Possible and Probable Languages

Possible and Probable Languages PDF Author: Frederick J. Newmeyer
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0199274339
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Book Description
In this important and pioneering book Frederick Newmeyer takes on the question of language variety. He considers why some language types are impossible and why some grammatical features are more common than others. The task of trying to explain typological variation among languages has been mainly undertaken by functionally-oriented linguists. Generative grammarians entering the field of typology in the 1980s put forward the idea that cross-linguistic differences could be explained by linguistic parameters within Universal Grammar, whose operation might vary from language to language. Unfortunately, this way of looking at variation turned out to be much less successful than had been hoped for. Professor Newmeyer's alternative to parameters combines leading ideas from functionalist and formalist approaches which in the past have been considered incompatible. He throws fresh light on language typology and variation, and provides new insights into the principles of Universal The book is written in a clear, readable style and will be readily understood by anyone with a couple of years' study of linguistics. It will interest a wide range of scholars and students of language, including typologists, historical linguists, and theorists of every shade.

Possible and Probable Languages

Possible and Probable Languages PDF Author: Frederick J. Newmeyer
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191534404
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
In this important and pioneering book Frederick Newmeyer takes on the question of language variety. He considers why some language types are impossible and why some grammatical features are more common than others. The task of trying to explain typological variation among languages has been mainly undertaken by functionally-oriented linguists. Generative grammarians entering the field of typology in the 1980s put forward the idea that cross-linguistic differences could be explained by linguistic parameters within Universal Grammar, whose operation might vary from language to language. Unfortunately, this way of looking at variation turned out to be much less successful than had been hoped for. Professor Newmeyer's alternative to parameters combines leading ideas from functionalist and formalist approaches which in the past have been considered incompatible. He throws fresh light on language typology and variation, and provides new insights into the principles of Universal Grammar. The book is written in a clear, readable style and will be readily understood by anyone with a couple of years' study of linguistics. It will interest a wide range of scholars and students of language, including typologists, historical linguists, and theorists of every shade.

Language

Language PDF Author: Edward Sapir
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Language and languages
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Book Description
Professor Sapir analyzes, for student and common reader, the elements of language. Among these are the units of language, grammatical concepts and their origins, how languages differ and resemble each other, and the history of the growth of representative languages--Cover.

Syntactic Structures

Syntactic Structures PDF Author: Noam Chomsky
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3112316002
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 120

Book Description
No detailed description available for "Syntactic Structures".

Language and Woman's Place

Language and Woman's Place PDF Author: Robin Tolmach Lakoff
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019534717X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 324

Book Description
The 1975 publication of Robin Tolmach Lakoff's Language and Woman's Place, is widely recognized as having inaugurated feminist research on the relationship between language and gender, touching off a remarkable response among language scholars, feminists, and general readers. For the past thirty years, scholars of language and gender have been debating and developing Lakoff's initial observations. Arguing that language is fundamental to gender inequality, Lakoff pointed to two areas in which inequalities can be found: Language used about women, such as the asymmetries between seemingly parallel terms like master and mistress, and language used by women, which places women in a double bind between being appropriately feminine and being fully human. Lakoff's central argument that "women's language" expresses powerlessness triggered a controversy that continues to this day. The revised and expanded edition presents the full text of the original first edition, along with an introduction and annotations by Lakoff in which she reflects on the text a quarter century later and expands on some of the most widely discussed issues it raises. The volume also brings together commentaries from twenty-six leading scholars of language, gender, and sexuality, within linguistics, anthropology, modern languages, education, information sciences, and other disciplines. The commentaries discuss the book's contribution to feminist research on language and explore its ongoing relevance for scholarship in the field. This new edition of Language and Woman's Place not only makes available once again the pioneering text of feminist linguistics; just as important, it places the text in the context of contemporary feminist and gender theory for a new generation of readers.

English as a Global Language

English as a Global Language PDF Author: David Crystal
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107611806
Category : Foreign Language Study
Languages : en
Pages : 227

Book Description
Written in a detailed and fascinating manner, this book is ideal for general readers interested in the English language.

Roots of language

Roots of language PDF Author: Derek Bickerton
Publisher: Language Science Press
ISBN: 3946234089
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 305

Book Description
Roots of language was originally published in 1981 by Karoma Press (Ann Arbor). It was the first work to systematically develop a theory first suggested by Coelho in the late nineteenth century: that the creation of creole languages somehow reflected universal properties of language. The book also proposed that the same set of properties would be found to emerge in normal first-language acquisition and must have emerged in the original evolution of language. These proposals, some of which were elaborated in an article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences (1984), were immediately controversial and gave rise to a great deal of subsequent research in creoles, much of it aimed at rebutting the theory. The book also served to legitimize and stimulate research in language evolution, a topic regarded as off-limits by linguists for over a century. The present edition contains a foreword by the author bringing the theory up to date; a fuller exposition of many of its aspects can be found in the author's most recent work, More than nature needs (Harvard University Press, 2014).

Analyzing Language in Restricted Domains

Analyzing Language in Restricted Domains PDF Author: Ralph Grishman
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 1317767845
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Book Description
First published in 1986. For most of the authors represented in this collection, the term 'Sublanguage' suggests a subsystem of language that behaves essentially like the whole language, while being limited in reference to a specific subject domain. Argued throughout this title, even if sublanguage grammars can be related to the grammar of the full standard language, sublanguages behave in many ways like autonomous systems. This volume will illustrate that, as such, they take on theoretical interest as microcosms of the whole language. The papers collected in this volume were presented at the Workshop on Sublanguage, held at New York University on January 19-20, 1984.

Nature Displayed in Her Mode of Teaching Language to Man

Nature Displayed in Her Mode of Teaching Language to Man PDF Author: Nicolas Gouin Dufief
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : French language
Languages : en
Pages : 574

Book Description


The Spanish language, la gramática inglesa, and the English reader

The Spanish language, la gramática inglesa, and the English reader PDF Author: Nicolas Gouin Dufief
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Commercial correspondence, Spanish
Languages : en
Pages : 604

Book Description