Studies in Language Companion Series

The period of 1965 to 1978 was an extremely productive time for U.S. (Russian born) Romance etymologist and philologist Yakov Malkiel whose specialty was the development of Latin words, roots, prefixes, and suffixes in modern Romance languages, particularly Spanish. Malkiel will be known as the great champion of etymology in linguistics as evidenced by several of the selected essays in From Particular to General Lingusitics. But here Malkiel also moves in several other subfields of linguistics and proves that whatever the subject of discussion is, it is characterized by a tenaciously comprehensive use of evidence.

Functional Grammar (FG) as set out by Simon Dik is the ambitious combination of a functionalist approach to the study of language with a consistent formalization of the underlying structures which it recognizes as relevant. The present volume represents the attempts made within the FG framework to expand the theory so as to cover a wider empirical domain than is usual for highly formalized linguistic theories, namely that of written and spoken discourse, while retaining its methodological precision. The book covers an array of phenomena, both from monologue and from dialogue material, relating to discourse structure, speaker aims and goals, action theory, the flow of information, illocutionary force, modality, etc. The central question underlying most of the contributions concerns the relation between, and the division of labour between the existing grammatical module of FG on the one hand, and a discourse or pragmatic module capable of handling such discourse phenomena on the other. What emerges are new proposals for the formal treatment of for instance illocutionary force and the informational status of constituents. Many of the data discussed are from ‘real’ language rather than being invented, and samples from various languages other than English

(Spanish, Polish, Latin, French) are examined and used as illustrations of the theoretical problem to be solved.

Readership: theoretical linguists and discourse and conversation analysts

This book, a tribute to Angela Downing, consists of twenty papers taking a broadly functional perspective on language, with topics ranging from the general (grammar as an evolutionary product, text comprehension, integrative linguistics) to particular aspects of the grammars of languages (Bulgarian, English, Icelandic, Spanish, Swedish). The more specific papers are sequenced according to Halliday’s division into ideational, textual and interpersonal aspects of the grammar, and cover a wide range of areas, including aspect, argument structure, noun phrase/nominal group structure and nominalisations, pronominal clitics, theme in relation to writing skills, discourse structures and markers, the role of attention in conversation, the functions of topic, phatic communion, subjectification, formulaic language and modality. A recurrent theme in the volume is the use of corpus materials in order to base functional descriptions on authentic productions. Overall, the volume constitutes a panoramic but nevertheless detailed view of some important current trends in functional linguistics.

The 23rd UWM Linguistics Symposium (1996) brought together linguists of opposing theoretical approaches – functionalists and formalists – in order to determine to what extent these approaches really differ from each other and to what extent the approaches complement each other. The two volumes of Functionalism and Formalism in Linguistics contain a careful selection of the papers originally presented at the symposium.

Volume I includes papers discussing the two basic approaches to linguistics; with contributions by: Werner Abraham, Stephen R. Anderson, Joan L. Bybee, William Croft, Alice Davidson, Mark Durie, Ken Hale, Michael Hammond, Bruce P. Hayes, Nina Hyams, Howard Lasnik, Brian MacWhinney, Geoffrey S. Nathan, Daniell Nettle, Frederick J. Newmeyer, Edith A. Moravcsik, Doris Payne, Janet Pierrehumbert, Kathleen M. Wheatley.

Volume II consists of case studies which draw upon the strengths of both approaches and thus help to bridge the gap between the two camps; with contributions by: Mira Ariel, Melissa Axelrod, Robbin Clamons, Bernard Comrie, Kees Hengeveld, Erika Hoff-Ginsberg, James Hurford, Lizanne Kaiser, Nicholas Kibre, Simon Kirby, Feng-hsi Liu, André Meinunger, Viola Miglio, Ann Mulkern, Waturu Nakamura, Maria Polinsky, Elizabeth Purnell, Gerald Sanders, Nancy Stenson, Maggie Tallerman, Ronnie Wilbur.

