In most languages we find 'little words' which resemble a full word, but which cannot stand on their own. Instead they have to 'lean on' a neighbouring word, like the 'd, 've and unstressed 'em of Kim'd've helped'em ('Kim would have helped them'). These are clitics, and they are found in most of the world's languages. In English the clitic forms appear in the same place in the sentence that the full form of the word would appear in but in many languages clitics obey quite separate rules of placement. This book is the first introduction to clitics, providing a complete summary of their properties, their uses, the reasons why they are of interest to linguists and the various theoretical approaches that have been proposed for them. The book describes a whole host of clitic systems and presents data from over 100 languages.

This book provides a detailed but accessible introduction to the development of the German language from the earliest reconstructable prehistory to the present day. Joe Salmons explores a range of topics in the history of the language, offering answers to questions such as: How did German come to have so many different dialects and close linguistic cousins like Dutch and Plattdeutsch? Why does German have 'umlaut' vowels and why do they play so many different roles in the grammar? Why are noun plurals so complicated? Are dialects dying out today? Does English, with all the words it loans to German, pose a threat to the language? This second edition has been extensively expanded and revised to include extended coverage of syntactic and pragmatic change throughout, expanded discussion of sociolinguistic aspects, language variation, and language contact, and more on the position of German in the Germanic family. The book is supported by a companion website and is suitable for language learners and teachers and students of linguistics, from undergraduate level upwards. The new edition also includes more detailed background information to make it more accessible for beginners.

Originally published in 1906, this study by E. C. Quiggin was, as its author put it, 'the first serious attempt at a scientific description of a northern dialect of Irish'. Quiggin maintained that collecting linguistic data from the people who were born before the famine was of immediate concern because their particular grasp of the vernacular would help shed much-needed light on the mysteries of Old and Middle Irish orthography. Drawn primarily from evidence of the speech found in a hamlet called Meenawannia near Donegal, this volume represents a fascinating case study of the Irish language at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Die Autorin geht der Langackerschen Auffassung der Grammatik als Bedeutung nach. Sie uberpruft empirisch am Beispiel der aquivalenten, deutschen und polnischen Formen der Pronomen, wie sich die schemenhaften Bedeutungen grammatischer Einheiten in individuellen Konzeptualisierungsprozessen konkretisieren und welche Bedeutungsinhalte sie in dem gegebenen sprachlichen Ereignis fokussieren. Die introspektiv-intersubjektive Methode ermoeglicht es, die Verarbeitungsarten der untersuchten Formen der Pronomen aufzudecken, die konzeptuelle Vielfalt der von den ProbandInnen aktivierten Bedeutungsinhalte dieser Formen zu beleuchten, und zu zeigen, dass die Formen der Pronomen prozessual individuell-subjektiv emotionsgepragte Einheiten darstellen.

Do you have a fear of transcription? Are you daunted by the prospect of learning and handling unfamiliar symbols? This workbook is for students who are new to linguistics and phonetics, and offers a didactic approach to the study and transcription of the words, rhythm and intonation of English. It can be used independently or in class and covers all the pronunciation details of words, phrases, rhythm and intonation. Progress is deliberately gentle with plenty of explanations, examples and 'can't go wrong' exercises. In addition, there is an associated website with audio recordings of authentic speech, which provide back-up throughout. The audio clips also introduce students to variations in accents, with eleven different speakers. Going beyond the transcription of words, the book also ventures into real discourse with the simplification systems of colloquial English speech, rhythm and intonation.

The Substance of Language Volume I: The Domain of Syntax Volume II: Morphology, Paradigms, and Periphrases Volume III: Phonology-Syntax Analogies John M. Anderson The three volumes of The Substance of Language collectively overhaul linguistic theory from phonology to semantics and syntax to pragmatics and offer a full account of how the form/function relationship works in language. Each explores the consequences for the investigation of language of a conviction that all aspects of linguistic structure are grounded in the non-linguistic mental faculties on which language imposes its own structure. The first and third look at how syntax and phonology are fed by a lexical component that includes morphology and which unites representations in the two planes. The second examines the way morphology is embedded in the lexicon as part of the expression of the lexicon-internal relationships of words. Phonology-Syntax Analogies looks at the substantive and structural analogies between phonology and syntax and the factors that cause such analogies to break down. It considers the degree to which analogies between syntax and phonology result from their both being representational subsystems within the overall system of language. At the same time it examines how far semantic and phonetic properties limit such analogies. The book presents a powerful argument against the notion of an ungrounded autonomous syntax, which it sustains and supports by detailed grammatical analyses and a powerfully coherent conceptual understanding of the nature of language The many detailed proposals of John Anderson's fine trilogy are derived from an over-arching conception of the nature of linguistic knowledge that is in turn based on the grounding of syntax in semantics and the grounding of phonology in phonetics, both convincingly subsumed under the notion of cognitive salience. The Substance of Language is a major contribution to linguistic theory and the history of linguistic thought.

