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

The Unaccented Vowels of Proto-Norse attempts to analyse the unaccented vowel system attested in the proto-Norse period, as partially attested in the older runic inscriptions in the elder futhark. Each chapter in turn assesses the evidence for unaccented syllables of a particular category, whether inflectional or derivational, and decides whether any reliable conclusions can be drawn from it. It is argued that too many widely accepted views are based on insufficient and poor methodology, and that too little note has been taken of the fact that viable alternatives exist alongside most of our theories about proto-Norse. In particular, a new realisation that the inscriptions are written in a less than perfect orthographic system, a notion that many scholars have often been unwilling to accept, leads to some interesting new interpretations of the data.

This wide-ranging book presents the linguistic achievements of four major cultures to readers presumably conversant with modern theoretical linguistics. The chapter on India discusses in detail Pāṇini's (c. 400 B.C.) grammar Ast-adhy-ay-i as well as the work of his commentators Kātyāyana, Patanjali, and Bhartṛhari. In the Chinese tradition, the Confucian doctrine of the Rectification of Names' is singled out for treatment. Arabic linguistics is represented by Sibawaihi's (d. 793) grammar al-Kitāb, in particular its syntax, as well as the subsequent commentary tradition. The chapter on Europe, which is the most comprehensive of the four, covers the time span from antiquity to the 20th century; special attention is devoted to the contributions of Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Varro, Apollonius Dyscolus, and the Modistae. The achievements of the cultures in linguistics are treated throughout from a deliberately value-laden point of view. The achievements of Western antiquity and the Middle Ages are shown to be much more than the average linguist is inclined to believe. Even more importantly, it is shown that the Indian and the Arab traditions have been superior to the European tradition at least until the 20th century. The fact that a linguistic theory created some 2,400 years ago is fully as adequate as our best theories today must have far-reaching implications for the notion of 'scientific progress'. More precisely, it proves necessary to distinguish between 'progress in the human sciences' and 'progress in the natural sciences'. These issues, which pertain to the general philosophy of science, are treated in the final chapter of the book.

Utterance particles, also known as modal particles or sentence-final particles, form a class of words in Cantonese which is of great descriptive and theoretical interest to students of language. Most utterance particles do not have any semantic content (truth-conditional meaning), and few can be said to have a consistent grammatical function. They are notorious for being extremely resistant to conventional syntactic and semantic analysis. The aim of this book is to seek a better understanding of utterance particles by concentrating analytical attention on three of them; namely, LA (la55), LO (lo55), and WO (wo44). Adopting a set of theoretical assumptions and analytical methods in the tradition of Conversation Analysis within an ethnomethodological framework, an attempt is made to approach these objects by examining them in the context of interactional details in naturally occurring conversations. This book presents original accounts of, and fresh insights into these utterance particles in Cantonese. But it also raises theoretical and methodological questions of more general interest. These include, among other things, the status of data and evidence in the analysis of language, and the possibility of a socially constituted linguistics.

This volume brings together a number of articles representative of the present outlook on the importance of metaphors, and of the work done on metaphors in several domains of (psycho)linguistics. The first part of the volume deals with metaphor and the system of language. The second part offers papers on metaphor and language use. In the third part psychological and psycholinguistic aspects of metaphor are discussed.

The goal of this monograph is a comprehensive analysis of understatements and other forms of non-direct speech (hedges) in modern English. It is based on a multi-level approach, including philosophical, cultural, and socio-psychological arguments. The main part consists of an investigation of the linguistic restrictions for understatements and hedges to be formed by means of the following grammatical categories: negation of predicates, gradation of predicates, modalization of affirmative sentences by means of parenthetical verbs, modal adverbs, modal verbs, and questions.