Language Form and Linguistic Variation: Papers Dedicated to Angus Mcintosh

505 Pages·1982·34.82 MB·English

by  John A. Anderson (Eds.)

LANGUAGE FORM AND LINGUISTIC VARIATION
AMSTERDAM STUDIES IN THE THEORY AND
HISTORY OF LINGUISTIC SCIENCE
General Editor
E.F. KONRAD KOERNER
(University of Ottawa)
Series IV - CURRENT ISSUES IN LINGUISTIC THEORY
Advisory Editorial Board
Henning Andersen (Copenhagen); Raimo Anttila (Los Angeles)
Tomaz V.Gamkrelidze (Tiflis);Hans-Heinrich Lieb (Berlin)
J.Peter Maher (Chicago);Ernst Pulgram (Ann Arbor, Mich.)
E.Wyn Roberts (Vancouver, B.C.);Danny Steinberg (Honolulu)
Volume 15
John Anderson (ed.)
LANGUAGE FORM AND LINGUISTIC VARIATION
Papers dedicated to Angus McIntosh
LANGUAGE FORM AND
LINGUISTIC VARIATION
Papers dedicated to Angus Mcintosh
edited by
John Anderson
(University of Edinburgh)
AMSTERDAM / JOHN BENJAMINS B.V.
1982
© Copyright 1982 - John Benjamins B.V.
ISSN 0304 0763 / ISBN 90 272 3506 6
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by print, photoprint,
microfilm or any other means, without written permission from the publisher.
DEDICATORY PREFACE
It can seldom have happened that a scholar has heen honoured on
his retirement by two festschrifts. But in the case of Angus McIntosh
just one would have seemed insufficient. Another volume ( So Meny
People Longages and Tonges, edited by Michael Benskin and M.L.
Samuels) pays tribute to the importance of his work in dialectology
and, of course, Middle English dialectology in particular. However,
many of his colleagues felt that a volume dedicated entirely to
dialect studies, would, inevitably, fail to reflect the vast range of
his interests.
For before he was Professor of English Language at the University
of Edinburgh Angus McIntosh was Professor of English Language and
General Linguistics, and, as such, responsible for introducing the
teaching of linguistics into that university. And despite the fact
that for the last twenty years his work has been mainly devoted to
the Atlas of the Dialects of Later Middle English he has still
(incredibly) found time to write articles on subjects ranging from
graphemics to stylistics, from place names to Modern English syntax.
Nearly all these papers break new ground. All of them are
distinguished by the originality of the approach and a sensitivity to
language that, unfortunately, is found all too rarely among linguists,
And all of them are written in that lucid and witty style that
characterizes everything that he writes, and which helps to make him
such a stimulating teacher and colleague.
It is to the author of these papers that the scholars who have
contributed to this volume dedicate their contribution with gratitude
and affection.
James Peter Thorne.

CONTENTS
Dedicatory Preface v
Fred Cassidy: Lemmatization -- The Case of 'Catalpa' 1
J.C. Catford: Marking and Frequency in the English Verb 11
Bridget Cusack: Complements and Humours 29
R.M.W. Dixon: Problems in Dyirbal Dialectology 43
Colin J. Ewen: The Phonological Representation of the Welsh
Mutations 75
Jan Firbas: Has every Sentence a Theme and a Rheme? 97
Jacek Fisiak: Isophones or Isographs? A Problem in Historical Dialec­
tology 117
M.A.K. Halliday: The De-automization of Meaning: From Priestley's
'An I nspector Calls' 129
Eric Hamp: 'Thwaite' .161
A.A. Hill: Rhymes and Reasons, the Practice of Two Poets .169
Richard M. Hogg: Two Geminate Consonants in Old English? ...187
Donald Macaulay: Borrow, Calque and Switch: The Law of the English
Frontier. 203
Norman Macleod: The Stylistic Analysis of Poetic Texts: Owen's
'Futility' and Davie's 'The Garden Party' 239
Bruce Mitchell: Old Enlish Man 'One': Two Notes 277
Wayne O'Neil: Simplifying the Grammar of English 285
Ivan Poldauf: Verbal Aspect: A Slavonic-English Comparison 307
John Pride: Communicative Needs in the Learning and Use of
English 321
Randolph Quirk and Jan Rusiecki: Supplementing Corpus Elicitation.379
VIII CONTENTS
Fred C. Robinson: Latin for Old English in Anglo-Saxon Manu­
scripts .395
Vivian Salmon: Wh- and Yes/No Questions: Charles Butler's Grammar
(1633) and the History of a Linguistic Concept 401
Barbara M.H. Strang: Some Aspects of the History of the Be+ing Con-
stuction 427
James Peter Thorne: A Note on the Indefinite Article 475
Josef Vachek: Written Language as a Heterogeneous System 485
LEMMATIZATION - THE CASE OF "CATALPA"
FRED CASSIDY
In making a dictionary of a language which has a standard
orthography, establishing the forms and sequences of lemmata is
at worst a minor problem. Each word has its established spelling;
alternatives are few; and new words are not admitted until they
have settled down from the first ad hoc attempts to spell them
to a more considered form, Except for foreign words of very
different sound, analogies are quickly found on which new words
can be spelled, More serious problems arise when the sources are
oral, or chiefly oral, and when the object is not to set a standi
ard, but to represent the variants which are in actual use, It is
the nature of spoken forms to develop many variants: on what
principles is the lexicographer to choose the right lemma or lemm-
ata under which to collect and present all the variants in his
word-list?
The problem was faced, of course, in the Scottish National
Dictionary,1 when the editors had to deal not only with written
forms which represented conflicting ways of rendering oral forms,
but also from the dialectal diversity of the oral forms them-
selves. As the introduction states, with a hint of patience tried,
"It is seldom that a word is spelled only one way in Scots." (xiv).
To put some order into the diversity, the more usual form or