This volume brings together a number of ground-breaking papers in the theory of phonology.

This book presents the reader with a set of diverse, carefully developed and clearly specified systems of transcription and coding, arising from contrasting theoretical perspectives, and presented as alternative choices, situated within the theoretical domain most natural to each. The perspectives represented include first and second language acquisition, interethnic and crosscultural interaction, information structure, and the study of discourse influences on linguistic expression. In the contributed chapters, the designers of these systems provide a distillation of collective experiences from the past quarter century, telling in their own words their perspectives on language processes, how these perspectives have shaped their choice of methodology in transcription and coding of natural language, and describing their systems in detail. Overview chapters by the editors then provide design principles and guidelines concerning issues pertinent to all systems, including such things as reliability, validity, ease of learning, computational tractability, and robustness against error. The final chapter is a compendium of existing computerized archives of language data and information sources together with details concerning data access and use.

This volume contains papers presented at a symposium in honor of Cornelis H. van Schooneveld and invited papers on the topics of invariance, markedness, distinctive feature theory and deixis. It is not a Festschrift in the usual sense of the word, but more of a collection of articles which represent a very specific way of defining and viewing language and linguistics. The specific approach presented in this volume has its origins and inspirations in the theoretical and methodological paradigm of European Structuralism in general, and the sign-oriented legacy of Ferdinand de Saussure and Charles Sanders Peirce and the functional and communication-oriented approach of the Prague School in particular. The book is divided in three sections: Theoretical and Methodological Overview: Cornelis H. van Schooneveld; Anatoly Liberman; Petr Sgall; Alla Bemova and Eva Hajicova; Robert Kirsner. Studies in Russian and Slavic Languages: Edna Andrews; Lawrence E. Feinberg; Annie Joly Sperling; Ronald E. Feldstein; Irina Dologova and Elena Maksimova; Stefan M. Pugh. Applications to Other Languages, Language Families, and Aphasia: Ellen Contini-Morava; Barbara A. Fennell; Victor A. Friedman; Robert Fradkin; Yishai Tobin; Mark Leikin.

A comprehensive account of essential periods and areas of research in the history of American Linguistics which addresses contemporary debates and issues within linguistics.

The general theory of language of Mikołaj Kruszweski (1851-1887) is, this book argues, a “lost paradigm” in the history of linguistics. The concept of 'paradigm' is understood in a broadly construed Kuhnian sense, and its applicability to linguistics as a science is examined. It is argued that Kruszewski's theory was a covert paradigm in that his major work, Ocerk nauki o jazyke ('An Outline of the Science of Language', 1883), had the potential to be seminal in the history of linguistics, i.e. to achieve the status of a 'classical text', or 'exemplar'. This potential was not realized because Kruszewski's influence was hindered by various historical factors, including his early death and the simultaneous consolidation of the Neogrammarian paradigm, with its emphasis on phonology and language change. The book examines the intellectual background of Kruszweski's thought, which was rooted, in part, in the tradition of British empiricism. It also discusses Kruszewski's relationship to his teacher Jean Baudouin de Courtenay (1845-1929), his attitude towards the Neogrammarian movement in linguistics, the ambivalent reception of his theory by his contemporaries, and the influence of his work on the linguistic theory of Roman Jakobson (1896-1982).