What is it about?

This volume explores how linguistic theories inform the ways in which languages are described. Theories, as representations of linguistic categories, guide the field linguist to look for various phenomena without presupposing their necessary existence and provide the tools to account for various sets of data across different languages. A goal of linguistic description is to represent the full range of language structures for any given language. The chapters in this book cover various sub-disciplines of linguistics including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, language acquisition, and anthropological linguistics, drawing upon theoretical approaches such as prosodic Phonology, Enhancement theory, Distributed Morphology, Minimalist syntax, Lexical Functional Grammar, and Kinship theory.

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Why is it important?

This volume will be of interest to researchers in both descriptive and theoretical linguistics.

Perspectives

The languages described in this book include Australian languages (Pama-Nyungan and non-Pama-Nyungan), Romance languages as well as English.

Dr Diana Guillemin
Griffith University

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This page is a summary of: Language Description Informed by Theory, January 2014, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/slcs.147.
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