Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics 2nd ed (14 Vols) - K. Brown (Elsevier, Ebooks (various), Literatura
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
FOREWORD
I remember being slightly surprised when I first heard that a second edition of the
Encyclopedia of Language
and Linguistics
(ELL2) was in the works: I wondered if it wasn’t premature, a bit too soon after the first edition.
But now that I see the result, it is clear that this new edition is both timely and a major advance over the very
successful ELL1. Linguistics is a fast-moving field.
Theoretical controversies continue and develop; linguistic and sociolinguistic data collection has increased
rapidly over the past 10 years or so, stimulated in large part by linguists’ awareness of the critical problem of
language endangerment; the greatly expanded role of digital resources is making huge bodies of data available
to all scholars; and interdisciplinary outreach by linguists and to linguistics has made our discipline a bit more
visible beyond the in-group. We and our students still hear the same old question all too often – ‘‘What is
linguistics, anyway?’’ – but within academia, at least, colleagues in other disciplines now tend to be embarrassed
to ask it, even if they don’t know the answer.
All these developments make this encyclopedia an invaluable reference work. By 1990 it was already
impossible (as I know all too well from my years as editor of a general linguistics journal) for any linguist to
have expert knowledge of the entire range of the discipline, much less of the interdisciplinary areas that were
beginning to take on new prominence. The past 15 years have seen remarkable developments, so that it is now
difficult to imagine being familiar with more than a smallish fraction of the many advances in our understanding
of language and linguistics. Having access to a quick survey of current issues and sources on language and the
brain, morphological theory, statistical methods in language processing, categorial grammars, the classification
of Austronesian languages, dialects in bird songs, second-language attrition, bilingual education, the CHILDES
database, and hundreds of other topics will delight and inform linguists and, I predict, a great many non-
linguists as well. The numerous articles on interdisciplinary topics should be especially valuable for linguists
with limited knowledge of the other disciplines as well as for non-linguists with an interest in interface issues.
Another feature of ELL2 struck me as I began to prepare to teach a new course on social, political, and
economic implications of multilingualism: this encyclopedia will be an excellent resource for my students,
because it has a whole range of articles on relevant topics, including a set on the language situation in countries
all over the world and another set on language education policies in the world’s major regions. Other course
instructors will surely also be happy to send their students to this work, for courses on language and the brain,
animal communication, second-language acquisition, and any number of other general topics.
From people who enjoy browsing through encyclopedias to specialists who want some basic orientation in an
area near their own, readers will find ELL2 to be an outstanding source of information.
Sarah G. Thomason
William J. Gedney Collegiate Professor of Linguistics
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA
INTRODUCTION
The first edition of the
Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics
(ELL1), with R. E. Asher as Editor-in-Chief
and J. M. Y. Simpson as Coordinating Editor, was published in 1994. It was intended to be ‘authoritative,
comprehensive, international and up-to-date.’ The reviews show that it largely succeeded in these aims.
When in 2002 I was invited by Chris Pringle (Publisher, Elsevier Social Sciences), to be Editor-in-Chief of a
new edition of ELL, I assumed that what Elsevier had in mind was a revision of ELL1. However it soon became
clear in discussions with Chris and with Sarah Oates (Linguistics Publishing Editor) that this was not at all what
was intended. In the 10 years since the first edition was published, linguistics had grown explosively, both in its
own specializations and in interdisciplinary fields. We decided that ELL2 should reflect this growth and be an
entirely new work, with new and expanded sections, new topics, new editors, new authors, and newly
commissioned articles. At the same time, we wanted to retain the broad vision of ELL1 as an encyclopedia
concerned both with languages and with linguistics. We have therefore sought to deal comprehensively with the
current state of the fundamental linguistic disciplines, with their applications to the study of language, and with
the interdisciplinary relationships between linguistics and the other disciplines from which it draws inspiration
and to which it contributes expertise. We have also sought to retain, and indeed expand on, ELL1’s coverage of
the languages of the world.
