Highlights the costly losses that scholars may incur in discussing questions of language evolution outside the framework of a shared, well-articulated linguistic ontology. (Author/VWL)

Examines "Grammaticalization" (P. J. Hopper and E. C. Traugott), a linguistics textbook that focuses on the establishment of grammaticalization as both a process and a topic. Argues that the significance of the work is that it offers a genuine attempt to explain linguistic change in terms of a realistic conception of what is actually…

Offers a critical appraisal of the way in which the idea that human language or some of its features evolved like the vertebrate eye by natural selection is articulated in Pinker and Bloom's (1990) selectionist account of language evolution. Argues that this account is less than insightful because it fails to draw some of the conceptual…

The goal of this article is twofold: (1) on the basis of non-conjectural, concrete cases, to establish the linguistic situations that are characteristic of the socio-historical states of equilibrium and punctuation; and (2) to show that neither the equilibrium nor punctuation can be uniquely defined by a particular linguistic situation specific to…

Discusses Victor Henry's innovative presentation of some underlying contradictions in the premises on which linguistics is founded, cast in the Kantian form of antinomies. The review argues that no science remains more strongly contested than linguistics, a science whose origins are paradoxical and that contains outdated concepts. (30 references)…

Discusses symbolic geography inherent in the coupling of divergent visions of the imagined community of a nation. Investigates linguistic debates in Bulgaria during the last century to display various representations of Bulgarian language, each of which offered a particular version of the shape and scope of linguistic boundaries. (Author/VWL)

Uncovers the neglected roots of codeswitching, researching early studies of codeswitching an the state of the field before 1950. Examines why studies predating the 1960s and 1970s have been ignored by modern codeswitching researchers. (Author/VWL)

Agrees with King's (1994) scenario of language emerging over a continuum with each step requiring an adaptive motivation. The article explores the major themes in King's work, including information donation and acquisition, gesture and information transmission, the evolution of social information transfer, the beginnings of language, and…

Examines the history of a construction from later Old English by comparing two approaches to its analysis, one functional and one formal. Both analyses are internally consistent and, at the same time, vulnerable to criticism from both the inside and the outside. (Author/VWL)

Argues that no real divide exists between oral and written transmission, but rather a dynamic relationship between the two, an approach described as the "ecological" model. The article selects examples from Talmudic tradition that reinforce this model. The article concludes that although historical exigency requires written storage of…

Analyzes the ideological underpinnings of language policies in Galicia, an autonomous community in northwestern Spain where Galician and Spanish enjoy co-official status. Describes and critiques the politically hegemonic (or official) and non-hegemonic (nationalist) overt language policies in Galicia, and discusses the linguistic culture of…

Explores the consequences of an implicit theoretical assumption for discourse analysis and argues that the traditional notion of verb as a simple word class is insufficient to characterize the full range of verbal expressions speakers routinely use in discourse. (26 references) (CK)

Maintains that language as humans now produce and comprehend evolved from languagelike precursors in the communication systems of nonhuman primates. The article reviews "Gesture and the Nature of Language" (GNL) (1995) and notes that GNL derives syntax incrementally without diluting it to an element not recognizable as a property of language. (37…

Discussion of the linguistic character of electronic mail (e-mail) looks at technology's role in shaping spoken and written usage, the growth of e-mail as a new communication genre, and formal linguistic properties of e-mail. Proposes a model of e-mail as a creolizing linguistic modality, analogous to pidginization and creolization processes well…