Language permeates human interaction, culture, behavior, and thought. The Foundations of Modern Linguistics Series focuses on current research in the nature of language. Linguistics as a discipline has undergone radical change within the last decade. Questions raised by today's linguists are not necessarily those asked previously by traditional grammarians or by structural linguists. Most of the available introductory texts on linguistics, having been published several years ago, cannot be expected to portray the colorful contemporary scene.
The symposium on new directions in linguistics and semiotics that took place in Houston, Texas, on March 18 — 20, 1982, was held to celebrate the inauguration of the new Department of Linguistics and Semiotics at Rice University and its new doctoral program in linguistics. The symposium also marked the return of Sydney M. Lamb to full-time academic life after four years in the computer industry. The new department had grown out of an interdepartmental linguistics program, and the event brought to fruition almost two decades of effort by the linguistics faculty at Rice....
Contrastive Linguistics, roughly defined as a subdiscipline of linguistics which is concerned with the comparison of two or more (subsystems of) languages, has long been associated primarily with language teaching. Apart from this applied aspect, however, it also has a strong theoretical purpose, contributing to our understanding of language typology and language universals. Issues in theoretical CL, which also feature in this volume, are the choice of model, the notions of equivalence and contrast, and directionality of descriptions. Languages used for illustration in this volume include English, German, Danish, and Polish.
This investigation of complex verb formation seeks to identify and clarify the way(s) in which a base verb becomes 'complex'. The author carefully considers both the syntactic and the morphological side of this question, and in doing so brings a wealth of data from very diverse languages to bear on claims made about the relationship between syntactic and morphological structure. The work takes the radical position that most data admit of either a syntactic (Phrase Structure) or lexical analysis because both are likely to be valid — under different circumstances.
This volume, which has partly grown from a Round Table at the XIVth International Congress of Linguists, argues for a large amount of underlying unity in outlook among different frameworks in present-day linguistics: the contemporary Prague School; the Noematic approach; the UNITYP model; Integrational Linguistics; Natural Morphology; much recent work in phonology; and Popperian Interactionism as applied, in particular, to historical linguistics.