We also planned to publish the Encyclopedia in two versions, a 14-volume print version and, in parallel, an
version supplements the written text with additional illustrative material that is only possible in an electronic
version – samples of spoken or signed language, videos of the use of language in context, and the like.
Our first task was to set up an Editorial Board. This consisted of the Editor-in-Chief and six Coordinating
Editors, each having general oversight over a particular area of the encyclopedia. We were fortunate in being
able to recruit as Coordinating Editors Jim Miller and Laurie Bauer (who between them covered the fundamen-
tal linguistic disciplines of phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse),
Anne Anderson (psychololinguistics and cognitive science), Graeme Hirst (computational applications of
linguistics), and Margie Berns (applied linguistics and applications of linguistics in education, the law, politics,
the media, and so on). We had hoped that Seumas Simpson, who had been Coordinating Editor for ELL1, would
be able to join us as Coordinating Editor for languages, writing systems, biographies, and the history of the
subject, but unfortunately that turned out not to be possible, so I took on the task of the sixth Coordinating
Editor. The first meeting of this editorial board and Elsevier was at Woodstock in 2002. By good fortune, both
Ron Asher and Seumas Simpson also attended this meeting, so we were able to draw on their experience of
ELL1. At this meeting we determined the overall architecture of ELL2, drew up the list of sections, set the
general scope of each, and began to think about Section Editors.
The six Coordinating Editors were invited to find an editor for each of the sections in their general area, and
these Section Editors, as they were recruited, were invited to take primary responsibility for a particular subject
area. They were also invited to join an Executive Editorial Board. ELL1 had 34 editors, ELL2 has 45; full details
of the board are included in the front matter. The names of many of the ELL1 sections have been retained –
pragmatics, semantics, syntax, morphology, phonetics, phonology, and so on – but in all cases the structure of
the sections and their contents have been rethought and articles freshly commissioned. Some ELL1 sections in
xxviii
INTRODUCTION
which there have been substantial recent developments or that we felt were rather scantily covered in ELL1 have
been considerably expanded, and new sections have been added. In the area of syntax and morphology there is a
new section on typology and universals; in the area of psycholinguistics there are new sections on language
acquisition and on cognitive science, and the ELL1 section on language pathology has been expanded into a
section on brain and language dealing not only with language disorders but also with the contemporary
developments in neurolinguistics. In the area of text linguistics and discourse there are now separate sections
on written and spoken discourse and a set of new sections on discourse in particular fields – medicine, the law,
the media, politics, etc. The section on computational linguistics and natural language processing has been
expanded in line with recent developments, and there is a new section on speech technology. New developments
in pragmatics have likewise been taken into account: intercultural pragmatics, pragmatics of reading, pragmatic
acts, and others. There is increased coverage of biographies and of languages.
In 2003 we held a meeting of all the editors. For this meeting, each of the Section Editors was asked to
articulate the coverage of their section, to draw up lists of article titles, and to begin to think of authors. As a
group we scrutinized the Section Editors’ proposals, examined their lists of articles, proposed further titles, and
attempted to identify gaps in coverage and to plug them. This process of determining the coverage of the
encyclopedia did not, of course, end with this meeting, but was continually negotiated over several more
months. Finally, we also proposed a small international Honorary Editorial Advisory Board to scrutinize
our plans and comment on them: Barry Blake (La Trobe), Yukio Otsu (Keio), Sally Thomason (Michigan),
Yueguo Gu (Beijing), and Nigel Vincent (Manchester). We are grateful for their help and advice. The extent to
which the encyclopedia meets its aims of being comprehensive and authoritative is due to the expertise and
dedication of the members of the editorial boards, the Coordinating Editors and Subject Editors, the interna-
tional advisors, and of course the authors. We are particularly pleased that the authorship is truly international.
Our authors come from more than 70 different countries: some 45% are from Europe and some 40% from
North America. A full list can be found in the list of contributors.
