From the early nineteenth century up until the first half of the twentieth century, many leading scholars in the emerging field of linguistics were occupied with what would today be considered a kind of linguistic typology. The various classifications of languages they proposed were generally intertwined with speculation about the “racial” tra…[Read more]

This note criticises some equivocations and ambivalent notions in the writings of Derrida, especially ‘Limited Inc’ and ‘De la grammatologie’, as regards the notions of norm, intention, system, center, consciousness, writing, speech act and literal meaning. Derrida is shown to both have his cake and eat it, using his own text as a paradoxical…[Read more]

This is a brief note criticising some anti-foundationalist and anti-essentialist semiotic assumptions in Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, from the standpoint of a classical structuralist perspective which (following Saussure) sees the play of differences as crucially constitutive of a system of positive terms.

Book of Abstracts of the International Conference “Words, Images and Ideology of Populism 3.0”

This article gives an overview of the conditional and its functions in the
South Siberian Turkic languages Altay Turkic, Shor, Khakas, Tuvan and Tofan.

This article deals with the global copy of a bound morpheme in Gagauz. The feminine marker -(y)ka, copied from Slavic, is used to build female forms of denominations for persons.

Preprint to appear in a special issue of Cultural Analytics on “Identity.” The article explores the paradox that the representation of gender in fiction became more flexible while the sheer balance of attention between fictional men and women was growing more unequal. We measure the rigidity of gendered roles by asking how easy it is to infer…[Read more]

Reading is a complex and difficult skill. The main difficulty beginning readers face is learning which letters represent which sounds—and then getting used to those patterns by reading them, again and again, in different combinations and contexts. It takes practice to learn how to read. Research also shows that the easier reading is, the more l…[Read more]

Although now largely forgotten, the international language movement was, from the 1880s to the end of the Second World War, a matter of widespread public interest, as well as a concern of numerous scientists and scholars. The primary goal was to establish a language for international communication, but in the early twentieth century an increasing…[Read more]

A frequently mentioned if somewhat peripheral figure in the historiography of late nineteenth-century linguistics is the German sinologist and general linguist Georg von der Gabelentz (1840–1893). Today Gabelentz is chiefly remembered for several insights that proved to be productive in the development of subsequent schools and subdisciplines. I…[Read more]

Review of Evaluating Cartesian Linguistics, by Christina Behme

The multifaceted concept of ‘form’ plays a central tole in the linguistic work of Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), where it is deeply entwined with aesthetic questions. H. Steinthal’s (1823–1899) interpretation of linguistic form, however, made it the servant of psychology. The Formungstrieb (drive to formation) of Georg von der Gabelentz…[Read more]

This paper is concerned with the syntax and semantics of the Turkish pronominal element kendisi ‘self.3SG’ that has so far received very little attention in the literature on anaphoric relations. We start out by examining the properties of this pronoun proceeding next to discuss the few existing proposals highlighting their inadequacies when con…[Read more]

The present contribution follows up on Rudnev (2011). It is for this reason that I omit most of the arguments for the pronominal nature of kendisi and
present a formalisation of its semantic properties based on Partee (1983) and Elbourne (2008).

This paper documents a number of restrictions on negation marking in Avar, a Northeast Caucasian language, and presents a tentative analysis of the observed morphosyntactic facts as having a semantic basis. The two different negation markers are analysed, based on the proposal in (Ramchand & Svenonius 2014), as taking complements of a different…[Read more]

This paper claims that the scope properties of the Russian disjunction marker ili correlate with the phrasal vs. clausal nature of the disjunction: phrasal disjunction yields narrow scope whilst clausal disjunction yields wide scope. In so doing, we introduce novel empirical generalisations that are problematic for purely semantic analyses of…[Read more]

This paper discusses two morphologically related anaphoric pronouns in Avar (Avar-Andic, Nakh-Daghestanian) and proposes that one of them should be treated as a minimal pronoun that receives its interpretation from a λ-operator situated on a phasal head whereas the other is a logophoric pronoun denoting the author of the reported event.

This work consists of two poems written in San Lucas Quiaviní Zapotec, a Valley Zapotec language spoken in the state of Oaxaca, Mexico. The poems are presented with English and Spanish translations, notes about the poet and translator, explanation of the translation process, and culture information.

This is a paper in comparative phonology, which undertakes a detailed comparative analysis of the standard British English RP (Received Pronunciation) vowel system, and that of standard French, including some observations on regional varieties.

This is an analysis of Terayama Shūji’s 1981 film “Shanhai ijin shōkan,” a French co-production which was marketed in the Anglosphere as “China Doll” and in France as “Les Fruits de la passion,” invoking both Ōshima Nagisa’s 1978 “L’Empire de la passion” (the sequel to his notorious “Empire of the Senses” / “L’Empire des sens,” 1976) as well as Ro…[Read more]