Zsigmond Simonyi (1853–1919)

Zsigmond Simonyi was the most influential Hungarian linguist of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. He acquired wide and deep professional knowledge at various universities in Hungary and abroad. His work was influenced by Neogrammarian ideas but his attitude to them was also critical to the necessary extent. This is demonstrated by the fact that he studied the contacts between Hungarian and the languages spoken in neighbouring countries in the wake of Schuchardt’s ideas. He was a Neogrammarian by education, but his views on historical linguistics were more modern, more akin to those of the younger generation of Neogrammarians. Thus, unlike most representatives of the classical Neogrammarian school, he did not restrict his attention to the phonological aspects of language change. Rather, he also studied larger units like phrases or sentences, as well as semantics. He attached special importance to discussing phenomena of the current spoken language, especially those of the various dialects, to keep track of linguistic facts as evidence for changes that have taken place. The enormous “Historical dictionary of Hungarian” that he co-authored with Gábor Szarvas has retained its value as a source of information to the present day, and continues to be an indispensable tool in research on etymology and historical linguistics

Book Reviews

Studi linguistici in onore di Roberto Gusmani. 3 vols. A cura di Raffaella Bombi, Guido Cifoletti, Fabiana Fusco, Lucia Innocente, Vincenzo Orioles. XLVI, VIII, VIII, 1866 pp. Alessandria, Edizioni dell’Orso, 2006. Gábor Tolcsvai Nagy: A cognitive theory of style (Metalinguistica 17). Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main, 2005. pp 162. Eugeniusz Cyran: Complexity scales and licensing in phonology (Studies in Generative Grammar 105). De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin & New York, 2010. xii + 311 pp. Donald W. Peckham: Noticing and instruction in second language acquisition: A study of Hungarian learners of English. Papers in English & American Studies XVI. Monograph Series 6. JATEPress, Szegedi Egyetemi Kiadó, Szeged, 2009. 155 pp. Shigeru Miyagawa: Why agree? Why move? Unifying agreement-based and discourse configurational languages. Linguistic Inquiry Monograph 54. The MIT Press, Cambridge MA, 2010. xiii + 183 pp

Cross-linguistic trade-offs and causal relationships between cues to grammatical subject and object, and the problem of efficiency-related explanations

Cross-linguistic studies focus on inverse correlations (trade-offs) between linguistic variables that reflect different cues to linguistic meanings. For example, if a language has no case marking, it is likely to rely on word order as a cue for identification of grammatical roles. Such inverse correlations are interpreted as manifestations of language users’ tendency to use language efficiently. The present study argues that this interpretation is problematic. Linguistic variables, such as the presence of case, or flexibility of word order, are aggregate properties, which do not represent the use of linguistic cues in context directly. Still, such variables can be useful for circumscribing the potential role of communicative efficiency in language evolution, if we move from cross-linguistic trade-offs to multivariate causal networks. This idea is illustrated by a case study of linguistic variables related to four types of Subject and Object cues: case marking, rigid word order of Subject and Object, tight semantics and verb-medial order. The variables are obtained from online language corpora in thirty languages, annotated with the Universal Dependencies. The causal model suggests that the relationships between the variables can be explained predominantly by sociolinguistic factors, leaving little space for a potential impact of efficient linguistic behavior

John Hewson-a Festschrift

Dr. John Hewson's appointment to Memorial University's Henrietta Harvey Chair in May 1997 marked 37 years of distinguished service as scholar, teacher and administrator. Dr. Hewson, an APLA member since the early days of our association and a scholar of national and international reputation, cannot be pinned down to any particular specialization: one could say that he has had a distinguished career in several branches of Linguistics. His scholarly achievements in General Linguistics, Theoretical Linguistics, Historical Linguistics, Amerindian, and Romance Linguistics are impressive in both quality and quantity. His CV lists 14 completed books (with 3 more in preparation), 141 published papers and reviews, and 93 papers to Learned Societies, including, for example, the closing address of the final plenary session of the most recent International Congress of Linguists (a world event staged every five years), held in Quebec in 1992

