Preface Acknowledgements Part I. Preliminaries: 1. What is evolutionary phonology? 2. Evolution in language and elsewhere 3. Explanation in phonology: a brief history of ideas Part II. Sound Patterns: 4. Laryngeal features 5. Place features 6. Other common sound patterns 7. The evolution of geminates 8. Some uncommon sound patterns Part III. Implications: 9. Synchronic phonology 10. Diachronic phonology 11. Beyond phonology References Language index Subject index.

Evolutionary Phonology: The Emergence of Sound Patterns

1. Introduction 2. Word order and clause structure 3. Order of elements within the phrases 4. Case, agreement, grammatical relations and thematic roles 5. Passives, middles and unaccusatives 6. Expletive constructions and clause structure 7. Fronting, focussing, extraposition and NP-shift 8. Finite and non-finite complements and adjuncts 9. Pronouns, reflexives and empty categories.

The Syntax of Icelandic

Sex-based differences in the form of English compliments and in the frequencies of various compliment response types are discussed. Based on a corpus of 1,062 compliment events, several differences in the form of compliments used by women and men are noted. Further, it is found that compliments from men are generally accepted, especially by female recipients, whereas compliments from women are met with a response type other than acceptance. These findings are set within a broader discussion of male–female differences in speech and the sociology of compliment work. Parallels are drawn between these sex-based differences and differences in norms for national varieties of English relating to the function and frequency of compliments as speech acts and to different response types elicited by diverse functional exploitations of compliment formulas in discourse. (Sex-based differences in language use, socioprag-matics, compliments/compliment responses, ethnography of speaking)

Sex-Based Differences in Compliment Behavior.

By 50,000 years ago, the effects of a ‘symbolic explosion’ — an efflorescence of human art, song, dance and ritual — were rippling across the globe. Applied to archaeological evidence, standard neo-Darwinian theory offers new understandings of this improbable event. The present article defines ‘symbolism’, models quasi-ritual behaviour in late archaic Homo sapiens, extends the argument to the emergence of anatomically modern humans and concludes with preliminary tests against archaeological, ethnographic and rock art data.

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The Human Symbolic Revolution: A Darwinian Account

What is the mechanism by which a linguistic change advances across successive generations of speakers? We explore this question by using the model of incrementation provided in Labov 2001 and analyzing six current changes in English. Extending Labov's focus on recent and vigorous phonological changes, we target ongoing morphosyntactic(-semantic) and discourse-pragmatic changes. Our results provide a striking validation of the incrementation model, confirming its value as a key to understanding the evolution of linguistic systems. However, although our findings reveal the predicted peak in the apparent-time progress of a change and corroborate the female tendency to lead innovation, there is no absolute contrast between men and women with respect to incrementation. Instead, quantitative differences in the social embedding of linguistic change correlate with the rate of the change in the speech community.

Paul Salmon

Papers

The Nordic Languages and Modern Linguistics

Style, Rhetoric and Rhythm. Essays by Morris W. Croll

The Wild Man in "Iwein" and Medieval Descriptive Technique

Language: Its Origin and Relation to Thought

Literature in Medieval Germany