The large number of editors and sections gave rise to a general structural problem. Some division of editorial
responsibility was necessary in order to cover a subject so wide-ranging and interdisciplinary as linguistics. It
will be clear from the list of section editors and their commissioning responsibilities, and from the subject
classification, that our sections correspond largely to the traditional partitioning of linguistics into syntax,
semantics, pragmatics, etc., and also recognizes the customary applications in psycholinguistics, sociolinguis-
tics, comparative linguistics, computational linguistics, and so forth. In many of the proposed sections, even
within the more centrally linguistic disciplines, the phenomena that we are dealing with are not readily
classifiable as belonging exclusively to one area. Consequently, there is on the one hand the possibility of
overlap, and on the other, the possibility of gaps in coverage. Overlap, where it does not involve repetition,
is not necessarily vicious because it can offer revealingly different perspectives on particular issues, and in a
project as large as this, it is difficult to avoid. We have tried our best to minimize any gaps. All the editors were
involved in scrutinizing the list of articles to try and identify and fill gaps, and it was a general editorial policy
that there was no strict demarcation between the responsibilities of the various editors, who were encouraged to
negotiate their area of responsibility with other neighboring areas to ensure that the coverage was as complete as
possible.
In a fast-changing and developing field like linguistics it is important for a work called an encyclopedia both
to be up-to-date and to remain in contact with its traditions. In the central areas of linguistics it is probably the
case that many of the fundamentals have remained much as they were 10 years ago, but they should be
reinterpreted in the light of new data or new theoretical positions. They need to be restated for a new generation
to inform the student and offer suitable background information to the researcher or professional from a related
area who seeks to understand linguistics.
The various subdisciplines have developed rapidly. Linguistics, like other disciplines in the arts and social
sciences, is driven by both theory and data and the interaction between the two. So in the 10 years since ELL1
we have seen the arrival of new theories and the fading of old ones in the fundamental linguistic disciplines as
well as in interdisciplinary areas. It is interesting to see how work in the linguistic disciplines increasingly draws
insights from interdisciplinary cooperation, and it is striking how different the bibliographies in ELL2 are from
those in ELL1.
In the same period, we have also seen a considerable increase in the amount of data available. There is more
data on individual languages, which is reflected in the language articles, and substantially more on basic
linguistic phenomena of both typological and universal issues: on topics such as the word, complementation,
case, tense, aspect, and modality, and on functional domains such as possession and comparison. Data feeds
INTRODUCTION xxix
theory, and these phenomena are as likely to be covered in the interdisciplinary sections as they are, for example,
in the sections on morphology or syntax.
Another area of substantial change since ELL1 is the development of new technologies. Developments in
computer technology have made it possible to assemble substantial corpora of spoken and written text, and
analysis tools have improved beyond measure so that in many areas corpus linguistics has had a substantial
impact on both description and theory. The Internet, text-messaging on mobile phones, online chat groups, and
the like bring new dimensions to the use of language in the media and to the study of discourse in general.
Similarly, new technologies for investigating speech and neural activity open up new insights on the mental
storage and processing of language.
All these developments have led to a considerable increase in the amount of interdisciplinary work in
linguistics. For example, developments in psycholinguistic theory have been influential in many areas – so
much so that linguistic investigations are now likely to be conducted in departments other than Departments of
Linguistics – as can be seen by looking at the departmental affiliations of the Section Editors and authors. This
renders the distinction between the ‘core’ and the ‘periphery’ of linguistics, which was still being drawn in ELL1,
no longer as viable as it once may have seemed.
ELL2 has attempted to address some of these issues by systematically including articles on interfaces between
disciplines and, in the subject classification, by listing individual articles under more than one classification.
This also implies that the classification does not entirely correspond to the commission responsibilities of
individual Section Editors.
We have tried to be comprehensive in our coverage. The articles are ordered alphabetically by title, so the
reader who wishes to see the coverage in a particular area will find it helpful to consult the subject classification.
What follows is a brief explication of the classification and the coverage of each section.
Foundations of linguistics explores fundamental linguistic concepts as they relate to linguistic theories and to
the collection and organization of data. Many of these foundational issues are also discussed, from a philo-
sophical point of view, in the section on philosophy and language and from other perspectives in other sections.