Head Labeling Preference and Language Change

This dissertation explores a cross-linguistic trend of a diachronic loss of obligatory syntactic movement, which includes the loss of phrasal movement, as in the new observation regarding the unidirectionality of wh-dependency changes—always from fronting to in-situ (e.g. Old to Modern Japanese, Archaic to Modern Mandarin, or Latin to Modern Romance, as well as the loss of head-movement, e.g. V-to-T in English or Swedish. I propose a unified explanation for these changes based on the preference for head-phrase {H,YP} configurations from the perspective of labeling (Chomsky 2013). I argue that the pressures imposed by Labeling Algorithm to maximize head-phrase configuration and minimize the {XP,YP} as well as {X,Y} merger (which are dispreferred from the standpoint of labeling) make the latter ones fragile and prone to loss. I extend this analysis to traditional grammaticalization and additional phenomena, e.g., change of word order and the loss of traditional rightward adjunction. I also investigate specifiers which are more resistant to diachronic change, in particular cases involving multiple movement and show that the loss of movement goes through a single wh-movement stage. I also explore the motivation for the existence of movement in general, discussing its semantic and interface-based triggers. Additionally, I propose an account of V2 where V2 involves two distinct configurations with distinct syntactic mechanisms and licensing conditions, with only one of them being subject to diachronic loss.I also explore the connection between historical change and language acquisition by investigating acquisitional errors of omission in the acquisition of reflexive clitics in Polish. I confirm the connection between acquisition and diachronic change by the history of SE-reflexives in Russian, as well as a broader pattern of acquisition with both monolingual and bilingual children, as well as mixed language varieties and show that all these phenomena provide support for the labeling-based structural preferences argued for in the thesis

Experimental, Acquisitional and Corpus Linguistic Approaches to the Study of Morphonotactics

This volume presents results of bilateral research project BeSyMPHONic (ÖAW/Univ. Toulouse) funded by ANR & FWF. Differences between the two languages with respect to the processing of morphonotactic (MPH) vs. phonotactic (PH) consonant clusters are shown for the first time, the linguistically challenging claim that differences between MPH and PH are also realized phonetically is refuted, and the importance of the relative morphological richness of a language is illustrated.Der Band zeigt Ergebnisse des von ANR & FWF geförderten, bilateralen Forschungsprojekts BeSyMPHONic (ÖAW/Univ. Toulouse). Unterschiede zwischen beiden Sprachen in Bezug auf die Verarbeitung morphonotaktischer (MPH) vs. phonotaktischer (PH) Konsonantengruppen werden erstmalig aufgezeigt, die sprachtheoretisch herausfordernde Behauptung, dass Unterschiede zwischen MPH und PH auch phonetisch realisiert werden, widerlegt, und die Wichtigkeit des relativen morphologischen Reichtums einer Sprache veranschaulich

Experimental, Acquisitional and Corpus Linguistic Approaches to the Study of Morphonotactics

This volume presents results of bilateral research project BeSyMPHONic (ÖAW/Univ. Toulouse) funded by ANR & FWF. Differences between the two languages with respect to the processing of morphonotactic (MPH) vs. phonotactic (PH) consonant clusters are shown for the first time, the linguistically challenging claim that differences between MPH and PH are also realized phonetically is refuted, and the importance of the relative morphological richness of a language is illustrated.Der Band zeigt Ergebnisse des von ANR & FWF geförderten, bilateralen Forschungsprojekts BeSyMPHONic (ÖAW/Univ. Toulouse). Unterschiede zwischen beiden Sprachen in Bezug auf die Verarbeitung morphonotaktischer (MPH) vs. phonotaktischer (PH) Konsonantengruppen werden erstmalig aufgezeigt, die sprachtheoretisch herausfordernde Behauptung, dass Unterschiede zwischen MPH und PH auch phonetisch realisiert werden, widerlegt, und die Wichtigkeit des relativen morphologischen Reichtums einer Sprache veranschaulicht