LINGUIST List 10.1835

Wed Dec 1 1999

Books: Historical/Corpus Ling, Slavic Ling

Editor for this issue: Scott Fults <scottlinguistlist.org>

Directory

1. LINCOM EUROPA, Historical Ling: Historical English Syntax, J. Pirez-Guerra
2. LINCOM EUROPA, Slavic Ling: Russian Existential Sentences: A functional approach

HISTORICAL ENGLISH SYNTAX 

A statistical corpus-based study on the organisation 
of Early Modern English sentences

JAVIER P�REZ-GUERRA
University of Vigo

In this monograph the author explores the syntactic organisation of
declarative clauses from late Middle English to present-day English and
pays special attention to the consequences which the location of the
subject has for the determination of the unmarked word order in Early
Modern English. The data have been taken from two electronic corpora,
namely, The Helsinki Corpus of English Texts and the
Lancaster/Oslo-Bergen Corpus of British English. 
	The author outlines his own concept of 'theme,' which will be useful
for the (explanatory and descriptive) purposes of describing syntactic
(un)markedness. Such a concept leads to the existence of, on the one
hand, an unmarked SV organisation and, on the other, of several marked
patterns, viz sentences introduced by existential there, instances of
subject extraposition and insertion of it, clefts, topicalisations,
left-dislocations and subject inversions. The subsystems just mentioned
are located on a scale of markedness, according to two variables: first,
frequency, which is investigated by way of the statistical analysis of
the data, and, second, 'linguistic functionality.' This second variable
has been examined in the light of variables such as gender, textual
category, discourse taxonomy, orality and informative principles such as
'given before new' or end-weight.
	JAVIER P�REZ-GUERRA lectures on English linguistics and corpus
linguistics at the Department of English, University of Vigo. His
research is focused on syntactic change from Early Modern English
onwards.

ISBN 3 89586 651 2. 
LINCOM Studies in Germanic Linguistics 11. 
Ca. 300pp. EUR 61.35 / USD 76 / DM 120 

Ordering information for individuals: Please give us your creditcard no.
/ expiry date or send us a cheque. Prices in this information include
shipment worldwide by airmail. A standing order for this series is
available with special discounts offered to individual subscribers. 

LINCOM EUROPA
Paul-Preuss-Str. 25,
D-80995 Muenchen, Germany

FAX +4989 3148909; 
http://home.t-online.de/home/LINCOM.EUROPA
LINCOM.EUROPAt-online.de

RUSSIAN EXISTENTIAL SENTENCES: A FUNCTIONAL APPROACH

MARIAVOEIKOVA
Institute of Linguistics, St. Petersburg


Russian grammar system is penetrated with the idea of existence.
Be-sentences are used for the expression of other categorial
meanings such as possession, qualification, space and time
localization etc. In fact we can quote Russian dialogues that
consist only of Be-sentences.The expansion of Be-meaning and a short
review of its studying in Russian forms the content of the first
chapter of the manuscript. The second chapter deals with the semantic
variety of existential constructions in literary language. It is
based upon the functional-semantic approach and includes the analysis
of Be-predicate in its grammar variants and the influence of contextual
means. Telling somebody about the existence is usually an 
indirect speech act with a lot of implications. These special
usages is the basis of the third chapter. 	
	The first two chapters are based on the material of my
dissertation that was published as a summary in Russian. More
extended variant is prepared for the serie "Theory of Functional
grammar" V.6. that is to be published in 1995. The third chapter
represents quite a new material that was never published. 

ISBN 3 89586 057 3. 
LINCOM Studies in Slavic Linguistics 04. 
Ca. 220pp. USD 67 / EUR 48.06


Ordering information for individuals: Please give us your creditcard no.
/ expiry date or send us a cheque. Prices in this information include
shipment worldwide by airmail. A standing order for this series is
available with special discounts offered to individual subscribers. 
A free copy of LINCOM's millenium catalogue 'project line 10' is now
available from LINCOM.EUROPAt-online.de.

LINCOM EUROPA
Paul-Preuss-Str. 25
D-80995 Muenchen, Germany

FAX +4989 3148909
http://home.t-online.de/home/LINCOM.EUROPA
LINCOM.EUROPAt-online.de.