Este libro presenta un panorama general de la estratificacion social del habla madrilena. Se propone una aproximacion a la dinamica linguistica de la ciudad a traves del analisis de un conjunto de variables fonicas, lexicas, morfosintacticas y pragmaticas que se describen e interpretan desde los principios de la sociolinguistica cuantitativa. La investigacion se desarrolla a partir de dos corpus de habla, uno del distrito de Salamanca y otro de Vallecas, dos distritos muy diferenciados socioeconomica y linguisticamente. Desde su estudio, Madrid se revela como una ciudad linguisticamente heterogenea, con un nucleo social que dirige las nuevas tendencias y lidera los cambios linguisticos. Ese nucleo, caracteristicamente conservador, se encuentra rodeado de colectivos de diverso origen que, tradicionalmente asentados en las areas perifericas de la ciudad, van asimilandose a la comunidad de habla movidos por su deseo de integracion y de ascenso. El uso que hacen de la lengua es su principal marca identitaria, un uso que moldean de acuerdo a sus deseos y posibilidades de movilidad en la escala social.

Originally published in 1972, this is the first in a series of dialect studies by the Princeton Chinese Linguistics Project. Yue is one of the major Chinese dialect groups and Cantonese is the standard dialect in the group. The present volume surveys the phonology of Cantonese; syntax and vocabulary are dealt with in subsequent studies. The series provides a systematic an detailed linguistic analysis of the Chinese languages. At the time of its original publication it provided specialists with an indispensable working-tool and a comprehensive library of reference. It will remain of value to anyone with an interest in linguistics.

Linguists researching the sounds of languages do not just study lists of sounds but seek to discover generalizations about sound patterns by grouping them into categories. They study the common properties of each category and identify what distinguishes one category from another. Vowel patterns, for instance, are analysed and compared across languages to identify phonological similarities and differences. This original account of vowel patterns in language brings a wealth of cross-linguistic material to the study of vowel systems and offers new theoretical insights. Informed by research in speech perception and production, it addresses the fundamental question of how the relative prominence of word position influences vowel processes and distributions. The book combines a cross-linguistic focus with detailed case studies. Descriptions and analyses are provided for vowel patterns in over 25 languages from around the world, with particular emphasis on minor Romance languages and on the diachronic development of the German umlaut.

Hans Krech war der erste habilitierte Sprechwissenschaftler an der Universitat Halle und der erste Hochschullehrer Deutschlands, der auf eine Professur Sprechwissenschaft berufen wurde. Anlasslich seines 50. Todestages (2011) wird eine Auswahl seiner Schriften in drei Banden unter dem Titel Beitrage zur Sprechwissenschaft neu veroeffentlicht. Sie verdeutlichen vielfaltige Wurzeln heutiger sprechwissenschaftlicher Arbeit. Band III enthalt Schriften zur Phonetik, zur Sprechkunstlerischen Gestaltung und zur Fachgeschichte. Einen Schwerpunkt bildet die Dokumentation seines Wirkens als Begrunder der Orthoepieforschung an der Universitat Halle. Eine Audio-CD erganzt das Lehrbuch Einfuhrung in die deutsche Sprechwissenschaft/Sprecherziehung durch Klangbeispiele.

Optimality theory has rapidly become the dominant framework in formal phonological theory. OT fundamentally revises the basic notions of generative grammar, replacing rules and derivations with a system of interacting constraints. Early work in OT tended to concentrate mainly on prosodic phonology and the phonology-morphology interface, and it was not initially clear how the theory could attack the rich range of phenomena found in segmental alterations. However, there is a body of work that concentrates on working out the details of featural phonology with OT, and this work shows that the theory allows superior explanations of the typological possibilities and the underlying motivations for these phenomena. This volume, first published in 2001, brings together work by some of the influential researchers in this area, ranging from the authors of influential dissertations to prominent senior faculty.

In many languages, word-formation is restricted by principles of prosody that organise speech into larger units such as the syllable. Written by an international team of leading linguists in the field of prosodic morphology, this book examines a range of key issues in the interaction of word-formation and prosody. It provides an explanation for non-concatenative morphology which occurs in different forms (such as reduplication) in many languages, by an interaction of independent general principles of prosodic and morphological well-formedness. Surveying developments in the field from the 1970s, the book describes the general transition in linguistic theory from rule-based approaches into constraint-based ones, and most of the contributions are written from the perspective of Optimality Theory, a rapidly developing theory of constraint interaction in generative grammar.