The section also broaches issues relating to the origin and evolution of language.
The section on animal communication discusses the complex communicative signals that non-human indi-
viduals across the animal kingdom have evolved to communicate information about themselves, their age, their
individual identity, their social status, etc., and also their capacity for referential signaling about external objects
such as the location of food sources or specific information about predators. Animal communication is a greatly
expanding field of research by biologists and psychologists that can make a significant contribution to
understanding human language. In the online version there are multimedia annexes that give a wide range of
examples of animal communication, from the bee dance to fish communication.
The section on issues in semiotics deals with theories of the sign as they apply both to linguistics and to other
communicative activities and other modalities such as music.
It is to be expected that an encyclopedia of linguistics should pay major attention to the fundamental
disciplines at the heart of all linguistic investigations: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics,
pragmatics, and discourse. In each of these areas there are articles on fundamental concepts of the discipline, on
models within the discipline, and on interfaces with other linguistic disciplines as well as on interdisciplinary
links.
Phonetics is the study of the way speech sounds are produced and interpreted. This includes the articulation
and perception of speech sounds and investigations into the character of and the explanation for the universal
constraints on the structure of speech sound inventories and speech sound sequences. It increasingly encom-
passes the design of mechanical systems to code, transmit, synthesize, and recognize speech. It also includes the
study of how speech sounds vary in different styles of speaking, in different phonetic contexts, over time, and
over geographical regions; how children first learn the sounds of their mother tongue; how best to learn to
pronounce the sounds of another language; and investigations into the causes of and the therapy for defects of
speech and hearing. These issues are relevant to more than one section. In the online version many of the articles
are accompanied by audio files.
The boundary between phonetics and phonology, the study of the more abstract, more functional, and
more psychological aspects of speech, is under constant debate. Phonology is the study of sound systems in
language and was the first subdiscipline in which the view of language as a system was developed successfully.
The section discusses the nature of phonological units and processes, both at the segmental and at the prosodic
level and illustrates this with descriptions of the phonological systems of a number of typologically different
languages.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
zanotowane.pl doc.pisz.pl pdf.pisz.pl upanicza.keep.pl
FOREWORD
I remember being slightly surprised when I first heard that a second edition of the
Encyclopedia of Language
and Linguistics
(ELL2) was in the works: I wondered if it wasn’t premature, a bit too soon after the first edition.
But now that I see the result, it is clear that this new edition is both timely and a major advance over the very
successful ELL1. Linguistics is a fast-moving field.
Theoretical controversies continue and develop; linguistic and sociolinguistic data collection has increased
rapidly over the past 10 years or so, stimulated in large part by linguists’ awareness of the critical problem of
language endangerment; the greatly expanded role of digital resources is making huge bodies of data available
to all scholars; and interdisciplinary outreach by linguists and to linguistics has made our discipline a bit more
visible beyond the in-group. We and our students still hear the same old question all too often – ‘‘What is
linguistics, anyway?’’ – but within academia, at least, colleagues in other disciplines now tend to be embarrassed
to ask it, even if they don’t know the answer.
All these developments make this encyclopedia an invaluable reference work. By 1990 it was already
impossible (as I know all too well from my years as editor of a general linguistics journal) for any linguist to
have expert knowledge of the entire range of the discipline, much less of the interdisciplinary areas that were
beginning to take on new prominence. The past 15 years have seen remarkable developments, so that it is now
difficult to imagine being familiar with more than a smallish fraction of the many advances in our understanding
of language and linguistics. Having access to a quick survey of current issues and sources on language and the
brain, morphological theory, statistical methods in language processing, categorial grammars, the classification
of Austronesian languages, dialects in bird songs, second-language attrition, bilingual education, the CHILDES
database, and hundreds of other topics will delight and inform linguists and, I predict, a great many non-
linguists as well. The numerous articles on interdisciplinary topics should be especially valuable for linguists
with limited knowledge of the other disciplines as well as for non-linguists with an interest in interface issues.
