This book offers an original treatment of the Italian clitic si. Sharply separating encoded grammar from inference in discourse, it proposes a unitary meaning for si, including impersonals, passives, and reflexives. Si signals third-person participancy but makes no distinctions of number, gender,… read more
Edited by Joseph Davis, Radmila J. Gorup and Nancy Stern
This collection carries the functionalist Columbia School of linguistics forward with contributions on linguistic theory, semiotics, phonology, grammar, lexicon, and anthropology. Columbia School linguistics views language as a symbolic tool whose structure is shaped both by its communicative… read more
Linguistic constructs often correspond to nothing concrete: Descriptivists’ zero morpheme, generativists’ trace, variationists’ null instantiation, and Columbia School’s null signal. These represent structural relations with no phonetic substance. Columbia School has posited, moreover, three types… read more
In his otherwise radically innovative linguistics (Columbia School), William Diver retained the classical phoneme, defined on the basis of contrastive distribution. He did so despite his rejection of most of the apparatus of traditional, descriptivist, and contemporary linguistics, and despite… read more
