[Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory]

This volume presents new developments in cognitive grammar and explores its descriptive and explanatory potential with respect to a wide range of language phenomena. These include the formation and use of locationals, causative constructions, adjectival and nominal expressions of oriented space, morphological layering, tense and aspect, and extended uses of verbal predicates. There is also a section on the affinities between cognitive grammar an early linguistic theories, both ancient and modern.

Charles C. Fries (1887-1967) was a major figure in American linguistics and language education during the first half of the 20th century. Theoretical innovation and practical implementation were important threads that ran throughout his work. Fries believed that the attempt to deal with practical problems was a vital part of developing linguistic theory. He spent most of his effort exploring grammar as a tool for communicating meaning. Charles C. Fries was quite influential in the development of linguistics in the United States, and yet in some ways remained outside of the mainstream of the linguistics he helped to develop. The contributors to this volume were asked to present and evaluate some aspect of Fries’ work and to show how similar ideas are being used today.

This collection of twelve essays, some of which have been written specifically for this volume by well-known European and North-American sociolinguists, reflects an increasing recognition within the field that sociological and theoretical innocence can no longer be underwritten by it, and offers a multi-pronged and multi-methodological way to move towards a critical, reflexive, and theoretically responsible socio-linguistics. It explores, with courage and sensitivity, some very important areas in the enormous space between Bloomfieldian 'idiolect' and Chomskyan 'UG' in order to situate the human linguistic enterprise, and offers valuable insights into human linguisticality and sociality. These explorations expose the limits of correlationism, determinism, and positivistic reificationism, and offer new ways of doing sociolinguistics. Intended for both practicing and future sociolinguists, it is an ideal text-book for the times, particularly for graduate and advanced undergraduate students.

This is a two-volume collection of original research papers designed to reflect the breadth and depth of the impact that William Labov has had on linguistic science. Four areas of 'Labovian' linguistics are addressed: First is the study of variation and change; the papers in sections I and II of the first volume take this as their central theme, with a focus on either the social context and uses of language (I) or on the the internal linguistic dynamics of variation and change (II). The study of African American English, and other language varieties in the Americas spoken by people of African descent and influenced by their linguistic heritage, is the subject of the papers in section III of the first volume. The third theme is the study of discourse; the papers in section I of the second volume develop themes in Labovian linguistics that go back to Labov's work on narrative, descriptive, and therapeutic discourse. Fourth is the emphasis on language use, the search for discursive, interactive, and meaningful determinants of the complexity in human communication. Papers with these themes appear in section II of the second volume.

In putting ‘morphonology’ up for adoption as a chapitre particulier in 1929, Trubetzkoy started a debate regarding the boundary between phonology and morphology that has not ended yet. Essentially a record of a roundtable devoted to that boundary (Montréal, October 1994), Trubetzkoy’s Orphan is a full and fascinating picture of some very important contemporary attempts to define it. In addition to papers that focus on it, the volume also contains important papers on the closely related topics of ‘morphoprosody’ and the ‘lexicon’, views from ‘the floor’ and ‘the outside’, and edited transcripts of the discussions that took place at the Montréal Roundtable.
Intended both for practicising and future phonologists and morpho-logists, Trubetzkoy’s Orphan is a valuable record of a very important debate regarding one of the most central questions in phonology and morphology.

The relation of language variation to reconstructed languages and to the methodology of reconstruction has long been neglected. The articles in the present volume consider this relationship from a number of different angles, with a number of different focuses. Several of the papers discuss evidence from Germanic, either Proto-Germanic (Joseph, Schwink), or daughter languages such as Dutch (Goss & Howell), Afrikaans (Roberge), Newcastle English (Milroy), and a Wisconsin German dialect (Geiger & Salmons). Other papers look at Italian (Cravens), Spanish (Harris-Northall), and the non-Indo-European languages or families Aramaic (Miller), and Proto-Hmong-Mien (Ratliff), and the Southeast Asian languages Phan Rang Cham and Tsat (Thurgood). In doing so they bring together a number of interconnected issues which are of current concern in comparative and historical linguistics.

There is a growing awareness that a fruitful cooperation between the (diachronic and synchronic) study of language variation and change and work in phonological theory is both possible and desirable. The study of language variation and change would benefit from this kind of cooperation on the conceptual and theoretical levels. Phonological theory may well profit from a greater use of what is commonly called ‘external evidence’.
This volume contains contributions by outstanding representatives from the more data-oriented fields and phonological theory. They discuss possibilities and problems for a further integration of both areas, by considering questions such as where and to which extent the two may need each other, and whether there is a need for an interdisciplinary conceptual framework and methodology. Attention is also paid to questions regarding the cause and actuation, linguistic constraints and the internal spread of linguistic change, as well as to possible and impossible processes of language change.

This volume focuses on the phonology, phonetics and psycholinguistics of voicing-related phenomena in Dutch. Dutch phonology has played a touchstone role in the past few decades where competing phonological theories regarding laryngeal representation have been concerned. Debates have focused on the phonetic facts (Is final neutralization complete or incomplete? Are the assimilation rules phonetic or phonological?) and the most adequate phonological analyses (Is [voice] a binary feature? What constraints are necessary? What is the best way of implementing the role of morphology?). This volume summarises and adds fuel to these debates on several fronts, by providing an overview of analyses so far (rule-based as well as constraint-based) and proposing a new one, by drawing attention to new facts, such as exceptions to final devoicing in certain dialects and the behaviour of loanwords, and by re-examining the phonetic state of affairs and the behaviour of voiced, voiceless and partially devoiced segments in psycholinguistic experiments.

The universal and typological status of the notion of word class — closely related to part-of-speech systems, morphology, syntax and the lexicon-syntax interface — continues to be of major linguistic theoretical interest. The papers included in this volume offer a fresh look at the variety of current theoretical and descriptive approaches to word class issues, and present original analyses and new data from a number of languages. The primary focus is on methods (including computational ones) and criteria for identifying and representing major word classes and subclasses in specific languages, with considerable attention also directed towards the characterization of the nature and role of minor — or neglected — word classes, including trans-categorization processes. The range of topics and perspectives covered makes this volume of considerable interest to both theoretical linguists and typologists.

The two related issues of word order, and subject-verb agreement have occupied center stage in the study of Arabic syntax since the time of Sibawayhi in the eighth century. This book is a contribution to both of these areas. It is grounded within the generative grammar framework in one of its most recent versions, namely Minimalism, as expounded in Chomsky (1995).
In this volume, a detailed description is given of word order options in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Palestinian Arabic (PA). It is shown that, perhaps surprisingly, the two varieties allow almost the same range of word orders.
The important question of whether Arabic has a VP is addressed: the author argues extensively that Arabic has a VP category. The evidence derives from examining superiority effects, ECP effects, binding, variable interpretations, etc.
Also discussed is the content of [Spec, TP] in VSO sentences. It is argued that the position is occupied by an expletive pronoun. The author defends the Expletive Hypothesis which states that in VSO sentences the expletive may take part in checking some features of the verb. A typology of the expletive pronoun in Modern Standard Arabic, Palestinian Arabic, Lebanese Arabic, and Moroccan Arabic is provided.
A particularly interesting problem involving pronominal co-reference is the following: if the subject is the antecedent of a pronominal clitic, word order is free; if a pronominal is cliticized onto the subject, then the antecedent must precede. An account that derives these restrictions without recourse to linear order is proposed.