This book is a collection of linguistic and philosophical papers dealing with the semantic problems of determiners. The language under investigation is mostly English, although a few papers deal with French and German, and, to a lesser extent, with Dutch, Polish, Russian and Hebrew. The majority of the contributions focus on the semantics of the definite and indefinite articles, leading into discussions of anaphoricness, specificness, opacity and transparency, referentiality and attributiveness and genericness. The relation of the determiners to other parts of grammar, in particular...

This book is a report of an investigation into the meanings of the modal auxiliaries in modern British English. The investigation took the form of a large-scale corpus-based project, looking at modal auxiliaries in both written and spoken language, and taking into account stylistic variation. The analysis of a corpus of a 'real' language brings the analyst face-to-face with a problem which has frequently been avoided or ignored in theoretical semantics: language is not an orderly phenomenon, and, as far as meaning is concerned, indeterminacy seems to be a feature of all languages. But it...

Typical cases of agreement are easy to identify, but where the boundaries of agreement lie depend on what aspects of the agreement relation are considered to be defining properties. It is a short step from viewing agreement in the traditional way, as a matching of features, to defining agreement as any relation that ensures consistency of information in two separate structures. This book takes as its topic agreement as it is traditionally conceived, one that only involves morphosyntactic categories.

The book explores ways in which the formal methods of linguistics can cast light on the structure of verbal interaction, and in particular considers how successive utterances cohere together in continuous spoken discourse. Beginning with an earlier model of discourse analysis elaborated to deal with teacher-pupil interaction in the classroom, it then reviews attempts to extend this model to a variety of discourses such as committee talk, doctor-patient interviews, broadcast discussions and the monologue of lectures.

The extension of the original model to other situations has...

The rapid increase of interest in disordered speech and language among linguists over the past decade or so has resulted in many books of practical help to speech pathologists in terms of assessment and remediation. Little, however, has appeared to examine the theoretical implications of the interaction between these two fields. This book aims to fill this gap, by showing how speech pathology can inform linguistic theory and vice versa.

Basing his arguments on the developments in theoretical linguistics as well as his own experience in teaching and research, the author proposes a model of learning which could resolve differences which have for centuries divided thinkers in philosophy and linguistics, between extreme and modified views of the way that language and thought interact, one determining the other; and in language teaching between proponents of contending methodologies. He shows that such distinctions as those between language learners and language users, first language learners and foreign language learners are...

Data from a variety of languages are offered in support of the claim that although there are several processes by which languages commonly add to an already existing stock of long vowels, there is only one mechanism by which a language without a distinction of vocalic length commonly introduces such a distinction. This mechanism is the coalescence of vowel sequences, typically after loss of intervocalic consonants. This book examines vowels lengths, their differences and their effects on language.

Despite a vast amount of study, literacy is still a very confused topic, which requires the integration of findings from different areas. Reading and writing are psychological skills, but they are also linguistic skills (since people read and write meaningful language) and social skills (since written language serves particular functions in different societies). In this book Michael Stubbs provides a basis for a sociolinguistic theory of literacy. He believes that a systematic theory of literacy must be based on an understanding of a number of factors, such as the relationship between...

For decades, bilingualism has resisted definition. If bilingualism is defined as habitual, fluent, correct and accent-free use of two languages, few individuals would qualify as bilinguals. A more viable approach may be to concede that 'bilingual' can be seen instead as a range of points on a continuum that allows for differences. The psychological study of bilingualism encompasses a wide range of phenomena including the organization and representation of the grammar, the perception and production of language mixing, cerebral lateralization of language functions, and patterns of recovery...

This book presents a framework for the linguistic analysis of speech and a computer program to process the results of this analysis. The model of description for the linguistic analysis is that known as 'scale-and-category' grammar. It is particularly suited for a study of how people use their language, and especially for a sociologically-oriented study of linguistic behaviour. By incorporating a concept of 'delicacy', it enables the investigator to vary, according to his particular interests, the amount of detail he enters into at various points in the description. The present...