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This volume on developmental linguistics offers method and rationale for analyses of complex variation in British English and ancient Greek within the grammar--i.e. without regard to the distribution of language variants in geographical or social space. The book offers a host of grammatical (and ...

This volume on developmental linguistics offers method and rationale for analyses of complex variation in British English and ancient Greek within the grammar--i.e. without regard to the distribution of language variants in geographical or social space. The book offers a host of grammatical (and social) reasons for accepting the beginnings of English as a French creole with Romance-like syntactic phenomena too involved to be viewed as borrowings, though disguised to casual observers by reason of the many Anglo-Saxon calques on French functor words. Two long chapters show how assuming a non-Germanic origin of English combine with a sophisticated theory of reversals in marked environments to disclose an entirely new understanding of English grammar, especially with regard to verb modalities and pronoun usage. Other chapters deal with aspects of historical change and variation in a developmentalist framework.

This volume consists of an introduction and two groups of essays by Paul M. Postal, each with a connecting theme. The first, positive group of papers, contains five previously unpublished studies of English syntax. These include a long study of so-called "locative inversion," two investigations ...

This volume consists of an introduction and two groups of essays by Paul M. Postal, each with a connecting theme. The first, positive group of papers, contains five previously unpublished studies of English syntax. These include a long study of so-called "locative inversion," two investigations related to raising to non-subject status, an argument for the existence of a hitherto ignored nominal grammatical category and a study of vulgar negative polarity items. Each investigation of specific English details is argued to have significant theoretical consequences. The second, negative group of papers, contains seven essays each of which seeks to show that aspects of contemporary linguistic activity are in part contaminated by elements of what is called "junk linguistics." Postal uses the term to denote work which advances proposals, puts forward claims and asserts deep results which, he argues, can only be accepted by ignoring serious standards of inquiry and scholarship. Postal claims that much of this work is nonetheless currently considered not only serious but prestigious reveals the problem to exist at the core of the field, not its periphery. These chapters include documentation of "junk linguistic" aspects in National Science Foundation refereeing, work on the foundations of linguistics, and even in widespread terminological usages. The final chapter briefly lists personal suggestions for dealing with this problem.