Phonology is the branch of linguistics that studies how languages systematically organize their phones or, for sign languages, their constituent parts of signs. The term can also refer specifically to the sound or sign system of a particular language variety. At one time, the study of phonology related only to the study of the systems of phonemes in spoken languages, but may now relate to any linguistic analysis either:
In linguistics, the minimalist program is a major line of inquiry that has been developing inside generative grammar since the early 1990s, starting with a 1993 paper by Noam Chomsky.
In generative linguistics, Distributed Morphology is a theoretical framework introduced in 1993 by Morris Halle and Alec Marantz. The central claim of Distributed Morphology is that there is no divide between the construction of words and sentences. The syntax is the single generative engine that forms sound-meaning correspondences, both complex phrases and complex words. This approach challenges the traditional notion of the Lexicon as the unit where derived words are formed and idiosyncratic word-meaning correspondences are stored. In Distributed Morphology there is no unified Lexicon as in earlier generative treatments of word-formation. Rather, the functions that other theories ascribe to the Lexicon are distributed among other components of the grammar.
Ray Jackendoff is an American linguist. He is professor of philosophy, Seth Merrin Chair in the Humanities and, with Daniel Dennett, co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He has always straddled the boundary between generative linguistics and cognitive linguistics, committed to both the existence of an innate universal grammar and to giving an account of language that is consistent with the current understanding of the human mind and cognition.
Morris Halle, né Pinkowitz, was a Latvian-born American linguist who was an Institute Professor, and later professor emeritus, of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The father of "modern phonology", he was best known for his pioneering work in generative phonology, having written "On Accent and Juncture in English" in 1956 with Noam Chomsky and Fred Lukoff and The Sound Pattern of English in 1968 with Chomsky. He also co-authored the earliest theory of generative metrics.
In linguistics, focus is a grammatical category that conveys which part of the sentence contributes new, non-derivable, or contrastive information. In the English sentence "Mary only insulted BILL", focus is expressed prosodically by a pitch accent on "Bill" which identifies him as the only person Mary insulted. By contrast, in the sentence "Mary only INSULTED Bill", the verb "insult" is focused and thus expresses that Mary performed no other actions towards Bill. Focus is a cross-linguistic phenomenon and a major topic in linguistics. Research on focus spans numerous subfields including phonetics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics.
Heinz Joachim Giegerich is a Scottish linguist of German nationality, and Emeritus Professor of English Linguistics in the School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Science of the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.
In linguistics, antisymmetry is a syntactic theory presented in Richard S. Kayne's 1994 monograph The Antisymmetry of Syntax. It asserts that grammatical hierarchies in natural language follow a universal order, namely specifier-head-complement branching order. The theory builds on the foundation of the X-bar theory. Kayne hypothesizes that all phrases whose surface order is not specifier-head-complement have undergone syntactic movements that disrupt this underlying order. Others have posited specifier-complement-head as the basic word order.
Syntax is a peer-reviewed academic journal in the field of syntax of natural languages, established in 1998 and published by Wiley-Blackwell. Its current editors-in-chief are Suzanne Flynn and Klaus Abels .The founding editors were Suzanne Flynn (MIT) and Samuel D. Epstein.
Jeroen van de Weijer is a Dutch linguist who teaches phonology, morphology, phonetics, psycholinguistics, historical linguistics and other courses at Shenzhen University, where he is Distinguished Professor of English linguistics at the School of Foreign Languages. Before, he was Full Professor of English Linguistics at Shanghai International Studies University, in the School of English Studies.
The lexical integrity hypothesis (LIH) or lexical integrity principle is a hypothesis in linguistics which states that syntactic transformations do not apply to subparts of words. It functions as a constraint on transformational grammar.
Fred Walter Householder, Jr. was an American linguist and professor of classics and linguistics at Indiana University. His best known works include Linguistic Speculations and his contributions to Readings in Linguistics II.
Language complexity is a topic in linguistics which can be divided into several sub-topics such as phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic complexity. The subject also carries importance for language evolution.
Jaklin Kornfilt is a theoretical linguist and professor at Syracuse University who is well known for her contributions to the fields of syntax, morphology, Turkish language and grammar, and Turkic language typology.
In syntax, verb-initial (V1) word order is a word order in which the verb appears before the subject and the object. In the more narrow sense, this term is used specifically to describe the word order of V1 languages. V1 clauses only occur in V1 languages and other languages with a dominant V1 order displaying other properties that correlate with verb-initiality and that are crucial to many analyses of V1. V1 languages are estimated to make up 12–19% of the world’s languages.
Harry van der Hulst is full professor of linguistics and director of undergraduate studies at the department of linguistics of the University of Connecticut. He has been editor-in-chief of the international SSCI peer-reviewed linguistics journal The Linguistic Review since 1990 and he is co-editor of the series ‘Studies in generative grammar’. He is a Life Fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study, and a board member of the European linguistics organization GLOW.
Lexicalist hypothesis is a hypothesis proposed by Noam Chomsky in which he claims that syntactic transformations only can operate on syntactic constituents. The hypothesis states that the system of grammar that assembles words is separate and different from the system of grammar that assembles phrases out of words.
Laura J. Downing is an American linguist, specializing in the phonology of African languages.
Alfred (“Al”) D. Mtenje is a professor of Linguistics at the University of Malawi. He is known for his work on the prosody of Malawian Bantu languages, as well as for his work in support of language policies promoting the native languages of Malawi.
Mark de Vos is Professor of Linguistics at Rhodes University. His primary research interests are in the area of Minimalist Syntactic Theory, specifically in areas of pseudo-coordination and agreement as well as Linguistic approaches to the Psycholinguistics of early reading in indigenous languages of South Africa.
