Synopsis:

Dan Everett is a renowned linguist with an unparalleled breadth of contributions, ranging from fieldwork to linguistic theory, including phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, historical linguistics, philosophy of language, and philosophy of linguistics. Born on the U.S. Mexican border, Daniel Everett faced much adversity growing up and was sent as a missionary to convert the Pirahã in the Amazonian jungle, a group of people who speak a language that no outsider had been able to become proficient in. Although no Pirahã person was successfully converted, Everett successfully learned and studied Pirahã, as well as multiple other languages in the Americas. Ever steadfast in pursuing data-driven language science, Everett debunked generativist claims about syntactic recursion, for which he was repeatedly attacked. In addition to conducting fieldwork with many understudied languages and revolutionizing linguistics, Everett has published multiple works for the general public: "Don’t sleep, there are snakes, Language: The cultural tool, and how language began". This book is a collection of 15 articles that are related to Everett’s work over the years, released after a tribute event for Dan Everett that was held at MIT on June 8th 2023.

Synopsis:

In 1826, as nationalism first began percolating through the Habsburg lands, Jan Herkel published a Latin-language Slavic grammar. Herkel, a lawyer and amateur linguist, came from the northern counties the Kingdom of Hungary which now form the Slovak Republic. Though he was inspired by a romantic love of his native language, Herkel imagined a single "Slavic language," divided into various "dialects." He proposed a single grammar for the whole Slavic world, attempting to encompass and yet restrain the diversity of orthography, morphology, phonology, and so forth found across Slavic varieties. Herkel was also the coiner of the term "panslavism", which he used to describe his efforts. This book provides the first English translation of Herkel's noteworthy grammar, with short notes. The book also contains a preface and explanatory essays by co-translators Raf Van Rooy and Alexander Maxwell. The preface introduces the topic of the book. Maxwell then gives a biography of Herkel, discusses linguistic nationalism in Slavic northern Hungary, and the legacy of panslavism. Van Rooy explores Herkel's key notion of the "genius" of the Slavic language as the legacy of early modern linguistic thought.

Synopsis:

This book presents a new methodology for the study of historical varieties, particularly a language’s early history. Using the German language’s first attestations as a case study, it offers an alternative to structuralist approaches to historical syntax, with their emphasis on delineating the shapes and mechanisms of early grammars. This focus has prompted Germanists to treat the data from the eighth- and ninth-century corpus with suspicion in that its texts are either poetic or translational. That is, if the unquestioned object of inquiry is a historical cognitive grammar, one ought to isolate – and perhaps discount entirely – data that are the product of confounding factors, like a poetic meter or a Latin source text. Otherwise, these competence-obscuring examples risk undermining scholars’ understanding of a genuine early German grammar.

Rather than this “deficit approach,” the current volume proposes that scholars treat each early attestation as an artifact of “literization,” the process through which people transform their exclusively oral varieties into a written variety. Each historical text features a scriptus, that is, an ad hoc, idiosyncratic, and localized literization created by a person (or team of people) for a particular purpose. The challenge of understanding texts in this way lies in the fact that there is little to no direct evidence pointing to the specific identities of early medieval literizers, their motivations, and the nature of the multiple spoken competencies that fed into their scripti.

In order to conceptualize early medieval German and the syntactic variation it exhibits as a sociolinguistic phenomenon, this book details the linguistic resources that were available to the literizer and are, happily, accessible to the modern researcher. First, there is Latin. Though illiterate in their own multilectal vernacular in the sense that no German scriptus existed until they developed it, literizers were educated in this highly literized language and the classical metalinguistic discourse, known as grammatica, that was associated with it. Second, there are the linguistic patterns of elaborated orality, that is, the varieties that are characteristic of public life and the oral tradition in exclusively oral communities. Though the patterns of a peculiarly German elaborated orality are lost to history, those of other traditions and cultures are attested and should also inform how scholars conceive of a multilectal early German.