Originally published in 1973, this book is an account of how the child learns the sound system of his native language, or how he learns to speak. A theory of the acquisition of phonology is derived from a detailed and rigorous analysis of the developing speech of a young child observed over a period of two years. The details of this analysis are elaborated in depth in chapters two and three and the major results of the study are given in chapter four. The final chapter is devoted to the implications of language acquisition for linguistic theory in general and generative phonology in particular. In addition to the obvious relevance of this work to general linguists and psychologists working on language acquisition, it was of considerable importance to speech therapists and all those involved medically with the observation and treatment of infant speech, in that it provided a characterisation of normal development which could act as a yardstick by which to measure abnormal or pathological conditions.

Laboratory Phonology uses speech data to research questions about the abstract categorical structures of phonology. This collection of papers broadly addresses three such questions: what structures underlie the temporal coordination of articulatory gestures? What is the proper role of segments and features in phonological description? And what structures - hierarchical or otherwise - relate morphosyntax to prosody? In order to encourage the interdisciplinary understanding required for progress in this field, each of the three groups of papers is preceded by a tutorial paper (commissioned for this volume) on theories and findings presupposed by some or all of the papers in the group. In addition, most of the papers are followed by commentaries, written by noted researchers in phonetics and phonology, which serve to bring important theoretical and methodological issues into perspective. Most of the material collected here is based on papers presented at the Second Conference on Laboratory Phonology in Edinburgh, 1989. The volume is therefore a sequel to Kingston and Beckman's Papers in Laboratory Phonology I, also published by Cambridge University Press.

Prior to the publication of this volume in 1987, scholars interested in Old English alliterative meter discovered a number of intriguing restrictions on verse form, and their discoveries proved useful in the editing of texts and in research on the early history of the English language. It had proved impossible up to this point however, to capture these restrictions in a plausible system of rules. In this book Professor Russom obtained a coherent and comprehensive rule system using the insights of linguistic theory. The rules of this system apply not just to stress and syllable count but to other features of word structure as well. Russom claims, in particular, that the concept of 'metrical foot' appropriate for analysis of Old English poetry corresponds to the concept of 'word pattern' used in linguistic analysis. In Old English Meter and Linguistic Theory the author explains these rules carefully, justifies then from a linguistic point of view and goes on to apply them to a wide variety of problems. The results should interest not only those who deal with Old English texts, but also metrists and linguistics generally.

The concept of the 'onset', i.e. the consonant(s) before the vowel of a syllable, is critical within phonology. While phonologists have examined the segmental behaviour of onsets, their prosodic status has instead been largely overlooked. In fact, most previous accounts have stipulated that onsets are insignificant when it comes to the 'heaviness' of syllables. In this book Nina Topintzi presents a new theory of onsets, arguing for their fundamental role in the structure of language both in the underlying and surface representation, unlike previous assumptions. To capture the weight behaviour of onsets, a novel account is proposed that relates their interaction with voicing, tone and stress. Using numerous case-studies and data from a variety of languages and phenomena (including stress, compensatory lengthening, gemination and word minimality), the book introduces a model that reflects the true behaviour of onsets, demonstrating profound implications for syllable and weight theories.

"Coop", "Voiello", "Superga" nomi propri? nomi comuni? Come funzionano i nomi commerciali (o marchionimi) nella lingua, quali tratti presentano quando entrano nel discorso? Il volume rappresenta il primo ampio studio sistematico sul funzionamento dei nomi commerciali nell'italiano scritto. Il suo carattere innovativo risiede nell'impostazione sperimentale con cui indaga i marchionimi, scandagliando sintatticamente un vasto "corpus" di dati testuali appositamente elaborato. Prendendo ispirazione ideale dalla lezione di Saussure, i nomi commerciali sono processualmente descritti nei loro valori correlativi: non come entita ontologicamente predefinite, bensi come il risultato di rapporti sintagmatici e paradigmatici da cogliere metodologicamente nell'analisi delle proposizioni in cui tali nomi ricorrono. Ne emerge una visione radicalmente nuova del nome commerciale, scevra da luoghi comuni onomastici o categoriali, e in grado di gettare un fascio di luce, da una prospettiva inconsueta, anche sul problema millenario dei nomi propri.

