The Twelfth International Conference on Historical Linguistics, which is the major forum for the presentation of work in progress in the field of diachronic linguistics, took place at the University of Manchester in August 1995. The quality and breadth of the abstracts submitted for the general programme was such that four parallel sessions were needed throughout the conference.
This volume presents a selection from the papers given at the 13th International Conference on Historical Linguistics. It offers a window on the current state of the art in historical linguistics: the papers cover a wide range of different languages, different language families, and different approaches to the study of linguistic change, ranging from optimality theory, theories of grammaticalization and the invisible hand, treatments of language contact and creolization to the linguistic consequences of political correctness.
The purpose of Point of View, first published in 1990, is twofold: from the perspective of linguistics, to analyse the discourse structure of texts; from the perspective of literary studies, to explain certain non-linguistic aspects of the texts in terms of linguistic form. This study therefore aims to provide a balanced and sufficiently comprehensive account of the relationship between linguistic form and point of view. It will be of particular value to literature students with an interest in linguistics, and literary style.
Cognitive linguistics is nothing if not an interdisciplinary and comparative enterprise. This collection addresses both the implications OF and the implications FOR cognitive linguistics of psycholinguistic, computational, neuroscientific, cross-cultural and cross-linguistic research.
Alice ter Meulen integrates current research in natural language semantics, with detailed analyses of English discourse, and logical tools from a variety of sources into an information theory that provides the foundation for computational systems to reason about change and the flow of time. The topic of temporal meaning in texts has received considerable attention in recent years from scholars in linguistics, logical semantics, cognitive science, and artificial intelligence.
