Working Papers


Book Description










Noun Phrase Structure in the Languages of Europe


Book Description

The result of over five years of close collaboration among an international group of leading typologists within the EUROTYP program, this volume is about the morphology and syntax of the noun phrase. Particular attention is being paid to nominal inflectional categories and inflectional systems and to the syntax of determination, modification, and conjunction. Its areal focus, like that of other EUROTYP volumes, is on the languages of Europe; but in order to appreciate what is peculiarly European about their noun phrases, a more comprehensive and genuinely typological view is being taken at the full range of cross-linguistic variation within this structural domain. There has been no shortage lately of contributions to the theory of noun phrase structure; the present volume is, however, unique in the extent to which its theorizing is empirically grounded.




Pragmatic Organization of Discourse in the Languages of Europe


Book Description

The volume is a collection of papers reporting the results of investigations on the interaction of discourse and sentence structure in the languages of Europe. The subjects discussed in the book include: morphosyntactic characteristics of spontaneous spoken texts; different patterns of word order in a pragmatic perspective; the coding of the pragmatic functions topic and focus in sentences with non-canonical word orders (e.g. dislocations, clefts); the range of functions of verb-subject order in declarative clauses and the notion of theticity; prosodic patterns of de-accenting of given information; deixis and anaphora; coding of definiteness and article systems. The book provides the empirical basis for the comparative survey of major phenomena found in the languages of Europe which have pragmatic relevance. Beside traditional areas of investigation at the interface between syntax and pragmatics such as dislocations, new areas are explored, such as the prosody of given information. Data are considered within a functional-typological approach.




Constraints on Error Variables in Grammar


Book Description

An in-depth investigation of constraints on error variables in grammar with special reference to bilingual misspelling orthographies. A corpus of errors is examined in minute detail. In the course of this analysis, received categories and standard assumptions about linguistic errors are critically scrutinized; some are sharpened, and others are abandoned. Many conceptual snarls having to do with the notion of error in linguistic performance are untangled in this book.




Transfer and Interference in Language


Book Description

The topic of this bibliography in its broadest sense is the subject of a wide range of academic disciplines. Given these circumstances, the particular associations and connotations of the terms ‘transfer’ and ‘interference’ in each of these areas are legion, with resultant differences in meaning in the disparate literature on these subjects. And yet it is, in one way or another, contact and interaction of languages in the speaker/hearer and learner, in language acquisition contexts, as well as in society in general, which is basic to these two concepts throughout the various disciplines. The discovery of this basic unitary notion is surely one of the reasons for the new interest in these phenomena. In light of all this, a bibliography cannot at present avoid being highly/ selective in order to demarcate an interdisciplinary area of research in its own right and with its own status. The establishment of such an area is one of our main aims. The focus of interest in this bibliography, admittedly, is directed towards the psycholinguistics of language contact and interaction.