as an expert witness, and continuing education outside the classroom.

The purpose of the book is to provide the interpreter with a map of the terrain and to suggest methods that will help insure an accurate result. The author, herself a practicing court interpreter, says: “The structure of the book follows the structure of the work as we do it.”

The book is intended as a basic course book, as background reading for practicing court interpreters and for court officials who deal with interpreters.

This introduction to the linguistic study of pidgin and creole languages is clearly designed as an introductory course book. It does not demand a high level of previous linguistic knowledge. Part I: General Aspects and Part II: Theories of Genesis constitute the core for presentation and discussion in the classroom, while Part III: Sketches of Individual Languages (such as Eskimo Pidgin, Haitian, Saramaccan, Shaba Swahili, Fa d'Ambu, Papiamentu, Sranan, Berbice Dutch) and Part IV: Grammatical Features (such as TMA particles and auxiliaries, noun phrases, reflexives, serial verbs, fronting) can form the basis for further exploration. A concluding chapter draws together the different strands of argumentation, and the annotated list provides the background information on several hundred pidgins, creoles and mixed languages.

Diversity rather than unity is taken to be the central theme, and for the first time in an introduction to pidgins and creoles, the Atlantic creoles receive the attention they deserve. Pidgins are not treated as necessarily an intermediate step on the way to creoles, but as linguistic entities in their own right with their own characteristics. In addition to pidgins, mixed languages are treated in a separate chapter.

Research on pidgin and creole languages during the past decade has yielded an abundance of uncovered material and new insights. This introduction, written jointly by the creolists of the University of Amsterdam, could not have been written without recourse to this new material.

The importance of the Prague School for the rise of structuralism and for integration of the theoretical linguistics of today can hardly be overestimated. The volume brings together 13 papers showing the main results of the research of the Prague School and of its continuation in the domains of phonemics and written language, morphemics and word formation, lexicon, syntax and semantics, text structures, stylistics and typology. The authors all actively contributed to the domain they are treating here.

The aim of this volume is to witness how the activities of the Prague School have continued to bring important new insights and discussions between the 1940s and the present time. Contributions are included which have escaped attention on an international scale because they were published in Czech; several papers have been written especially for this volume. The contributions cover various domains: syntax, morphology, sociolinguistics, graphemics, the language system, the lexicon, and contrastive linguistics.