Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 3,0, University of Münster (Englisches Seminar), language: English, abstract: The English language belongs to the Indo-European group of languages. Modern English is regarded as the global lingua franca. The language is widely spoken all over the world and we encounter it in business, science, technology, advertising, travel, and some other domains. However, how could the language originally spoken by a few thousand Anglo-Saxons establish such dominance? The language evolved over centuries and how much the language has change since then is all too clear. Some of the words in present day English date back to Old English, while others come from many of the Indo-European languages. The arrival of other cultures to England had a significant impact on English linguistic history. The influence of Scandinavian, Latin and Romance languages can be clearly seen at all linguistic levels in English language. Historical linguistics is the study of language change. One of its main concerns is the study of the history of words. The discipline that analyses the origin, formation, and development of the word is defined as etymology. It is also a combination of word analysis and the study of literary text across language and time. However, it would not have developed into such an interesting discipline without the linguistic phenomenon of folk etymology. A foreign word that was hard to pronounce would be changed into something that sounded more familiar. Sometimes the change was made unconsciously due to mishearing or misunderstanding. This process frequently occurs when one language borrows a word from another. Since the Norman Conquest the English language was constantly adopting words due to external cultural influences. It is not entirely clear how many words entered English from other languages. But the meaning of some of them has also certainly changed. According to D. Crystal “most of the words in the language have changed their meaning over the past thousand years, their original meanings forgotten”.

This volume brings together the most important general linguistic writings by Mikolay Kruszewski (1851-1887), whom Roman Jakobson described as “one of the greatest theoreticians of language among the world linguists of the late nineteenth century”. Apart from reissuing a revised version of the late Robert Austerlitz' translation of the theoretical introduction of Kruszewski's Master's thesis on morphophonemic alternation in Old Slavic, first published in German in 1881, the bulk of the present volume consists of the first translation ever, by Gregory M. Eramian, of Kruszewski's doctoral thesis, Outline of Linguistic Science, supervised by J. Baudouin de Courtenay and submitted in Russian at the University of Kazan in 1883, which until now has been available only in German translation, published in Techmer's “Zeitschrift” (Leipzig, 1884-1890; reprinted Amsterdam, 1973). Together with a detailed introduction, a full list of Kruszewski's writings, a bibliography of secondary sources, including a reconstruction of the major works consulted by Kruszewski, and detailed indexes of biographical names, subjects & terms, and languages cited for examples, the present volume provides Western scholars with a solid textual and contextual basis for a proper reassessment of the ideas of arguably the most outstanding 19th-century linguistic thinker.

First published in 1988, this classic text is established as one of the most important discussions of the language of literature. Re-issued as a result of recent critical interest, this edition includes a new preface by the author.

In Linguistic Theory, Robert de Beaugrande analyses linguistic theories not as abstract ideas or theses, but as the process and product of theoretical discourse. He argues that the best documentation of this discourse can be found in the 'fundamental' works of major linguists from Ferdinand de Saussure to Teun van Dijk and Walter Kintsch. He therefore employs the highly unusual strategy of a close reading of these works as discourse performances and strives to uncover their main points and characteristic moves in the linguist's own words. Through this approach, the reader is able to appreciate and understand the variety and controversy among linguistic theories as they have emerged and developed in interaction with each other. Special scrutiny is allocated to the issue of how far the active practice of the linguists followed their own theories and proposals, and why. The author concludes by assessing the prospects for linguistics to be drawn from the retrospect in the previous chapters.

Linguistic Theories of Humor appeared thirty years ago. It attracted a lot of attention and ended up being one of the most quoted books in the linguistics of humor. Partly due to its broad coverage which includes both theoretical and socio-pragmatic aspects and partly due to the depth of its bibliography it remained an indispensable reference in many areas, despite the growth of the field. The original fully corrected text is supplemented by a long essay, in which the author revisits the topics of the book to discuss how three decades have shifted the perspective of the field.

This volume presents nineteen studies by specialists in the field of Greek lexicography. A number of papers deal with historical aspects of Greek lexicography covering all phases of the language, i.e. ancient, medieval and modern, as well as the interrelations of Greek to neighboring languages. In addition, other papers address more formal issues, such as morphological, semantic and syntactic problems that are relevant to the study of Greek lexicography, as well as the study of individual words. Finally, in one study the problem of technical linguistic terminology is addressed along with the methodological, epistemological and other issues relating to the particular problem. The work is of special interest to scholars on the long standing problems of diachronic semantics, historical morphology and word formation, and to all those interested in etymology and the study of words of the Greek language.

The Munda group of languages of the Austroasiatic family are spoken within central and eastern India by almost ten million people. To date, they are the least well-known and least documented languages of the Indian subcontinent. This unprecedented and original work draws together a distinguished group of international experts in the field of Munda language research and presents current assessments of a wide range of typological and comparative-historical issues, providing agendas for future research. Representing the current state of Munda Linguistics, this volume provides detailed descriptions of almost all of the languages in the family, in addition to a brief chapter discussing the enigmatic Nihali language.