The papers in this volume were presented at the Fifth Biennial Symposium of the Department of Linguistics, Rice University, March 1993. The participants were asked to concentrate in depth and in a self-reflective way upon some range of data. The intent was multifold. The first purpose was descriptive. It was expected that the participants would carry out their task in a retrospective way, exemplifying and building upon their previous work, but it was also expected that they would begin to demonstrate the configuration of some area in a more comprehensive picture of language. The point was to take (at least) one substantive step in the depiction of what we think language will ultimately be like. The contributions were both specific and generalizing, with focus as much upon methodology as upon hypotheses about language. In examining descriptive practice, we continued to concentrate upon issues which concerned us all, and at the same time we tried to advance the discourse by the results of such description. We hoped that problematic and recalcitrant data would make our own practice clearer to us and that it might also instruct us in the refinement of our conceptions of language.

This volume presents seven alternative approaches to studying second language acquisition, and each approach is authored by a leading advocate for it in the field. Edited by Dwight Atkinson, and including contributions from James Lantolf ,Diane Larsen-Freeman, Gabriele Kasper and Johannes Wagner, Bonny Norton and Carolyn McKinney, Patricia Duff and Steven Talmy.

This book provides linguists with a clear, critical, and comprehensive overview of theoretical and experimental work on information structure. Leading researchers survey the main theories of information structure in syntax, phonology, and semantics as well as perspectives from psycholinguistics and other relevant fields. Following the editors' introduction the book is divided into four parts. The first, on theories of and theoretical perspectives on information structure, includes chapters on topic, prosody, and implicature. Part 2 covers a range of current issues in the field, including focus, quantification, and sign languages, while Part 3 is concerned with experimental approaches to information structure, including processes involved in its acquisition and comprehension. The final part contains a series of linguistic case studies drawn from a wide variety of the world's language families. This volume will be the standard guide to current work in information structure and a major point of departure for future research.

This edited volume presents Alternative Voices in the contexts of present-day and historical globalisation, the emergence of the knowledge society, increased global-local or glocal migration flows, the explosion of social media, and disparate regional growth that have both impacted and shaped the sociocultural fabric of geopolitical spaces across the world. The volume builds upon twenty-seven contributions that focus upon issues related to language, culture and identity from a multidisciplinary nexus of historical, philosophical and empirically-based traditions. Positioned in post-colonial emic heritage, the research presented here challenges the “monolingual (including monocultural) bias” and the “linguacentric bias” in the Language Sciences. This volume is an important contribution in terms of analyzing and demonstrating issues related to the complexity of culture and language, and their links with social, political, economic forces, particularly the tensions related to glocal identity positions that are evoked and played out in geopolitically heterogeneous spaces. Given its multidisciplinary nature, this volume presents individual comprehensive accounts of complexities that have been poorly understood and inadequately covered in the existing literature – both in Southern and Northern contexts.

Innovations and Challenges in Applied Linguistics from the Global South provides an original appraisal of the latest innovations and challenges in applied linguistics from the perspective of the Global South. Global South perspectives are encapsulated in struggles for basic, economic, political and social transformation in an inequitable world, and are not confined to the geographical South. Taking a critical perspective on Southern theories, demonstrating why it is important to view the world from Southern perspectives and why such positions must be open to critical investigation, this book: charts the impacts of these theories on approaches to multilingualism, language learning, language in education, literacy and diversity, language rights and language policy; provides broad historical and geographical understandings of the movement towards a Southern perspective and draws on Indigenous and Southern ways of thinking that challenge mainstream viewpoints; seeks to develop alternative understandings of applied linguistics, expand the intellectual repertoires of the discipline, and challenge the complicities between applied linguistics, colonialism, and capitalism. Written by two renowned scholars in the field, Innovations and Challenges in Applied Linguistics from the Global South is key reading for advanced students and researchers of applied linguistics, multilingualism, language and education, language policy and planning, and language and identity.

