Winfred P. Lehmann

A Structural Principle of Language and Its Implications.

Sentence qualifier markers, like those indicating interrogation and negation, are placed before verbs in consistent VO languages, after verbs in consistent OV languages. This placement principle permits us to identify other sentence qualifiers, like potential, desiderative, and reflexive. It also provides means for distinguishing qualifier markers from congruence as well as deixis markers. Moreover, it has morphological and phonological implications, leading to so-called agglutinative structure. Besides contributing to our understanding of linguistic structure, this principle enables us to clarify some problems in the historical development of languages.*

Proto-Indo-European syntax

Syntax, the study of sentences, is generally held to be the heart of grammar. This book has been written to provide a syntax of Proto-Indo-European, the parent of all Indo-European languages.

Perspectives on historical linguistics

1. Prefatory note 2. Table of contents 3. Charts, figures and tables 4. Abbreviations 5. 1. Introduction: diachronic linguistics (by Lehmann, Winfred P.) 6. 2. Building on empirical foundations (by Labov, William) 7. 3. A semiotic model of diachronic process phonology (by Dressler, Wolfgang U.) 8. 4. Semantically-marked root morphemes in diachronic morphology (by Malkiel, Yakov) 9. 5. From propositional to textual and expressive meanings some semantic-pragmatic aspects of grammaticalization (by Traugott, Elizabeth Closs) 10. 6. Romance Etymology (by Dworkin, Steven N.) 11. 7. Indo-european etymology with special reference to grammatical category (by Justus, Carol F.) 12. Bibliography 13. Subject index 14. Author index

Converging Theories in Linguistics.

Process models of language, and generative grammars, receive support from typological theory. Typological study has found that some syntactic constructions can be correlated with characteristic sentence patterns. Thus consistent OV languages have relative clauses, possessives, and adjectives preceding nouns; consistent VO languages show the converse order. The parallelism between the three constructions can be accounted for in process models, and related to the position of the object with regard to the verb in both OV and VO languages. The central importance of the verb in language as indicated in these and other constructions is pointed up by recent neurological investigations supporting descriptive and generative theory which proposes that verbs have the primary role in sentences. These observations illuminate syntactic patterns in New High German, in Latin and the Romance languages; they also indicate that a framework is now available for historical and descriptive syntactic study.

Proto-Indo-European compounds in relation to other Proto-Indo-European syntactic patterns

Abstract Compounds in a language have long been viewed as reflections of other syntactic patterns in that language. Some of the suggestions on relationships may now strike us as clumsy, such as those deriving compounds like Greek from imperatives plus objects. 1 Other suggestions have been less explicit than we should like, for example Leumanns view of compounds as permutations of longer syntactic sequences; nass-augig was for him a derived form of a nominal sentence: Auge nass. 2 And Jacobi, 3 using Brugmanns definition of compound, proposed that Proto-Indo-European [PIE] verbal tatpurushas were “syntactic word complexes of a certain kind, so common in the proto-language that they could be combined into words”. But the procedures by which the complexes were combined were not specified. Recent statements on compounds have been more explicit. In his monograph on English nominalizations Lees stated of nominals that they are “noun-like versions of sentences”. 4 In accordance with this position, at least so...

Contemporary Linguistics and Indo-European Studies.

AMONG THE MOST REMARKABLE events in the recent history of mankind is the spread of the Indo-European family of languages. A small people living north of the Black Sea around 3000 B.C. somehow acquired adequate strength to send groups through much of Europe and southeast Asia. These groups established control of previously populated areas, imposing their languages on the indigenous speakers. Our knowledge of these events has been largely deduced from these languages, which were spread in much the same way as was Arabic through North Africa in the seventh century A.D. Although the records are restricted in size and subject matter, they have disclosed a great deal about the culture of the Indo-European people and their early descendants, as well as about the history of western civilization. Advances have been achieved by two complementary approaches: the exploitation of texts, and refinements in linguistic methodology. These approaches seem to alternate in yielding new information about the Indo-European languages and their development. After Sanskrit became known in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century, greatly expanding information about the early history of the Indo-European family, a period of improvement in linguistic methodology, dating from about 1835 to 1875, produced the greatest advances in Indo-European studies. This period was followed by another in which advances resulted from the discovery and exploitation of new materials, notably Hittite and Mycenaean Greek; additional perspective was provided by Tocharian, Middle Iranian dialects, and by other languages such as Venetic. While generalizations of this sort result in artificial simplifications, we can assert that our expectation for major gains in understanding the early Indo-European languages will now again be based on further advances in linguistic methodology. In contrast with the nineteenth-century advances, which led to greater understanding of sound systems and sound changes, the current improvements fall in the area of syntax. Many syntactic studies were carried out in the nineteenth century; but they never succeeded in catching the imagination of most linguists, or of nonspecialists, so that when languages are viewed historically today it is the striking sound changes that are emphasized, and celebrated with labels noting their formulators, such as Grimms Law, Verners Law, and Grassmanns Law. But recent advances in our understanding of syntax promise insights which are far more fundamental for our understanding of language than is attention to phonological systems. These will be outlined in this study, with some of their implications for our knowledge of the Indo-European languages and historical linguistic developments in general, accompanied by suggestions of an immense program of studies which should be undertaken now.