This book analyzes the relationship between gender, age and role in Japanese television interviews. It covers a wide range of topics on Japanese communication; cultural and gender variables are interwoven in the interpretation of the findings. The study shows how participants interact through language and how they project their identities in the context of the interview. Based on a qualitative analysis, speech in mixed and same gender interactions is analysed, turntaking, terms of address and aizuchi (listener’s responses) are examined. The findings reveal interesting characteristics of all-female interactions, such as the influence of age that appears to be more important than gender; an observation that has repercussions in the study of gender and language differences in modern Japan. This book is an interdisciplinary study that integrates notions of politeness and theories of gender and language, and will be of interest to people researching Japanese culture and communication, gender studies and institutional language.

The Grammar of Possession: Inalienability, incorporation and possessor ascension in Guaraní, is an exhaustive study of linguistic structures in Paraguayan Guaraní which are directly or indirectly associated with the semantic domain of inalienability. Constructions analyzed in the book include adnominal and predicative possessive constructions, noun incorporation, and possessor ascension. Examples are drawn from a rich data base that incorporate native speaker intuitions and resources in the construction of illustrative linguistic forms as well as the analysis of the communicative use of the forms under study. The book provides a complete picture of inalienability as a coherent integrated system of grammatical and semantic oppositions in a language that has received little attention in the theoretical linguistic literature.

The analysis moves from general principles to specific details of the language while applying principles of Cognitive Grammar and Functional Linguistics. There is an explicit aim to uncover the particularities of form-meaning connections, as well as the communicative and discourse functions of the structures examined. Other approaches are also considered when appropriate, resulting in a theoretically informed study that contains a rich variety of considerations.

This volume contains a selection of papers on grammaticalization from a broad perspective. Some of the papers focus on basic concepts in grammaticalization research such as the concept of 'grammar' as the endpoint of grammaticalization processes, erosion, (uni)directionality, the relation between grammaticalization and constructions, subjectification, and the relation between grammaticalization and analogy. Other papers shed a critical light on grammaticalization as an explanatory parameter in language change. New case studies of micro-processes of grammaticalization complete the selection. The empirical evidence for (and against) grammaticalization comes from diverse domains: subject control, clitics, reciprocal markers, pronouns and agreement markers, gender markers, auxiliaries, aspectual categories, intensifying adjectives and determiners, and pragmatic markers. The languages covered include English and its varieties, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, French, Slavonic languages, and Turkish. The book will be valuable to scholars working on grammaticalization and language change as well as to those interested in individual languages.

The general objective of the study is systematic examination of the processes involved in the formation and evolution of complex sentence constructions in a group of genetically related languages. The Chadic language group, at about 140 languages, constitutes the largest and most diversified branch of the Afroasiatic family. One of the findings of the present work is that languages starting from the same base may develop quite different morphological and syntactic structures. With respect to issues of general linguistic interest, the book deals with motivations for grammaticalization: It is proposed that one of the most important motivations is satisfaction of the principle of well formedness, that is, that every element in an utterance must have its role transparent to the hearer either by inherent lexical properties or by grammatical means. In the present work both aspects of grammaticalization, viz. the emergence of grammatical constructions and the emergence of grammatical morphemes, are given equal weight. In addition to semantic metaphor and metonymy as mechanisms in the processes of grammaticalization, the present work develops the notion of semiotic metonymy, whereby a part of a sign performs the function of the sign. It is shown that semiotic metonymy plays an important role in the grammaticalization of grammatical morphemes and constructions into other morphemes and constructions. The book also shows that unindirectionality is not a governing principle with respect to the development of grammatical morphemes into other grammatical morphemes; rather, there is considerable evidence and theoretical justification for the bidirectionality principle.

This study of Old Spanish and present-day Mexico and New Mexico data develops a grammaticization account of variation in progressive constructions. Diachronic changes in cooccurrence patterns show that grammaticization involves reductive change driven by frequency increases. Formal reduction results in the emergence of auxilliary-plus-gerund sequences as fused units. Semantically, the constructions originate as spatial expressions; their grammaticization involves gradual loss of locative features of meaning. Semantic generalization among parallel evolutionary paths results in the competition among different constructions in the domain of progressive aspect. Patterns of synchronic variation follow from both the retention of meaning differences and the routinization of frequent collocations, as well as sociolinguistic factors. Register considerations turn out to be crucial in evaluating the effects of language contact. Purported changes in Spanish — English bilingual varieties are largely a feature of oral, informal language rather than a manifestation of convergence.