An A B C of Linguistics is about linguistics that is suitable for graduate and postgraduate students of English. It is also an informational book for general readers. There aren’t many books on this subject. Therefore, I chose to write this book. People with an educational background in English will benefit more from this book.

Computer understanding of natural language (NL) is commonly considered as extracting ?sense? from NL texts. This deprives the problem of determinity, since the notion of ?sense? lacks a formal definition. However, with a man-to-computer NL dialogue involved in some working process, any address by humans is nothing but a task for the computer to fulfil. Then it is immaterial whether the computer understands the address text sense and even the very notion of ?sense?. Only the address task is to be accomplished. This means not revealing morphologic, syntactic and other text structures, but only extracting data on the task. As a result, a new theory of NL dialogue understanding has been created, called ?orientated linguistics?. This theory has been brought to life as several practical systems, which have demonstrated an extremely reliable and correct understanding of a quite free and easy NL, a tiny resource consumption and simple readjustment between various subject areas and, what is more, national languages.

Changing socio-political landscapes, the dynamics of ‘glocalisation’, among other factors, are spawning new policy attitudes towards multilingualism, and again putting language planning (LP) on the map – in a manner reminiscent of the 1960s and 1970s. With respect to terminology, this book suggests that to be relevant and sustainable, current LP would have to define its mission as the deregulation of access to specialised knowledge, and correspondingly be founded on substantially different methods and theoretical bases: epistemology and ontology of specialised domains; research on language for special purposes (LSP) and collocations; corpus linguistics; knowledge extraction and knowledge representation; language engineering technologies. On the one hand, the book recommends itself to decision-makers and language planning project managers. On the other, it should be of interest to students of LSP and terminology, language planning, concept and object theories, knowledge modelling, artificial intelligence, text and corpus management, translation process analysis, text and African linguistics.

In the early years of generative grammar it was assumed that the appropriate mechanism for generating syntactic structures was a grammar of context-free rewriting rules. The twelve essays in this volume discuss recent challenges to this classical formulation of phrase structure and the alternative conceptions proposed to replace it. Each article approaches this issue from the perspective of a different linguistic framework, such as categorical grammar, government-binding theory, head-driven phrase structure grammar, and tree-adjoining grammar. By contributing to the understanding of the differing assumptions and research strategies of each theory, this volume serves as an important survey of current thinking on the frontier of theoretical and computation linguistics.

There are two prominent schools in linguistics: Minimalism (Chomsky) and Construction Grammar (Goldberg, Tomasello). Minimalism comes with the claim that our linguistic capabilities consist of an abstract, binary combinatorial operation (Merge) and a lexicon. Most versions of Construction Grammar assume that language consists of flat phrasal schemata that contribute their own meaning and may license additional arguments. This book examines a variant of Lexical Functional Grammar, which is lexical in principle but was augmented by tools that allow for the description of phrasal constructions in the Construction Grammar sense. These new tools include templates that can be used to model inheritance hierarchies and a resource driven semantics. The resource driven semantics makes it possible to reach the effects that lexical rules had, for example remapping of arguments, by semantic means. The semantic constraints can be evaluated in the syntactic component, which is basically similar to the delayed execution of lexical rules. So this is a new formalization that might be suitable to provide solutions to longstanding problems that are not available for other formalizations. While the authors suggest a lexical treatment of many phenomena and only assume phrasal constructions for selected phenomena like benefactive and resultative constructions in English, it can be shown that even these two constructions should not be treated phrasally in English and that the analysis would not extend to other languages as for instance German. I show that the new formal tools do not really improve the situation and many of the basic conceptual problems remain. Since this specific proposal fails for two constructions, it follows that proposals (in the same framework) that assume phrasal analyses for all constructions are not appropriate either. The conclusion is that lexical models are needed and this entails that the schemata that combine syntactic objects are rather abstract (as in Categorial Grammar, Minimalism, HPSG and standard LFG). On the other hand there are constructions that should be treated by very specific, phrasal schemata as in Construction Grammar and LFG and HPSG. So the conclusion is that both schools are right (and wrong) and that a combination of ideas from both camps is needed.