Essays on Time-Based Linguistic Analysis - Hardcover

Bailey, Charles-James N.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198242204 ISBN 13: 9780198242208

Publisher: Clarendon Press, 1996

Synopsis

This volume on developmental linguistics offers method and rationale for analyses of complex variation in British English and ancient Greek within the grammar--i.e. without regard to the distribution of language variants in geographical or social space. The book offers a host of grammatical (and social) reasons for accepting the beginnings of English as a French creole with Romance-like syntactic phenomena too involved to be viewed as borrowings, though disguised to casual observers by reason of the many Anglo-Saxon calques on French functor words. Two long chapters show how assuming a non-Germanic origin of English combine with a sophisticated theory of reversals in marked environments to disclose an entirely new understanding of English grammar, especially with regard to verb modalities and pronoun usage. Other chapters deal with aspects of historical change and variation in a developmentalist framework.

About this title

About the Author

Charles-James N. Bailey is the Emeritus Professor of English and General Linguistics at the Technische University of Berlin.

From the Back Cover

The purpose of this volume is to make easily available a representative selection of Charles-James N. Bailey's views on linguistic theory. Several previously published papers have been extensively revised and updated for the collection, which also contains two new chapters. The collection is flanked by a new Prologue and Epilogue, and the whole is preceded by Peter Muhlhausler's Introduction which offers a critical appraisal of Professor Bailey's contribution to the field.

Edition details

• Publisher: Clarendon Press
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0198242204
• ISBN 13: 9780198242208
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 430