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history of ling the magic of a common language : jakobson , mathesius , trubetzkoy , and the prague linguistic circle by jindrich toman current studies in linguistics series # 26 , the mit press $ 40 hardcover available from the mit press 800 . 356 . 0343 or < mitpress-orders @ mit . edu > social and cultural environment , historical factors , and tenets of the prague linguistics circle . available for discussion ling semiotics tobin , yishai . invariance , markedness and distinctive feature analysis . a contrastive study of sign systems in english and hebrew john benjamins xii , 402 pp . contrastive analysis hb : us : 1 55619 565 6 / eur : 90 272 3614 3 us $ 100 . 00 / hfl . 180 , - - this volume provides a new kind of contrastive analysis of two unrelated languages english and hebrew based on the semiotic concepts of invariance , markedness and distinctive feature theory . it concentrates on linguistic forms and constructions which are remarkably different in each language despite the fact that they share the same familiar classifications and labels . tobin demonstrates how and why traditional and modern syntactic categories such as grammatical number ; verb tense , aspect , mood and voice ; conditionals and interrogatives ; etc . , are not equivalent across languages . it is argued that these so-called universal concepts function differently in each language system because they belong to distinct language-specific semantic domains which are marked by different sets of semantic features . current issues in linguistic theory , iii socioling lippi-green , rosina ( university of michigan , ann arbor ) . language ideology and language change in early modern german . a sociolinguistic study of the consonantal system of nuremberg john benjamins xiv , 150 pp . sociolinguistics hb : us : 1 55619 573 7 / eur : 90 272 3622 4 us $ 48 . 00 / hfl . 85 , - - this quantitative study , based on a computerized corpus of texts written by five men in early 16th - century nuremberg , employs multivariate glm statistical procedures to analyze the way linguistic , social and stylistic factors work individually and in interaction to influence variation observed in the texts . the study provides evidence that consonantal variation in early modern written texts is not random . of particular importance is the quantification of an individual 's relationship to an emerging ideology of language standardization , and the way that relationship interacts with written language variation . current issues in linguistic theory , 119 .
