Essays on time-based linguistic analysis / Charles-James N. Bailey ; with an introduction by Peter Mühlhäusler.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bailey, Charles James Nice.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Linguistic analysis (Linguistics).

Historical linguistics.

Physical Description:

423 pages : illustrations ; 25 cm

Place of Publication:

Oxford [England] : Clarendon Press ; New York : Oxford University Press, 1996.

Summary:

This volume on developmental linguistics offers method and rationale for analyses of complex variation in British English and ancient Greek within the grammar--i.e. without regard to the distribution of language variants in geographical or social space. The book offers a host of grammatical (and social) reasons for accepting the beginnings of English as a French creole with Romance-like syntactic phenomena too involved to be viewed as borrowings, though disguised to casual observers by reason of the many Anglo-Saxon calques on French functor words. Two long chapters show how assuming a non-Germanic origin of English combine with a sophisticated theory of reversals in marked environments to disclose an entirely new understanding of English grammar, especially with regard to verb modalities and pronoun usage. Other chapters deal with aspects of historical change and variation in a developmentalist framework.

Contents:

Variation theory and so-called sociolinguistic grammars

Theory, description, and what keeps linguistics from becoming a science

Conceptualizing dialects as implicational constellations rather than as entities bounded by isoglossic bundles

Reversals in marked categories and contexts

What grammarians haven't been doing right, or, Unriddling analytical paradoxes

Old and new views on language history and language relationships

Reconstructing language development

A note on [x], [ss], and a ruki-rule in ancient Greek

Epilogue on historical linguistics.

Notes:

Collection of previously published material.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0198242204

OCLC:

33948221