Christopher Beedham Knihy

This book assembles a collection of papers first presented at the Summer School and Conference on the Method of Lexical Exceptions held at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, 2-8 September 2007, which explored an area of linguistics now referred to as ‘the method of exceptions and their correlations’. Recognition of the work of Saussure was impeded during his lifetime by the Junggrammatiker (Neogrammarians) and their view of exceptions, but this book incorporates exceptions into a Saussurean approach. Exceptions to rules are treated here not as something wilful and inexplicable, but as a clue to what has gone wrong in the original rule. The topics covered are the passive, irregular verbs, morphology, transitivity, light verb constructions, resultative verbs, compound nouns, phonology, colour terms, historical-comparative reconstruction, language teaching, Saussurean structuralism and the approach of the Junggrammatiker to exceptions. The languages addressed are English, Arabic, Georgian, Turkish, Russian, the Cushitic languages and German. Grammar and linguistics are usually thought of as purely theoretical disciplines, but this book demonstrates how to use exceptions to conduct ‘experiments’ in the manner of the natural sciences, which leads empirically to better theory.

This book is aimed at students of German with an interest in linguistics, as well as at general linguists who know German, and introduces the reader to the most important and controversial areas of modern linguistics. Recently theoretical linguistics has become virtually synonymous with generative grammar. This book challenges that view, and presents a theoretical linguistics which is descriptive, structuralist, and dialectical. Topics covered, all with reference to German, include the traditional and familiar parts of speech, passive construction, and irregular verbs; more modern concepts such as the phoneme, the morpheme, and syntax; the methodology of Saussurean structuralism; and areas of vital research such as word formation, and language and politics. A supplementary chapter on generative grammar, using English data, makes plain the error of that methodology. The book renders modern linguistics accessible without compromising on quality. To this end, the recommended literature on each topic has been especially selected for its accessibility, all examples are translated into English, and at key points exercises are provided.