Jacob Wackernagel’s 1892 essay on second-position enclitics in the Indo-European languages has long been hailed as groundbreaking in both historical and theoretical linguistics. Until now, however, it has only been available in the original German. This book provides a full translation into English, including glossed and translated examples from several early Indo-European languages and varieties and full bibliographical details of the references drawn upon, as well as a new edition of the German original. It should be of interest to researchers in historical and Indo-European linguistics and in general linguistics working on the interfaces between morphology, prosody and syntax.

This volume contains the complete collection of published and unpublished work on German grammar by Tilman N. Höhle. It consists of two parts. The first part is Topologische Felder, a book-length manuscript that was written in 1983 but was never finished nor published. It is a careful examination of the topological properties of German sentences, including a discussion of typological assumptions. The second part assembles all other published and unpublished papers by Höhle on German grammar.

All of these papers were highly influential in German linguistics, in theoretical linguistics in general, and in a specific variant of theoretical linguistics, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Topics covered are clause structure, constituent order, coordination, (verum) focus, word structure, the relationship between relative pronouns and verbs in V2, extraction, and the foundations of a theory of phonology in constraint-based grammar.

This volume presents two works elaborating a general theory of words and their structure written by René de Saussure, younger brother of Ferdinand de Saussure. Although originating in René de Saussure's concerns for the structure of Esperanto, these essays are clearly intended to articulate a general account of word formation in natural language. They appear here in the French original with facing English translations, accompanied by some remarks on René de Saussure's life and followed by essays on the Esperantist background of his analysis (by Marc van Oostendorp), the contemporary relevance of his morphological theory (by Stephen Anderson), and the semantic theory of words underlying his analysis (by Louis de Saussure). These two works have remained essentially unknown to the community of scholars in general linguistics since their publication in 1911 and 1919, respectively, although Esperantists have been aware of them. They develop in quite explicit form a theory of what would later be called morphemic analysis, based primarily on data from French (with some material from German and English, as well as occasional examples from other Indo-European languages). In its fundamental aspect, René's view of word formation differed significantly from that of his brother, who saw the structure of complex words as revealed not through their decomposition into smaller "atomic" units but rather in the relations between words, relations which could be presented in analogical form and which anticipate rule-based theories of morphological structure. The contrast between the two brothers' views thus anticipates basic issues in current theorizing about word structure.

This volume contains the complete collection of published and unpublished work on German grammar by Tilman N. Höhle. It consists of two parts. The first part is Topologische Felder, a book-length manuscript that was written in 1983 but was never finished nor published. It is a careful examination of the topological properties of German sentences, including a discussion of typological assumptions. The second part assembles all other published and unpublished papers by Höhle on German grammar. All of these papers were highly influential in German linguistics, in theoretical linguistics in general, and in a specific variant of theoretical linguistics, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar. Topics covered are clause structure, constituent order, coordination, (verum) focus, word structure, the relationship between relative pronouns and verbs in V2, extraction, and the foundations of a theory of phonology in constraint-based grammar.

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).

Throughout much of the history of linguistics, grammaticality judgments – intuitions about the well-formedness of sentences – have constituted most of the empirical base against which theoretical hypothesis have been tested. Although such judgments often rest on subtle intuitions, there is no systematic methodology for eliciting them, and their apparent instability and unreliability have led many to conclude that they should be abandoned as a source of data. Carson T. Schütze presents here a detailed critical overview of the vast literature on the nature and utility of grammaticality judgments and other linguistic intuitions, and the ways they have been used in linguistic research. He shows how variation in the judgment process can arise from factors such as biological, cognitive, and social differences among subjects, the particular elicitation method used, and extraneous features of the materials being judged. He then assesses the status of judgments as reliable indicators of a speaker's grammar. Integrating substantive and methodological findings, Schütze proposes a model in which grammaticality judgments result from interaction of linguistic competence with general cognitive processes. He argues that this model provides the underpinning for empirical arguments to show that once extragrammatical variance is factored out, universal grammar succumbs to a simpler, more elegant analysis than judgment data initially lead us to expect. Finally, Schütze offers numerous practical suggestions on how to collect better and more useful data. The result is a work of vital importance that will be required reading for linguists, cognitive psychologists, and philosophers of language alike. "Native speakers' judgments of the acceptability of linguistic examples have always formed a major part of the data of linguistics, but linguists generally either have elicited such data in a haphazard fashion and accepted the results uncritically or have rejected acceptability judgments altogether and equally uncritically. Schütze's book is a welcome relief from the failure of linguists to deal responsibly with what can be either the most fertile or the most misleading source of information about languages." —James D. McCawley, University of Chicago "Schütze has written an extraordinarily useful and timely book. In it, he provides a clear and readable review of past studies of the methodology of generative syntax. But this is not merely a survey: it is also a call for more careful and objective scientific methods in syntax, including a set of practical methodological suggestions for working syntacticians. If heeded, they will greatly strengthen the empirical base of linguistic theory." —Tom Wasow, Stanford University

"Thoughts on grammaticalization" was first published in a working-paper version in 1982 and became very influential immediately, even though it was properly published only in 1995. Despite its modest title, the book can be read as an advanced introduction to grammaticalization, though its conception is very original. The present edition contains a number of corrections of the 1995 edition. After a short review of the history of research, the work introduces and delimits the concepts related to grammaticalization. It then provides extensive exemplification of grammaticalization phenomena in diverse languages, ordered by grammatical domains such as the verbal, pronominal and nominal sphere and clause level relations. The final chapter presents a theory of grammaticalization which is based on the autonomy of the linguistic sign with respect to the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes. This is the basis of the structural parameters that constitute grammaticalization. They are operationalized to the point of rendering degrees of grammaticalization measurable.

Die Sprachwissenschaft ist das Hauptwerk des deutschen Sinologen und Sprachwissenschaftlers Georg von der Gabelentz (1840–1893), eines Vertreters der humboldtschen Richtung der Sprachforschung im neunzehnten Jahrhundert. Als es erschien, wurde das Buch von einer Fachlinguistik, die sich schon längst auf den positivistischen Weg der Junggrammatiker begeben hatte, nur kühl rezipiert. Ab der Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts wurde das Buch jedoch immer öfter als Bindeglied zwischen den Denkströmungen des 19. Jahrhunderts und dem aufkommenden Strukturalismus des 20. Jahrhunderts betrachtet. Das Buch erschien in zwei Auflagen; die erste zu Gabelentz' Lebzeiten, im Jahr 1891, und die zweite posthum im Jahr 1901, die von Albrecht Graf von der Schulenburg (1865–1902), einem Neffen und Schüler Gabelentz', erheblich überarbeitet und erweitert wurde. Diese kritische Ausgabe bietet zum ersten Mal den Text der beiden Auflagen in einer Form dar, die es dem Leser ermöglicht, die beiden Auflagen leicht zu vergleichen. Dadurch stellt diese Ausgabe eine wertvolle Quelle für historiographische Forschung zum Stand der Linguistik an der Schwelle zum 20. Jahrhundert dar.