Linguistic and Literary Studies in Eastern Europe and Studies in Functional and Structural Linguistics (vols. 1–70, 1979–2015)

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 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.

The papers in this volume are divided into two sections. Part 1 Quantitative Linguistics contains contributions by Marie Těšitelová; M. Ludvíková; H. Confortiová; Ludmila Uhlířová; I. Nebeská; Jan Králík; J. Krámský; J. Sabol; J. Štěpán. Part 2 Algebraic Linguistics contains contributions by M. Novotný; Pavel Materna; Eva Hajičová, Petr Sgall & Petr Piťha; Jarmila Panevová & Petr Sgall.

The volume presents for the first time in book form in English the work of two major representatives of the so-called Moscow-Tartu school. The Introduction outlines their project for a poetics of expressiveness against the background of the structural-semiotic movement of the '60s and '70s. Part I is a systematic exposition of the theory, concentrating on the concepts of theme, expressive device, poetic world, etc. Part II and III apply these concepts to a structuralist portrayal of Leo Tolstoy's tales for children (shown to be A War and Peace in miniature) and of the medieval Latin author Archpoet of Cologne (with special emphasis on his Mock Penitent). The volume is provided with a Bibliography of the poetics of expressiveness and a Glossary of its metalanguage.

Contains key papers by the founders of the Prague School; including Vilém Mathesius famous article “Functional Linguistics” (1929), the theses presented at the First Congress of Slavists in Prague (1929), an earlier paper by Mathesius “On the potentiality of the phenomena of language” (1911), Jan Mukařovský's “Standard language and poetic language” (1932) and other historical contributions by B. Havránek, V. Skalička, and B. Trnka.

The papers in this volume are divided into two sections. Part 1 Quantitative Linguistics contains contributions by Marie Těšitelová; Jiří Kraus; Ján Horecký & E. Nemcová; J. Sabol; Z. Lišková; V. Smetáček & M. Königová; J. Štěpán; L. Klimeš; P. Vašák. Part 2 Algebraic Linguistics contains contributions by M. Novotný; L. Nebeský; Petr Sgall; Eva Hajičová; Petr Pitha; J. Weisheitelová; Jarmila Panevová, A. Goralčíková & Eva Hajičová.