Another feature of ELL2 struck me as I began to prepare to teach a new course on social, political, and
economic implications of multilingualism: this encyclopedia will be an excellent resource for my students,
because it has a whole range of articles on relevant topics, including a set on the language situation in countries
all over the world and another set on language education policies in the world’s major regions. Other course
instructors will surely also be happy to send their students to this work, for courses on language and the brain,
animal communication, second-language acquisition, and any number of other general topics.
From people who enjoy browsing through encyclopedias to specialists who want some basic orientation in an
area near their own, readers will find ELL2 to be an outstanding source of information.
Sarah G. Thomason
William J. Gedney Collegiate Professor of Linguistics
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA
INTRODUCTION
The first edition of the
Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics
(ELL1), with R. E. Asher as Editor-in-Chief
and J. M. Y. Simpson as Coordinating Editor, was published in 1994. It was intended to be ‘authoritative,
comprehensive, international and up-to-date.’ The reviews show that it largely succeeded in these aims.
When in 2002 I was invited by Chris Pringle (Publisher, Elsevier Social Sciences), to be Editor-in-Chief of a
new edition of ELL, I assumed that what Elsevier had in mind was a revision of ELL1. However it soon became
clear in discussions with Chris and with Sarah Oates (Linguistics Publishing Editor) that this was not at all what
was intended. In the 10 years since the first edition was published, linguistics had grown explosively, both in its
own specializations and in interdisciplinary fields. We decided that ELL2 should reflect this growth and be an
entirely new work, with new and expanded sections, new topics, new editors, new authors, and newly
commissioned articles. At the same time, we wanted to retain the broad vision of ELL1 as an encyclopedia
concerned both with languages and with linguistics. We have therefore sought to deal comprehensively with the
current state of the fundamental linguistic disciplines, with their applications to the study of language, and with
the interdisciplinary relationships between linguistics and the other disciplines from which it draws inspiration
and to which it contributes expertise. We have also sought to retain, and indeed expand on, ELL1’s coverage of
the languages of the world.
We also planned to publish the Encyclopedia in two versions, a 14-volume print version and, in parallel, an
version supplements the written text with additional illustrative material that is only possible in an electronic
version – samples of spoken or signed language, videos of the use of language in context, and the like.
Our first task was to set up an Editorial Board. This consisted of the Editor-in-Chief and six Coordinating
Editors, each having general oversight over a particular area of the encyclopedia. We were fortunate in being
able to recruit as Coordinating Editors Jim Miller and Laurie Bauer (who between them covered the fundamen-
tal linguistic disciplines of phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse),
Anne Anderson (psychololinguistics and cognitive science), Graeme Hirst (computational applications of
linguistics), and Margie Berns (applied linguistics and applications of linguistics in education, the law, politics,
the media, and so on). We had hoped that Seumas Simpson, who had been Coordinating Editor for ELL1, would
be able to join us as Coordinating Editor for languages, writing systems, biographies, and the history of the
subject, but unfortunately that turned out not to be possible, so I took on the task of the sixth Coordinating
Editor. The first meeting of this editorial board and Elsevier was at Woodstock in 2002. By good fortune, both
Ron Asher and Seumas Simpson also attended this meeting, so we were able to draw on their experience of
ELL1. At this meeting we determined the overall architecture of ELL2, drew up the list of sections, set the
general scope of each, and began to think about Section Editors.
The six Coordinating Editors were invited to find an editor for each of the sections in their general area, and
these Section Editors, as they were recruited, were invited to take primary responsibility for a particular subject
area. They were also invited to join an Executive Editorial Board. ELL1 had 34 editors, ELL2 has 45; full details
of the board are included in the front matter. The names of many of the ELL1 sections have been retained –
pragmatics, semantics, syntax, morphology, phonetics, phonology, and so on – but in all cases the structure of
the sections and their contents have been rethought and articles freshly commissioned. Some ELL1 sections in
xxviii
INTRODUCTION
which there have been substantial recent developments or that we felt were rather scantily covered in ELL1 have
been considerably expanded, and new sections have been added. In the area of syntax and morphology there is a
new section on typology and universals; in the area of psycholinguistics there are new sections on language
acquisition and on cognitive science, and the ELL1 section on language pathology has been expanded into a
section on brain and language dealing not only with language disorders but also with the contemporary
developments in neurolinguistics. In the area of text linguistics and discourse there are now separate sections
on written and spoken discourse and a set of new sections on discourse in particular fields – medicine, the law,
the media, politics, etc. The section on computational linguistics and natural language processing has been
expanded in line with recent developments, and there is a new section on speech technology. New developments
in pragmatics have likewise been taken into account: intercultural pragmatics, pragmatics of reading, pragmatic
acts, and others. There is increased coverage of biographies and of languages.
