Linguistic Complexity by Kortmann, Bernd; Szmrecsanyi, Benedikt;

Rövid leírás:

The linguae& litterae series, edited by Peter Auer, Gesa von Essen and Werner Frick, documents the research activities of the School of Languageand Literature of the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies (FRIAS). These research activities in literary studies and linguistics are characterized by an approach that is theoretically and methodologically "state of the art" and interdisciplinarily open.

In linguistics the accent is on the corpus-based, quantitative and qualitative investigation of language; in literary studies the focus is on the comparative, transdisciplinary analysis of literary phenomena in their cultural contexts. At the same time the series deals with the productive interfaces and synergies between modern linguistics and literary studies (as well as the humanities, social and natural sciences with which they interact). It seeks a new, contemporary reformulation of the humanities research curriculum and its problem and concept orientation for the future.

The series has a clear international orientation - each volume is multilingual, containing German, English and French contributions and, depending on the volume, articles in Italian or Spanish as well. Each individual volume is peer reviewed by an international editorial board.

Each year 2-4 volumes are published.

Hosszú leírás:

Linguistic complexity is one of the currently most hotly debated notions in linguistics. The essays in this volume reflect the intricacies of thinking about the complexity of languages and language varieties (here: of English) in three major contact-related fields of (and schools in) linguistics: creolistics, indigenization and nativization studies (i.e. in the realm of English linguistics, the “World Englishes” community), and Second Language Acquisition (SLA) research: How can we adequately assess linguistic complexity? Should we be interested in absolute complexity or rather relative complexity? What is the extent to which language contact and/or (adult) language learning might lead to morphosyntactic simplification? The authors in this volume are all leading linguists in different areas of specialization, and they were asked to elaborate on those facets of linguistic complexity which are most relevant in their area of specialization, and/or which strike them as being most intriguing. The result is a collection of papers that is unique in bringing together leading representatives of three often disjunct fields of linguistic scholarship in which linguistic complexity is seen as a dynamic and inherently variable parameter.

"This volume is a welcome addition to the growing body of work on linguistic
complexity, especially as it pertains to morphosyntactic complexity in contact
varieties of English."
Natalie Operstein and Amber Clontz in: Linguist List 23.5022