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...

This book provides one of the best and most thorough studies available in English of the syntax of a non-Indo-European language.

This book is concerned with the relationship between semantics and surface structure and in particular with the way in which each is mapped into the other. Jim Miller argues that semantic and syntactic structure require different representations and that semantic structure is far more complex than many analysts realise. He argues further that semantic structure should be based on notions of location and movement. The need for a semantic component of greater complexity is demonstrated by an examination of prepositions, particles, adverbs and verb-prefixes, and is shown to accord with...

This groundbreaking study takes a novel approach to reduplication, a phenomenon whereby languages use repetition to create new words. Sharon Inkelas and Cheryl Zoll present a new model of reduplication--Morphological Doubling Theory --that derives the full range of reduplication patterns. This approach argues for a theoretical shift in phonology that entails more attention to word structure.

A substantially revised edition of Huddleston's contribution to Sentence and Clause in Scientific English, the final report of a research project into the linguistic properties of scientific English carried out at University College London in 1964 7. The book has two complementary aims: to analyse certain areas of the grammar of 'common-core' English - the grammar that is common to all varieties of the language - and to apply this analysis to a selective grammatical description of a corpus of some 135,000 words of written scientific English. The theoretical framework underlying the...

Originally published in 1972, this study is dedicated to the surviving speakers of the Dyirbal, Giramay and Mamu dialects.

The goal of this study is to challenge the monopoly of arbitrariness, which has possibly affected many models of linguistic description and analysis.

Laurel Brinton's important study of the development of English aspectual systems provides an exceptionally clear and systematic account of an area of syntax and semantics that continues to be the subject of both terminological and notional confusion. Not only has the study of aspect been confused, but the variety of aspectual markers in English has also been unduly neglected. In this book Dr Brinton convincingly demonstrates the need to make clear distinction between 'aspect' and 'aktionsart' and betwen the aspectual meaning of individual forms and the meanings that result from the...

This study offers one of the first systematic accounts of syntactic change and will be of interest to a wide range of linguists.

Dr Cheshire's fieldwork concentrates on phonological variation in spontaneous everyday conversation. She interviews a group of non-standard English speakers living in Reading, Berkshire. Her data provides a basis for a perceptive analysis of variation in contemporary English and of the nature and function of variation in general. She specifically focuses on morphological and syntactic variation, and thus also provides a valid description between standard English and a variety used by working-class speakers, which will interest not only linguists including sociolinguists and dialectologists,...