In 2003 we held a meeting of all the editors. For this meeting, each of the Section Editors was asked to
articulate the coverage of their section, to draw up lists of article titles, and to begin to think of authors. As a
group we scrutinized the Section Editors’ proposals, examined their lists of articles, proposed further titles, and
attempted to identify gaps in coverage and to plug them. This process of determining the coverage of the
encyclopedia did not, of course, end with this meeting, but was continually negotiated over several more
months. Finally, we also proposed a small international Honorary Editorial Advisory Board to scrutinize
our plans and comment on them: Barry Blake (La Trobe), Yukio Otsu (Keio), Sally Thomason (Michigan),
Yueguo Gu (Beijing), and Nigel Vincent (Manchester). We are grateful for their help and advice. The extent to
which the encyclopedia meets its aims of being comprehensive and authoritative is due to the expertise and
dedication of the members of the editorial boards, the Coordinating Editors and Subject Editors, the interna-
tional advisors, and of course the authors. We are particularly pleased that the authorship is truly international.
Our authors come from more than 70 different countries: some 45% are from Europe and some 40% from
North America. A full list can be found in the list of contributors.
The large number of editors and sections gave rise to a general structural problem. Some division of editorial
responsibility was necessary in order to cover a subject so wide-ranging and interdisciplinary as linguistics. It
will be clear from the list of section editors and their commissioning responsibilities, and from the subject
classification, that our sections correspond largely to the traditional partitioning of linguistics into syntax,
semantics, pragmatics, etc., and also recognizes the customary applications in psycholinguistics, sociolinguis-
tics, comparative linguistics, computational linguistics, and so forth. In many of the proposed sections, even
within the more centrally linguistic disciplines, the phenomena that we are dealing with are not readily
classifiable as belonging exclusively to one area. Consequently, there is on the one hand the possibility of
overlap, and on the other, the possibility of gaps in coverage. Overlap, where it does not involve repetition,
is not necessarily vicious because it can offer revealingly different perspectives on particular issues, and in a
project as large as this, it is difficult to avoid. We have tried our best to minimize any gaps. All the editors were
involved in scrutinizing the list of articles to try and identify and fill gaps, and it was a general editorial policy
that there was no strict demarcation between the responsibilities of the various editors, who were encouraged to
negotiate their area of responsibility with other neighboring areas to ensure that the coverage was as complete as
possible.
In a fast-changing and developing field like linguistics it is important for a work called an encyclopedia both
to be up-to-date and to remain in contact with its traditions. In the central areas of linguistics it is probably the
case that many of the fundamentals have remained much as they were 10 years ago, but they should be
reinterpreted in the light of new data or new theoretical positions. They need to be restated for a new generation
to inform the student and offer suitable background information to the researcher or professional from a related
area who seeks to understand linguistics.
The various subdisciplines have developed rapidly. Linguistics, like other disciplines in the arts and social
sciences, is driven by both theory and data and the interaction between the two. So in the 10 years since ELL1
we have seen the arrival of new theories and the fading of old ones in the fundamental linguistic disciplines as
well as in interdisciplinary areas. It is interesting to see how work in the linguistic disciplines increasingly draws
insights from interdisciplinary cooperation, and it is striking how different the bibliographies in ELL2 are from
those in ELL1.
