Jørgen Rischel

Some characteristics of noun phrases in West Greenlandic

Abstract “Ergativity” 2 is one of the syntactic characteristics of the Eskimo languages. It is reflected in the surface representation of sentences by a difference in case marking between transitive and intransitive sentences, the former being related in form to possessive constructions.

Formal linguistics and real speech

Abstract This paper discusses the nature of the data that form the input to linguistic descriptions, particularly with regard to the greater or lesser artificiality of such data. The paper argues in favour of a much stronger emphasis in linguistic work on natural speech data even including spontaneous speech. A major part of the paper is devoted to a general discussion of some preliminaries to the study of linguistic variation in natural speech.

Diphthongization in faroese

Abstract The Faroese language 1 has among its most characteristic properties an abundance of dipthongs. Some of these are reflexes of Old West Scandinavian (abbreviated OWS) diphthongs, some are reflexes of vowel-consonant combinations, and finally a number of diphthongs have developed from OWS single vowels.

Roman Jakobson and the phonetics-phonology dichotomy

Abstract If one is to mention the one scholar who over the second half of this century has had the greatest impact on the way we talk about the relationship between phonetics and phonology, there is no doubt that the name is Roman Jakobson. His name in the context of phonology is, above all, coupled to the theory of distinctive features, but his linguistic thinking is even more strongly tied with the general dichotomy of invariance versus variation. I shall deal to some extent with both issues in this paper, but I wish to emphasize from the start that this is not a biographically or bibliographically balanced account of Jakobsons achievements. It is just an essay in which I look from an outsiders perspective at some live issues in phonetics and phonology for which Jakobsons thinking has been highly significant. I discuss these issues from the point of view of present challenges, rather than in the context of Jakobsons own linguistic milieu. It is the heritage and its importance for linguistics and pho...

Fonetik og Fonologi, Almen og Dansk

Abstract It is unusual for international journals to publish reviews of an introductory textbook written in a »small« language like Danish The textbook reviewed here is, however, significant both by presenting a comprehensive overview of contemporary Danish phonetics-phonology and by doing this in a theoretically interesting format It should be noted m passing that among Western languages Danish is second only to English in its post-medieval tradition of painstaking phonetic observation

Content, expression and structure: Studies in Danish functional grammar

Abstract “A functionalist approach implies a conception of language as a matching of content that can be communicated with the expressive means of the language. That is, instead of seeing language metaphorically as horizontal levels, one put on top of the other, we return to the basic Saussurean notion that languages have two planes, an expression plane and a content plane.” (p. vii).

Structural and functional aspects of tone split in Thai

Abstract Comparative and diachronic work throughout this century has laid a very strong foundation for the hypothesis that Thai owes its great number of tones to processes which created tones and splitted existing tones at an earlier stage of the language, and the further hypothesis that those processes had a direct connection with consonant mutations which involved segmental loss of contrast. Since the sixties, studies of Thai tones have emphasize the phonetic aspects of tonogenesis or tone split (cf. the key-note paper of Abramson and Erickson 1991). It is argued in the present paper that although the hypotheses stated above are not at issue, the diachronic scenario is still poorly understood, both with respect to the underlying phonetic mechanisms and with respect to the structural and functional aspects of the sound changes. It is a stumbling-stone for the formulation of phonetic explanations of tone split that there are quite different types of consonants involved, and with quite different diachronic...

ALLÉN, STURE: Grafematisk analys som grundval för textederin

Abstract Written language is traditionally conceived as being secondary to spoken language, not only from an historical point of view but also with regard to its importance as an object for linguistic research. It is true that written sources preponderate in the material adduced as evidence in language history, but the written material is generally used to substantiate hypotheses about sound change. And also in synchronic linguistics it is a commonplace that language is essentially spoken language, although scholars disagree as to the extent to which written language can be relegated to the status of a mere reflection of it.