Field Linguistics
This book deals with one aspect of the issue of linguistic diversity in the world: the task of linguistic documentation arising out of original research in the field. Although many linguistics programmes include a field methods component, I have often been asked by academics, ‘When you do fieldwork, how do you actually start?’ This suggests that researchers are possibly sometimes still being thrown into the field at the deep end, much as I suppose I was back in the early 1970s when I was sent on my first fieldtrip. I went with an abundance of enthusiasm, tempered with some trepidation, but not a whole lot of practical training. There therefore has to be a substantial need for a book such as this.
English Grammar,
Adapted to the Different
Classes of Learners Murray.s grammar is subtitled .adapted to the different classes of leaners., and, as a result of a strict division into main text and additional linguistic information, it is a graded grammar. It would thus appear to be suitable for learners of different ages. This was one of the reasons for the grammar.s phenomenal popularity.
Murray.s grammar is to a large extent based on Lowth.s (Vorlat 1959), but it also differs in a number of respects. Furthermore, the second half of the eighteenth century saw the birth of grammars written specifically for children, for which there proved to be a real market (Navest 2005). In this paper, I will discuss the question of whether - as would appear to be the case - it was Lowth.s grammar which gave the impetus to this development or not, and what it was that made his grammar unsuitable for children. I will do so by focussing on Lowth.s methodology in codifying the English language and contrasting it with that adopted by Murray and others of the period, thereby taking into account a number of specific linguistic strictures discussed in the grammars. As these grammars were primarily aimed at the rising middle classes (Fitzmaurice1998), I will also argue that the presence of some of these linguistic strictures in the grammars can be explained by what was considered to be a real threat at the time: the possibile linguistic contamination by English nannies in the language acquisition process of young children.
Language and Learning: Philosophy of Language in the Hellenistic Age The sophistication and diversity of Hellenistic traditions addressing problems of language will make the study of those linguistic theories an intriguing subject to all students of the history of language theory in general. A novice in Hellenistic philosophy will also find that the study of the different schools’ concern with language and linguistic phenomena provides an excellent introduction to the doctrines of the various schools, since it sheds light on their epistemology as well as on their logical, ethical and physical presuppositions.
There are three main centres of interest that received special attention from all schools in the Hellenistic age and its aftermath.
(1) There is the question of the origin of language or languages. Though the notion of a ‘wise inventor’ of language was generally treated with disfavour, the problem of the etymology of linguistic expressions and their reference to reality posed a challenge to all philosophical schools.
(2) Special attention was also given to the question of the interdependence between language and thought in general, particularly in view of the importance attributed to rhetoric and other forms of self-expression.
(3) Last, but not least, is the concern with the question in what sense ‘language’ can be treated as a technical subject with rules of its own, so that grammar is not merely a matter of empirical research and linguistic observation.
For the past forty years, linguistics has been dominated by the idea that language is categorical and linguistic competence discrete. It has become increasingly clear, however, that many levels of representation, from phonemes to sentence structure, show probabilistic properties, as does the language faculty. Probabilistic linguistics conceptualizes categories as distributions and views knowledge of language not as a minimal set of categorical constraints but as a set of gradient rules that may be characterized by a statistical distribution. Whereas categorical approaches focus on the endpoints of distributions of linguistic phenomena, probabilistic approaches focus on the gradient middle ground. Probabilistic linguistics integrates all the progress made by linguistics thus far with a probabilistic perspective. This book presents a comprehensive introduction to probabilistic approaches to linguistic inquiry. It covers the application of probabilistic techniques to phonology, morphology, semantics, syntax, language acquisition, psycholinguistics, historical linguistics, and sociolinguistics. It also includes a tutorial on elementary probability theory and probabilistic grammars.