In the same period, we have also seen a considerable increase in the amount of data available. There is more
data on individual languages, which is reflected in the language articles, and substantially more on basic
linguistic phenomena of both typological and universal issues: on topics such as the word, complementation,
case, tense, aspect, and modality, and on functional domains such as possession and comparison. Data feeds
INTRODUCTION xxix
theory, and these phenomena are as likely to be covered in the interdisciplinary sections as they are, for example,
in the sections on morphology or syntax.
Another area of substantial change since ELL1 is the development of new technologies. Developments in
computer technology have made it possible to assemble substantial corpora of spoken and written text, and
analysis tools have improved beyond measure so that in many areas corpus linguistics has had a substantial
impact on both description and theory. The Internet, text-messaging on mobile phones, online chat groups, and
the like bring new dimensions to the use of language in the media and to the study of discourse in general.
Similarly, new technologies for investigating speech and neural activity open up new insights on the mental
storage and processing of language.
All these developments have led to a considerable increase in the amount of interdisciplinary work in
linguistics. For example, developments in psycholinguistic theory have been influential in many areas – so
much so that linguistic investigations are now likely to be conducted in departments other than Departments of
Linguistics – as can be seen by looking at the departmental affiliations of the Section Editors and authors. This
renders the distinction between the ‘core’ and the ‘periphery’ of linguistics, which was still being drawn in ELL1,
no longer as viable as it once may have seemed.
ELL2 has attempted to address some of these issues by systematically including articles on interfaces between
disciplines and, in the subject classification, by listing individual articles under more than one classification.
This also implies that the classification does not entirely correspond to the commission responsibilities of
individual Section Editors.
We have tried to be comprehensive in our coverage. The articles are ordered alphabetically by title, so the
reader who wishes to see the coverage in a particular area will find it helpful to consult the subject classification.
What follows is a brief explication of the classification and the coverage of each section.
Foundations of linguistics explores fundamental linguistic concepts as they relate to linguistic theories and to
the collection and organization of data. Many of these foundational issues are also discussed, from a philo-
sophical point of view, in the section on philosophy and language and from other perspectives in other sections.
The section also broaches issues relating to the origin and evolution of language.
The section on animal communication discusses the complex communicative signals that non-human indi-
viduals across the animal kingdom have evolved to communicate information about themselves, their age, their
individual identity, their social status, etc., and also their capacity for referential signaling about external objects
such as the location of food sources or specific information about predators. Animal communication is a greatly
expanding field of research by biologists and psychologists that can make a significant contribution to
understanding human language. In the online version there are multimedia annexes that give a wide range of
examples of animal communication, from the bee dance to fish communication.
The section on issues in semiotics deals with theories of the sign as they apply both to linguistics and to other
communicative activities and other modalities such as music.
It is to be expected that an encyclopedia of linguistics should pay major attention to the fundamental
disciplines at the heart of all linguistic investigations: phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics,
pragmatics, and discourse. In each of these areas there are articles on fundamental concepts of the discipline, on
models within the discipline, and on interfaces with other linguistic disciplines as well as on interdisciplinary
links.
Phonetics is the study of the way speech sounds are produced and interpreted. This includes the articulation
and perception of speech sounds and investigations into the character of and the explanation for the universal
constraints on the structure of speech sound inventories and speech sound sequences. It increasingly encom-
passes the design of mechanical systems to code, transmit, synthesize, and recognize speech. It also includes the
study of how speech sounds vary in different styles of speaking, in different phonetic contexts, over time, and
over geographical regions; how children first learn the sounds of their mother tongue; how best to learn to
pronounce the sounds of another language; and investigations into the causes of and the therapy for defects of
speech and hearing. These issues are relevant to more than one section. In the online version many of the articles
are accompanied by audio files.
The boundary between phonetics and phonology, the study of the more abstract, more functional, and
more psychological aspects of speech, is under constant debate. Phonology is the study of sound systems in
language and was the first subdiscipline in which the view of language as a system was developed successfully.
The section discusses the nature of phonological units and processes, both at the segmental and at the prosodic
level and illustrates this with descriptions of the phonological systems of a number of typologically different
languages.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]