Synopsis:

A substantial proportion of what is discoverable about the structure of many Aboriginal languages spoken on the vast Australian continent before their decimation through colonial invasion is contained in nineteenth-century grammars. Many were written by fervent young missionaries who traversed the globe intent on describing the languages spoken by “heathens”, whom they hoped to convert to Christianity. Some of these documents, written before Australian or international academic institutions expressed any interest in Aboriginal languages, are the sole record of some of the hundreds of languages spoken by the first Australians, and many are the most comprehensive. These grammars resulted from prolonged engagement and exchange across a cultural and linguistic divide that is atypical of other early encounters between colonised and colonisers in Australia. Although the Aboriginal contributors to the grammars are frequently unacknowledged and unnamed, their agency is incontrovertible.

This history of the early description of Australian Aboriginal languages traces a developing understanding and ability to describe Australian morphosyntax. Focus on grammatical structures that challenged the classically trained missionary-grammarians – the description of the case systems, ergativity, bound pronouns, and processes of clause subordination – identifies the provenance of analyses, development of descriptive techniques, and paths of intellectual descent. The corpus of early grammatical description written between 1834 and 1910 is identified in Chapter 1. Chapter 2 discusses the philological methodology of retrieving data from these grammars. Chapters 3–10 consider the grammars in an order determined both by chronology and by the region in which the languages were spoken, since colonial borders regulated the development of the three schools of descriptive practice that are found to have developed in the pre-academic era of Australian linguistic description.

Synopsis:

This volume results from the workshop "Discourse obligates – How and why discourse limits the way we express what we express" at the 44th Annual Meeting of the German Linguistic Society in Tübingen, Germany. The workshop brought - and this book brings - together information-structural and information-theoretic perspectives on optional variation between linguistic encodings. Previously, linguistic phenomena like linearization, the choice between syntactic constructions or the distribution of ellipsis have been investigated from an information-structural or information-theoretic perspective, but the relationship between these approaches remains underexplored.

The goal of this book is to look more in detail into how information structure and information theory contribute to explaining linguistic variation, to what extent they explain different encoding choices and whether they interact in doing so. Using experimental and corpus-based methods, the contributions investigate this on different languages, historical stages and levels of linguistic analysis.

Synopsis:

Many theories hold that language change, at least on a local level, is driven by a need for improvement. The present volume explores to what extent this assumption holds true, and whether there is a particular type of language change that we dub language change for the worse, i.e., change with a worsening effect that cannot be explained away as a side-effect of improvement in some other area of the linguistic system. The chapters of the volume, written by leading junior and senior scholars, combine expertise in diachronic and historical linguistics, typology, and formal modelling. They focus on different aspects of grammar (phonology, morphosyntax, semantics) in a variety of language families (Germanic, Romance, Austronesian, Bantu, Jê-Kaingang, Wu Chinese, Greek, Albanian, Altaic, Indo-Aryan, and languages of the Caucasus). The volume contributes to ongoing theoretical debates and discussions between linguists with different theoretical orientations.

Synopsis:

This volume brings together studies on morphosyntactic and phonological constituency from a host of languages across the Americas. The study expands on previous multivariate typological work on phonological domains by simultaneously coding the results of morphosyntactic constituency tests. The descriptions are geared towards developing a typology of constituency and linguistic levels in both morphosyntactic and phonological domains. The multivariate approach adopted in this volume deconstructs constituency tests and phonological domains into cross-linguistically comparable variables applying and extending autotypology method to the domain of constituent structure. Current methodologies for establishing constituents have been criticized for containing an in-built selection bias, where the results and interpretation of tests are chosen or sampled in such a fashion that specific analyses are prejudged to be correct or false in a non-rigorous fashion. The papers of this volume develop novel methodology for reporting and coding constituency variables for language description and comparison that seeks to reign in selection bias allowing theories concerning the relationship between morphosyntactic and phonological constituent structure to be more severely tested.

Synopsis:

This collective volume breaks new ground in studies of linguistic complexity by addressing this phenomenon in heritage languages. It dismisses with the conception that heritage languages are less complex than their baseline or homeland counterparts and shows complexity trade-offs at various levels of linguistic representation. The authors consider defining properties of complexity as a phenomenon, diagnostics of complexity, and the ways complexity is modeled, measured, or operationalized in language sciences. The chapters showcase several bilingual dyads and offer new empirical data on heritage language production and use.

