LINGUIST List 6.459

Mon 27 Mar 1995

Books: History of Ling, Ling Semiotics, Socioling

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HISTORY OF LING
THE MAGIC OF A COMMON LANGUAGE: Jakobson, Mathesius, Trubetzkoy, and
the Prague Linguistic Circle
by Jindrich Toman
Current studies in linguistics series #26, The MIT Press
$40 hardcover
Available from The MIT Press 800.356.0343 or <mitpress-ordersmit.edu>
Social and cultural environment, historical factors, and tenets of the
Prague Linguistics Circle.
Available for discussion
LING SEMIOTICS
TOBIN, YISHAI. Invariance, Markedness and Distinctive Feature Analysis. A
contrastive study of sign systems in English and Hebrew
JOHN BENJAMINS xii, 402 pp. CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS
Hb: US:1 55619 565 6 / Eur: 90 272 3614 3 US$100.00 / Hfl.180,--
This volume provides a new kind of contrastive analysis of two
unrelated languages English and Hebrew based on the semiotic concepts
of invariance, markedness and distinctive feature theory. It
concentrates on linguistic forms and constructions which are
remarkably different in each language despite the fact that they share
the same familiar classifications and labels. Tobin demonstrates how
and why traditional and modern syntactic categories such as
grammatical number; verb tense, aspect, mood and voice; conditionals
and interrogatives; etc., are not equivalent across languages. It is
argued that these so-called universal concepts function differently in
each language system because they belong to distinct language-specific
semantic domains which are marked by different sets of semantic
features. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, III
SOCIOLING
LIPPI-GREEN, ROSINA (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor). Language Ideology and
Language
Change in Early Modern German. A sociolinguistic study of the
consonantal system of Nuremberg
JOHN BENJAMINS xiv, 150 pp. SOCIOLINGUISTICS
Hb: US: 1 55619 573 7 / Eur: 90 272 3622 4 US$ 48.00 / Hfl.85,--
This quantitative study, based on a computerized corpus of texts
written by five men in early 16th-century Nuremberg, employs
multivariate GLM statistical procedures to analyze the way linguistic,
social and stylistic factors work individually and in interaction to
influence variation observed in the texts. The study provides evidence
that consonantal variation in early modern written texts is not
random. Of particular importance is the quantification of an
individual's relationship to an emerging ideology of language
standardization, and the way that relationship interacts with written
language variation. Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 119.