These papers, from the IPS-77 Congress held in Miami Beach, Florida in 1977, present the state-of-the-art in phonetic science. The volume is subdivided into twelve sections: History of Phonetics, Issues of Method and Theory in Phonetics, Laryngeal Function, Temporal Factors and Intonation, Physiological and Acoustic Phonetics, Speech Production, Neurophonetics and Psychopathology, Speech Perception, Speech and Speaker Recognition, Teaching Phonetics, Children’s Speech and Language Acquisition, and Special Issues in Phonetics.

These papers, from the IPS-77 Congress held in Miami Beach, Florida in 1977, present the state-of-the-art in phonetic science. The volume is subdivided into twelve sections: History of Phonetics, Issues of Method and Theory in Phonetics, Laryngeal Function, Temporal Factors and Intonation, Physiological and Acoustic Phonetics, Speech Production, Neurophonetics and Psychopathology, Speech Perception, Speech and Speaker Recognition, Teaching Phonetics, Children s Speech and Language Acquisition, and Special Issues in Phonetics.

This book provides hands-on experience with a major area of modern phonology, including phonetics; phonetic variation; natural classes of sounds; alternations; rule systems; and prosodic phonology. Working with problems is an essential part of courses that introduce students to modern phonology. This book provides hands-on experience with a major area of modern phonology, including phonetics; phonetic variation; natural classes of sounds; alternations; rule systems; and prosodic phonology. An introductory essay gives an overview of some of the principal results and assumptions of current phonological theory. The problems are taken from a wide variety of languages, and many are drawn from the authors' firsthand research. All have been used by the authors in their introductory courses, primarily at Harvard and MIT, and are meant to be used in conjunction with a textbook and/or other materials provided by the classroom instructor.

This volume contains functional approaches to the description of language and culture, and language and cultural change. The approaches taken by the authors range from cognitive approaches including Stratificational grammar to more socially oriented ones including Systemic Functional linguistics. The volume is organized into two sections. The first section 'Functional Approaches to the Structure of Language: Theory and Practice' starts with contributions developing a Stratificational model; these are followed by contributions focusing on some related functional model of language; and by articles describing some particular set of language phenomena.In the second section 'Functional Approaches to the History of Language and Linguistics' general studies of language change are addressed first; a second group of contributions examines language change, lexicon and culture; and the last cluster of contributions treats the history of linguistics and culture.

After a brief survey of the perception of morphological change in the standard works of the Hispanic tradition in the 20th century, the author first attempts to refine concepts such as analogy, leveling, blending, contamination, etc. as they have been applied to Spanish. He then revisits difficult problems of Spanish historical grammar and explores the extent to which various types of morphological processes may have operated in a given change. Selected problems are examined in light of abundant textual evidence. Some include: the resistance to change of Sp. dormir ‘to sleep’, morir ‘to die’, the vocalic sequence /ee/, the reduction of the OSp. verbal suffixes -ades, -edes, -ides, -odes, and the uncertain origin of Sp. eres ‘you are’. Important notions such as the directionality of leveling, phonological vs. morphological change in the nominal and verbal paradigms, the morphological spread of sound change, and the role of morphological factors in apparent syntactic change are discussed.

The papers in this volume address the general question what type of lexical specifications we need in a generative grammar and by what principles this information is projected onto syntactic configurations, or to put it differently, how lexical insertion is executed. Many of the contributions focus on what the syntactic consequences are of choices that are made with respect to the lexical specifications of heads. The data in the volume are drawn from diverse languages, among which: Brazilian Portuguese, Bulgarian, Dutch, English, French, German, Icelandic, Italian, Mohawk, Norwegian, Polish, Russian.

Textual Parameters in Older Languages takes a contemporary approach to the inherent limitations of using older texts as data for linguistic analysis, drawing on methods of text analysis, pragmatics and sociolinguistics to supplement traditional historical and philological methods. The focus of the book is on the importance of controlling for textual parameters-defined by the editors as dimensions of variation associated with texts and their production, including text type, degree of poeticality, orality, and dialect-in the analysis of older language data. Failure to do so can result in invalid generalizations; recognizing the influence of textual parameters, conversely, raises a myriad of issues for the practice and theory of historical linguistics. The 12 essays in this collection apply this approach in analyses of anaphora, non-finite verbal forms, particles, punctuation, word order and other phenomena in a wide range of languages including Ancient Tamil, Sanskrit, Latin, Heian Japanese, Medieval Greek, Old French, Old Russian, Middle English, and Modern Danish. An in-depth introduction by the editors lays out the goals of the textual parameters approach, and considers the methodological and theoretical consequences of the evidence presented in the book as a whole.

This collection of twelve essays, some of which have been written specifically for this volume by well-known European and North-American sociolinguists, reflects an increasing recognition within the field that sociological and theoretical innocence can no longer be underwritten by it, and offers a multi-pronged and multi-methodological way to move towards a critical, reflexive, and theoretically responsible socio-linguistics. It explores, with courage and sensitivity, some very important areas in the enormous space between Bloomfieldian 'idiolect' and Chomskyan 'UG' in order to situate the human linguistic enterprise, and offers valuable insights into human linguisticality and sociality. These explorations expose the limits of correlationism, determinism, and positivistic reificationism, and offer new ways of doing sociolinguistics. Intended for both practicing and future sociolinguists, it is an ideal text-book for the times, particularly for graduate and advanced undergraduate students.

The two related issues of word order, and subject-verb agreement have occupied center stage in the study of Arabic syntax since the time of Sibawayhi in the eighth century. This book is a contribution to both of these areas. It is grounded within the generative grammar framework in one of its most recent versions, namely Minimalism, as expounded in Chomsky (1995). In this volume, a detailed description is given of word order options in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Palestinian Arabic (PA). It is shown that, perhaps surprisingly, the two varieties allow almost the same range of word orders. The important question of whether Arabic has a VP is addressed: the author argues extensively that Arabic has a VP category. The evidence derives from examining superiority effects, ECP effects, binding, variable interpretations, etc. Also discussed is the content of [Spec, TP] in VSO sentences. It is argued that the position is occupied by an expletive pronoun. The author defends the Expletive Hypothesis which states that in VSO sentences the expletive may take part in checking some features of the verb. A typology of the expletive pronoun in Modern Standard Arabic, Palestinian Arabic, Lebanese Arabic, and Moroccan Arabic is provided. A particularly interesting problem involving pronominal co-reference is the following: if the subject is the antecedent of a pronominal clitic, word order is free; if a pronominal is cliticized onto the subject, then the antecedent must precede. An account that derives these restrictions without recourse to linear order is proposed.