Language typology 1988 : typological models in reconstruction

1. The Importance of Models in Historical Linguistics (by Lehmann, Winfred P.) 2. On Two Kinds of Reconstruction in Comparative Studies (by Klimov, Georgij A.) 3. Morphemic Change, Typology, and Uniformitarianism: A study in reconstruction (by Hoenigswald, Henry M.) 4. Some Problems of Syntactic Reconstruction (by Yartseva, Viktoria N.) 5. Vowel Gamuts in Romance Derivational Suffixation (by Malkiel, Yakov) 6. Maintenance of Reference in Sentence and Discourse (by Kibrik, Andrej A.) 7. The Development of Bound Pronominal Paradigms (by Mithun, Marianne) 8. On Reconstructing Morphology and Syntax (by Hamp, Eric P.) 9. Linguistics and Archeology: Differences in perspective in the study of prehistoric cultures (by Polome, Edgar C.) 10. Latin tarentum Accas, the ludi Saeculares, and Indo-European Eschatology (by Watkins, Calvert) 11. Uber den Ursprung des Albanischen (sprachvergleichend und historisch betrachtet) (by Desnitskaja, Agnija) 12. References 13. Index

The Humanistic Basis of Second Language Learning

A humanistic approach to language study recognizes the necessity of learning a language in its social and cultural contexts, encompassing the ecology and the material, social, religious, and linguistic cultures of the language studied. The need to teach language in relation to social and cultural values affects educational choices with respect to curriculum, materials, and approaches and should be central to national planning and programs for professional development and the improvement of teaching.

German: language and culture

ALG 1100 Road Map to the Culture of the German-Speaking Countries (3 units) Exploring links between the cultural past and present of the Germanspeaking countries through key memory sites such as the story of Siegfried and the Nibelungen, Grimms fairy tales, the Faust theme, the Holocaust Memorial, the Alps and the Rhine and Danube rivers, the metropolitan cities Berlin,Vienna and Zurich, and other topics Course Component: Lecture No knowledge of German required.

WILLIS, D. W. E.: Syntactic change in Welsh: a study of the loss of verb-second

Among welcome activities in recent Indo-European studies is the interest in the historical development of the syntax of the Celtic languages. As a major reason, the VSO order of the Insular dialects contrasts sharply with the more general SVO order in most of the current Indo-European languages and the SOV order of early languages like Hittite, Vedic Sanskrit and Homeric Greek. The interest was increased by the finding that Iberian Celtic, and presumably Proto-Celtic also had SOV structure. In 1991 Fife and Poppe1 published an important set of essays on Brythonic word order that survey the earlier studies as well, accompanied by extensive references and bibliography. In the book under review Willis deals especially with one phase of Welsh syntax, as indicated in his subtitle. As the central problem, many verb-second examples are found in Middle Welsh, while Old Welsh and Modern Welsh have dominant VSO order. In the examples “some phrasal constituent and a preverbal particle” precede the verb, yielding verb-second order (Willis 1998: 4). Sentences with this order have been referred to as abnormal by the “standard theory”, and a similar pattern as mixed. Pointing out that Middle Welsh “retains all the other characteristics of a language with basic VSO order”, Poppe concluded that the fronted constituents in the language of Middle Welsh appear to be pragmatically controlled (1991: 200)2. By this theory, Middle Welsh has the VSO order of Old and Modern Welsh. Willis by contrast assumes that Middle Welsh had become SVO, and that through internal developments Modern Welsh returned to VSO structure. In contrast with Poppe’s functional syntactic approach, that of Willis is generative, primarily according to the Principles and Parameters syntactic paradigm, with some reference to Minimalism. The book consists of eight chapters: