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

This is the second volume of papers on sign-based linguistics to emerge from Columbia School linguistics conferences. One set of articles offers semantic analyses of grammatical features of specific languages: English full-verb inversion; Serbo-Croatian deictic pronouns; English auxiliary do; Italian pronouns egli and lui; the Celtic-influenced use of on (e.g., ‘he played a trick on me’); a monosemic analysis of the English verb break. A second set deals with general theoretical issues: a solution to the problem that noun class markers (e.g. Swahili) pose for sign-based linguistics; the appropriateness of statistical tests of significance in text-based analysis; the word or the morpheme as the locus of paradigmatic inflectional change; the radical consequences of Saussure’s anti-nomenclaturism for syntactic analysis; the future of ‘minimalist linguistics’ in a maximalist world. A third set explains phonotactic patterning in terms of ease of articulation: aspirated and unaspirated stop consonants in Urdu; initial consonant clusters in more than two dozen languages. An introduction highlights the theoretical and analytical points of each article and their relation to the Columbia School framework. The collection is relevant to cognitive semanticists and functionalists as well as those working in the sign-based Jakobsonian and Guillaumist frameworks.

The 15 contributions in the present collection can be divided roughly into three groups: (1) Papers directly following up functional stylistics and the theory of language culture, elaborated in the classical period of the Prague Linguistic School. (2) Papers concerning the problems of style in a wider communicative arena. These contributions are closely related to contemporary text linguistics and also deal with problems involving psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics and semiotics. (3) Papers having, at least in some part, a pronounced historiographic character. These contributions reflect the fact that contemporary Czech linguistic research is firmly anchored in the Prague linguistic tradition. Although the authors' frame of reference is mainly Czech and the current language situation in the Czech Republic, the majority of contributions were intended to have a more general linguistic character and general linguistic validity.

The volume presents perspectives in the theory of drama and theatre that are new for the following reasons: 1) the contributions reflect the international cooperation in developing drama and theatre as well as its theories; 2) this collection is the first attempt of presenting papers within the context of (Analytical) Theory of Science; 3) it is the first consistent set of papers starting from semiotics a s a meta-theory. The volume is divided into four sections: I Fundamental of Theatre Research, II Theory of Drama and Theatre, III Descriptive Theatre Research, IV Applied Theatre Research. The fifth and final section offers a selective bibliography of analytical approaches to drama and theatre.

By focusing on the “East European” dialogues and polemics, both contemporary and past, the present volume pursues two aims: 1) It would like to locate the discussion between semiotics and dialectics in an historical context. 2) It would like to make the reader familiar with the solutions proposed by theoreticians like Bakhtin, Lotman, Voloshinov, Fischer and Mukařovský, solutions which, in the past, were frequently ignored by European Marxists, semioticians and sociologists of literature. At present, one cannot help feeling that if they had been familiar with the works of these authors, Marxism, Critical Theory, semiotics and the sociology of literature (of the text) would have evolved differently.