Charles N. Li - Böcker

Historical linguistics, the oldest field in linguistics, has been traditionally dominated by phonological and etymological investigations. Only in the late twentieth century have linguists begun to focus their interest and research on the area of syntactic change and the insight it provides on the nature of language. This volume represents the first major contribution on the mechanisms of syntactic change. The fourteen articles that make up this volume were selected from the Symposium on the Mechanisms of Syntactic Change held at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1976, one of a series of three conferences sponsored by the National Science Foundation. These papers clearly demonstrate that the generative approach to the study of language does not explain diachronic processes in syntax. This collection is enlightening, provocative, and carefully documented with data drawn from a great variety of language families.

This reference grammar provides, for the first time, a description of the grammar of "Mandarin Chinese", the official spoken language of China and Taiwan, in functional terms, focusing on the role and meanings of word-level and sentence-level structures in actual conversations.

Wappo is an indigenous language, generally regarded as a language isolate, which was once spoken in the Russian River Valley, just north of San Francisco, California. This reference grammar is based on the speech of Laura Fish Somersal, its last fluent speaker, who died in 1990, and represents the most extensive data and grammatical research ever done on this language. The grammar focuses on morphosyntax, particularly nominal, verbal, and clausal structures and clause combining patterns, from a functional/typological perspective.

First published in 1988, Language, Speech and Mind consists of 18 specially invited contributions to mark Professor Fromkin’s 65th birthday in 1988. It reflects her very special interdisciplinary interests and flair, thereby celebrating her own important contributions in the areas of phonetics, phonology, neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and the philosophy of science.

First published in 1976, Subject and Topic presents research from the 1975 University of California, Santa Barbara symposium that sought to achieve thorough understanding of two important grammatical concepts: subject and topic.Drawing empirical evidence from diverse language families including Indo-European, Malayo-Polynesian, Sino-Tibetan, Australian, Afro-Asiatic, Mayan, Niger-Congo, Finno-Ugric, Altaic, Caucasian, Iroquoian, Yuman, and Uto-Aztecan, the volume addresses questions about how subjects and topics can be characterized independently of specific languages and their structural roles. Additional contributions, written especially for this volume, examine child language, American Sign Language, and Jacaltec structures, broadening the empirical foundation.The book challenges traditional assumptions: no universal definition exists for identifying subjects or topics across languages. Instead, the studies reveal that languages exhibit varying degrees of subject-prominence and topic-prominence, leading to a proposed typology that represents a significant departure from the formalist linguistics dominant in the 1960s. By prioritizing cross-linguistic data collection over theoretical formalization, this volume established new directions for linguistic research and remains essential reading for students and researchers of linguistics.