Children often mispronounce words when learning their first language. Is it because they cannot perceive the differences that adults make or is it because they can't produce the sounds involved? Neither hypothesis is sufficient on its own to explain the facts. On the basis of detailed analyses of his son's and grandson's development, Neil Smith explains the everyday miracle of one aspect of first language acquisition. Mispronunciations are now attributed to performance rather than to competence, and he argues at length that children's productions are not mentally represented. The study also highlights the constructs of current linguistic theory, arguing for distinctive features and the notion 'onset' and against some of the claims of Optimality Theory and Usage-based accounts. Smith provides an important and engaging update to his previous work, The Acquisition of Phonology, building on ideas previously developed and drawing new conclusions with the aid of fresh data.

Der Autor untersucht Wechselbeziehungen zwischen dem Phoneminventarumfang und phonologischen, morphologischen, syntaktischen und semantischen Eigenschaften. Der Phoneminventarumfang gilt als quantitativer Gradmesser fur phonologische Komplexitat. Diese hangt mit Fragen der Sprachoekonomie, Kompensationstheorien und Selbstregulation sprachlicher Systeme zusammen. Nach einer kritischen Neubewertung derartiger Wechselbeziehungen pladiert er fur eine statistische Modellierung, die konzeptuell auf synergetischen Sprachtheorien beruht. Die empirische Analyse slawischer Sprachen zeigt eine vorrangige Wirkung des Phoneminventarumfangs auf die phonologische Ebene selbst und eine multidirektionale Beeinflussung anderer sprachlicher Ebenen.

Ziel der Arbeit ist eine konfrontative und pragmatische Analyse der Verwendung und der Funktion von Abtoenungspartikeln im Deutschen und Polnischen. Dazu werden die Abtoenungspartikeln hinsichtlich ihrer Pragmatik, Lexikologie und Lexikographie fur beide Sprachen referiert. Weiterhin wird auf die wesentlichen pragmatischen Funktionen der deutschen und der polnischen Abtoenungspartikeln naher eingegangen, wobei lexikologische Fragen zum Vorhandensein von Homonymen in anderen Wortklassen und Fragen zu der syntaktischen Distribution der Abtoenungspartikeln hinsichtlich der Satzarten eroertert werden. Die Materialbasis bilden verschriftete Rundfunksendungen sowie funktional entsprechende Belege aus im Internet zuganglichen Korpora. Ziel der Analyse ist es, die von deutschen und polnischen Abtoenungspartikeln getragenen Funktionen und funktionalen Schattierungen systematisch zu beschreiben.

First published in 2003, Phonetic Interpretation presents innovative work from four core areas: phonological representations and the lexicon, phonetic interpretation and phrasal structure, phonetic interpretation and syllable structure, and phonology and natural speech production. Written by major figures in the fields of phonetics, phonology and speech perception, the chapters in this volume use a wide range of laboratory and instrumental techniques to analyse the production and perception of speech, their aim being to explore the relationship between the sounds of speech and the linguistic organisation that lies behind that. The chapters present evidence of the lively intellectual engagement of laboratory phonology practitioners with the complexities and richness of human language. The book continues the tradition of the series, Papers in Laboratory Phonology, by bringing linguistic theory to bear on an essential problem of linguistics: the relationship between mental models and the physical nature of speech.

'Contrast' - the opposition between distinctive sounds in a language - is one of the most central concepts in linguistics. This book presents a fascinating account of the logic and history of contrast in phonology. It provides empirical evidence from diverse phonological domains that only contrastive features are computed by the phonological component of grammar. It argues that the contrastive specifications of phonemes are governed by language-particular feature hierarchies. This approach assigns a key role to abstract cognitive structures, challenging contemporary approaches that favour phonetic explanations of phonological phenomena. Tracing the evolution of the hypothesis that contrastive features play a special role in phonology, it shows how this insight has been obscured by misunderstandings of the role of the contrastive feature hierarchy. Questioning the widely held notion that contrast should be based on minimal pairs, Elan Dresher argues that the contrastive hierarchy is indispensable to illuminating accounts of phonological patterning.

Dr Lass examines certain crucial issues in phonological and general linguistic theory through detailed studies of English phonetics, dialectology and language-history. He argues that contemporary 'standard' phonological theory is inhibited and misled by the related disadvantages of an artificially constrained formalism and a restricted database. He confronts theories of English phonology with a much wider range of material than is usual, drawing for example on Scots, Northern and North-Midland English, East Coast American dialects, and many others. Dr Lass offers solutions to many outstanding problems in the history of English. All the detailed discussions are informed by an overriding concern for the methodological and philosophical issues suggested by such problems. What kind of discipline is linguistics? What kinds of knowledge do its procedures yield and how are they validated?