Synopsis:

This book offers an accessible introduction to the ways that language is processed and produced by computers, a field that has recently exploded in interest. The book covers writing systems, tools to help people write, computer-assisted language learning, the multidisciplinary study of text as data, text classification, information retrieval, machine translation, and dialog. Throughout, we emphasize insights from linguistics along with the ethical and social consequences of emerging technology. This book welcomes students from diverse intellectual backgrounds to learn new technical tools and to appreciate rich language data, thus widening the bridge between linguistics and computer science.

Synopsis:

This book examines extractions out of the subject, which is traditionally considered to be an island for extraction. There is a debate among linguists regarding whether the “subject island constraint” is a syntactic phenomenon or an illusion caused by cognitive or pragmatic factors. The book focusses on French, that provides an interesting case study because it allows certain extractions out of the subject despite not being a typical null-subject language. The book takes a discourse-based approach and introduces the “Focus-Background Conflict” constraint, which posits that a focused element cannot be part of a backgrounded constituent due to a pragmatic contradiction. The major novelty of this proposal is that it predicts a distinction between extractions out of the subject in focalizing and non-focalizing constructions.

The central contribution of this book is to offer the detailed results of a series of empirical studies (corpus studies and experiments) on extractions out of the subject is French. These studies offer evidence for the possibility of extraction out of the subject in French. But they also reveal a clear distinction between constructions. While extractions out of the subject are common and highly acceptable in relative clauses, this is not the case for interrogatives and clefts.

Finally, the book proposes a Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) analysis of subject islands. It demonstrates the interaction between information structure and syntax using a representation of information structure based on Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS).

Synopsis:

Expressions from the semasiological domain of phasal polarity (ʻstillʼ, ʻalreadyʼ, etc.) tend to be highly polyfunctional, with their various uses often extending into a wide range of other linguistic domains, both time-related and non-temporal. Yet these patterns have hitherto been investigated mostly for individual languages or smaller groups. This volume presents the first ever larger-scale survey of the numerous functions of expressions whose meanings include the notion of ʻstill’, making use of a global sample of 76 varieties from 45 distinct phyla. It is aimed at semanticists, typologists and descriptive grammarians alike.

Synopsis:

Kagayanen is a resilient Austronesian>Greater Central Philippine>Manobo language spoken by about 30,000 individuals, mostly in Palawan province in the Philippines. This grammar is the result of nearly 40 years of research by Carol Pebley and a team of Kagayanen speakers and non-Kagayanen co-workers. The primary data source is a corpus of texts collected over a 20 year period. These texts, three of which appear in an appendix to this book, provide vivid insights into Kagayanen ways of being. The grammar is written with a general linguistics audience in mind, from a "communication first" perspective. It should prove useful to specialists in Austronesian languages, linguistic typologists, and others interested in doing research in the central Philippines. It is also hoped that this grammar will be an encouragement to Kagayanen speakers, proving that their language is wonderfully complex and deserves an equal place alongside other regional and international languages.

Synopsis:

This volume contains a selection of papers that were presented at the 53rd Annual Conference on African Linguistics, which was held virtually at the University of California San Diego. There are 21 papers covering phonology, morphology, syntax, lexical semantics, sociolinguistics, typology and historical linguistics. The volume features a keynote paper that proposes a novel community-based approach to language documentation. African languages investigated in detail include Wolof, Mende, Dangme, Kusaal, Nzema, Anii, Nigerian Pidgin, Tunen, Nyokon, Vale, Lokoya, Lopit, Otuho, Kalenjin, Tiriki, Oromo, Tigrinya, Asá, Qwadza, and Ikalanga.

Synopsis: This edited volume pays tribute to traditional and innovative language contact research, bringing together contributors with expertise on different languages examining general phenomena of language contact and specific linguistic features which arise in language contact scenarios. A particular focus lies on contact between languages of unbalanced political and symbolic power, language contact and group identity, and the linguistic and societal implications of language contact settings, especially considering contemporary global migration streams.

Drawing on various methodological approaches, among others, corpus and contrastive linguistics, linguistic landscapes, sociolinguistic interviews, and ethnographic fieldwork, the contributions describe phenomena of language contact between and with Romance languages, Semitic languages, and English(es).

