This book presents an investigation of a number of areas of interest in the study of language change, dealing in particular with questions of how patterns of pronunciation vary across both time and space. Most of the illustrative material is drawn from non-standard dialects of English, especially the varieties spoken in Ireland (Hiberno-English). The theoretical issues discussed include the following: what role do articulatory and linguistic constraints play in determining the direction of sound change? How do social and political pressures influence the resolution of competition between...
This book presents an investigation of a number of areas of interest in the study of language change, dealing in particular with questions of how patt...
'Mass terms' like water, rice and traffic, have proved very difficult to accommodate in any theory of meaning since, unlike count nouns such as house or dog, they cannot be treated as denoting sets of individuals. In this study, motivated by the need to design a computer program for understanding natural language utterances containing mass terms, Harry Bunt provides a thorough analysis of the problem and offers an original and detailed solution. An extension of classical set theory, Ensemble Theory, is defined. This provides the formal basis of a framework for the analysis of natural language...
'Mass terms' like water, rice and traffic, have proved very difficult to accommodate in any theory of meaning since, unlike count nouns such as house ...
This book offers a detailed description and analysis of West Flemish, a dialect of Dutch, within the framework of Government and Binding Theory. The study focusses on two constructions: the doubling of subject pronouns, and the order of verb phrase constituents. For each construction the book gives a rigourous account of the data, and a theoretical analysis. It demonstrates how recent developments in generative syntax can help to explain the properties of individual dialects. Liliane Haegeman combines expertise in theoretical linguistics and traditional philology. Her study blends rigourous...
This book offers a detailed description and analysis of West Flemish, a dialect of Dutch, within the framework of Government and Binding Theory. The s...
In Vox Latina and Vox Graeca Professor Allen was concerned primarily with the pronunciation of the individual vowels and consonants of classical Latin and Greek. In this major work he analyses in depth and in detail all the prosodic features of these languages: length of vowels and quantity of syllables, accent, pitch, stress and 'rhythm', with special attention to their manifestations in verse. The description and explanation of such features raise theoretical problems of very general importance and Professor Allen devotes the first part of the book to the establishment of the phonetic...
In Vox Latina and Vox Graeca Professor Allen was concerned primarily with the pronunciation of the individual vowels and consonants of classical Latin...
Can we reasonably speak of 'linguistic realities'? Do theoretical linguists devise accounts of a reality which exists outside of their theories? In this provocative and insightful study of the philosophy of linguistics, the author first investigates the realist/instrumentalist debate in the philosophy of science, and shows what relevance it has for the sort of questions linguists might ask themselves about the nature of their discipline. He proposes a realist philosophy of linguistics, which takes as its starting point Popper's falsificationist philosophy of science, coupled with his...
Can we reasonably speak of 'linguistic realities'? Do theoretical linguists devise accounts of a reality which exists outside of their theories? In th...
Synchronic sociolinguistics has been particularly convincing in its use of quantitative models to demonstrates how 'the present might explain the past'. However, the relevance of sociolinguistics to historical linguistics 'using the past to explain the present', has been largely ignored. In this volume Dr Romaine lays the foundation for a field of research encompassing both historical linguistics and sociolinguistics, which aims to investigate and account for language variation within a particular speech community over time. The socio-historical approach is illustrated here by a detailed...
Synchronic sociolinguistics has been particularly convincing in its use of quantitative models to demonstrates how 'the present might explain the past...
