Analogy Levelling Markedness

Ranging from tonogenesis, stress shift, and quantity readjustment to paradigmatic levelling, allomorphy, and grammaticalization, this collection covers a wide spectrum of developments, primarily in Germanic, Romance, and Indo-Aryan. A traditional umbrella category of change in systems is that of analogy. Somewhat less sanctioned, markedness is a basic relation shaping the structure of systems, in phonology as well as morphology.

Biographical note: Viktor Elšik teaches at the Univerzita Karlova, Prague, Czech Republic. Yaron Matras is Professor of Linguistics at the University of Manchester, UK.

The Handbook of the History of English is a collection of articles written by leading specialists in the field that focus on the theoretical issues behind the facts of the changing English language. organizes the theoretical issues behind the facts of the changing English language innovatively and applies recent insights to old problems surveys the history of English from the perspective of structural developments in areas such as phonology, prosody, morphology, syntax, semantics, language variation, and dialectology offers readers a comprehensive overview of the various theoretical perspectives available to the study of the history of English and sets new objectives for further research

This volume represents major research issues in language production today, presenting readers with a picture of the breadth of current research in the field. Contributors have focused on models of visual word processing, aphasic speech, object recognition and language production in children. Many chapters highlight the need for psychological models of language production to learn from theoretical linguistics in order to become better informed about the structure of language itself. Therefore, this volume also includes chapters written by linguists for psychologists which serve to remind us of the complexity of structure and process in the languages of the world.

The comprehensive analysis of the segmental and metrical system of the Swiss German dialect of Thurgovian provides a significant contribution to both phonetic and phonological theory. Based on the author's original fieldwork and experimental investigations, it is the first in-depth study of this area, tracing it back also to its Old High German roots, particularly that of the dialect of Notker. Quantity alternations - notably word-initial long/short consonantal alternations - asymmetric neutralization of phonetic-phonological contrasts, stress and weight are most prominent among the theoretical issues on which Thurgovian phonology is brought to bear.

The pre-eminence of Anglo-Saxon England in its field can be seen as a result of its encouragement of interdisciplinary approaches to the study of all aspects of Anglo-Saxon culture. Thus this volume includes an important assessment of the correspondence of St Boniface, in which it is shown that the unusually formulaic nature of Boniface's letters is best understood as a reflex of the saint's familiarity with vernacular composition. A wide-ranging historical contextualization of The Letter of Alexander to Aristotle illuminates the way English readers of the later tenth century may have defined themselves in contradistinction to the monstrous unknown, and a fresh reading of the gendering of female portraiture in a famous illustrated manuscript of the Psychomachia of Prudentius (CCCC 23) shows the independent ways in which Anglo-Saxon illustrators were able to respond to their models. The usual comprehensive bibliography of the previous year's publications rounds off the book; and a full index of the contents of volumes 26-30 is provided. (Previous indexes have appeared in volumes 5, 10, 15, 20 and 25.)

This critical overview examines every aspect of the field including its history, key current research questions and methods, theoretical perspectives, and sociolinguistic factors. The authors represent leading proponents of every theoretical perspective. The book is a valuable resource for phonologists and a stimulating guide for their students.

The book presents an analysis of selected domains of morphosyntactic variation in a 250,000 word collection of the Middle English Paston Letters (1421-1503) from a historical sociolinguistic point of view. In the three case studies, two nominal and one verbal variable are described and discussed in detail: the replacement of Old English “i>h-th-wh-take, make, give, have, do plus deverbal noun). While the study aims at a balanced integration of theories and methods from a number of different approaches in sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, typology, and language change, its main focus is social network theory and the role of the linguistic individual in the formation and change of language structures. Questions of individual language use and of deliberate versus unmonitored changes in the (individual) system take center stage and are discussed in the light of social network analysis. Traditional empirical social network analysis is carefully revised. Despite its many merits in present-day sociolinguistics, it often needs to be supplemented by hermeneutic-biographical analyses of the individual speakers' lives when applied to historical data. With this background, common theories and models of language change, such as grammaticalization, paradigmatic pressure, typological alignment, and generational shifts, are illustrated and evaluated from the point of view of single speakers and social groups, and their particular embedding in the speech community through various network structures. The book is of interest to advanced students and researchers in English and general linguistics, Middle English, historical linguistics and language change, corpus linguistics, as well as sociolinguistics.