Synopsis: Bereits Jacob Grimm bemerkte im Band 2 seiner Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (1848), dass adjektivische Genuskongruenz mit gemischtgeschlechtlichem Personenbezug in den älteren Sprachstufen des Deutschen häufig das Neutrum aufweist. Askedal (1973) widmete diesem Thema eine ausführliche Studie auf Basis kritischer Editionen einer Handvoll alt- und mittelhochdeutscher literarischen Werke. Die Standardwerke zur historischen Grammatik des Deutschen beschränken sich bislang darauf, diese Regel undifferenziert nach grammatischem Kontext lediglich zu konstatieren.

Die vorliegende Studie zeichnet das Phänomen der Gender Resolution (Corbett 1983) im Mittelhochdeutschen nach. Dies geschieht auf handschriftennaher Grundlage anhand der Geschäftsprosa der Urkunden des Corpus der altdeutschen Originalurkunden bis zum Jahr 1300 (Wilhelm et al. 1932–2004) sowie der erst seit wenigen Jahren verfügbaren Transkriptionen der Haupthandschriften aller drei Rezensionen der Kaiserchronik als literarischem Vergleichstext. Die Studie setzt sich zum Ziel, bestehendes Wissen über dieses grammatische Phänomen zu validieren und im Rahmen eines zeitgemäßen grammatiktheoretischen Modells zu reflektieren. Zu diesem Zweck wird systematisch Variation in der Kongruenzform des Quantors mittelhochdeutsch bėide ‘beide’, der sich auf ein Referentenpaar bezieht, in den typischen Kontexten seines Auftretens hinsichtlich morphologischer, semantischer und syntaktischer Zusammenhänge detailliert untersucht.

Der Preis dieses Buches wird in Deutschland auf 40 EUR festgesetzt.

Already Jacob Grimm noted in volume 2 of his Geschichte der deutschen Sprache (1848) that adjectival forms with reference to mixed-gender human groups often showed neuter agreement in the historical stages of German. Askedal (1973) as well dedicated an extensive study to this issue, based on critical editions of a handful of Old and Middle High German literary texts. Standard reference works on historical German grammar so far merely state the rule without further differentiation by grammatical context.

This survey traces the phenomenon of gender resolution (Corbett 1983) in Middle High German. Evidence is collected on a true-to-manuscript basis consisting of the businesslike prose of the Corpus der altdeutschen Originalurkunden bis zum Jahr 1300 (Wilhelm et al 1932–2004) as well as the main manuscripts of all three recensions of the Kaiserchronik as a literary object of comparison, transcriptions of which have only in recent years been made available. The survey aims to validate existing knowledge on this grammatical phenomenon and to reflect on it in a modern grammar-theoretical framework. For this purpose, variation in the agreement form of Middle High German bėide ‘both’, which refers to a pair of antecedents, is evaluated systematically and in great detail in its typical use contexts with regard to morphological, semantic, and syntactic circumstances.

Synopsis: On the premise that syntactic variation is constrained by factors that may not always be immediately obvious, this volume explores various perspectives on the nominal syntax in the early Germanic languages and the syntactic diversity they display. The fact that these languages are relatively well attested and documented allows for individual cases studies as well as comparative studies. Due to their well-observable common ancestry at the time of their earliest attestations, they moreover permit close-up comparative investigations into closely related languages. Besides the purely empirical aspects, the volume also explores the methodological side of diagnosing, classifying and documenting the details of syntactic diversity. The volume starts with a description by Alexander Pfaff and Gerlof Bouma of the principles underlying the Noun Phrases in Early Germanic Languages (NPEGL) database, before Alexander Pfaff presents the Patternization method for measuring syntactic diversity. Kristin Bech, Hannah Booth, Kersti Börjars, Tine Breban, Svetlana Petrova, and George Walkden carry out a pilot study of noun phrase variation in Old English, Old High German, Old Icelandic, and Old Saxon. Kristin Bech then considers the development of Old English noun phrases with quantifiers meaning ‘many’. Alexandra Rehn’s study is concerned with the inflection of stacked adjectives in Old High German and Alemannic. Old High German is also the topic of Svetlana Petrova’s study, which looks at inflectional patterns of attributive adjectives. With Hannah Booth’s contribution we move to Old Icelandic and the use of the proprial article as a topic management device. Juliane Tiemann investigates adjective position in Old Norwegian. Alexander Pfaff and George Walkden then take a broader view of adjectival articles in early Germanic, before Alexander Pfaff rounds off the volume with a study of a peculiar class of adjectives, the so-called positional