Kibbee Douglas A. Kibbee – författare

The contributions to this volume cover a broad range of issues in language policy that are hotly debated in every corner of the globe. The articles included investigate the implications of language policies on the notion of language rights as the issues are played out in very specific circumstances — from the courtroom in Australia to the legislature in California to the educational system in England to the administrative practices of the European Commission. The authors explore conflicts between basic conceptions of fairness in justice, administration and education on the one hand, and political and economic realities on the other. Articles focus on langage issues in the United States, Canada, Brazil, England, France, Slovakia, Russia, Sri Lanka, Australia and several African states. Other articles consider the implications of new supernational agreements — the European Union, NAFTA, GATT, the OAU — on language issues in the signatory states. In sum the volume offers an extensive presentation of current issues and practices in language policy and linguistic human rights.

The twenty papers from the eighteenth Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages deal with diverse aspects of the Romance languages and Romance linguistics. They reflect the current state of Romance studies in North America and of the particular outlook among the international group of contributors and participants to LSRL 18. The thriving research front accords central importance to formal questions of synchronic analysis. The group of seven historical and typological papers amounts to a strong alternative. Several papers treat the group of Romance languages not only as a well-defined, almost exclusive research province, but move from Romance phenomena outward to other language types, even to genuinely universal dimensions. Other contributions maintain a more circumscribed outlook exploiting the typological closeness of the Romance idioms for improved analyses. Three invited contributions by Georg Bossong, Yves Charles-Morin and Maria-Luisa Rivero on typological, phonological and syntactic questions set the tone for the volume.