Germanic dialects : linguistic and philological investigations

627 Pages·1986·18.472 MB·English

by  Bela Brogyanyi

LANGUAGE AND DISCOURSE: TEST AND PROTEST
LINGUISTIC & LITERARY STUDIES IN EASTERN EUROPE (LLSEE)
The emphasis of this scholarly series is on recent developments in
Linguistic and Literary Research in Eastern Europe; it includes analysis,
translations and syntheses of current research as well as studies in
the history of linguistic and literary scholarship.
Founding Editor: John Odmark
General Editor: Philip A. Luelsdorff
Volume 19
Jacob L. Mey (ed.)
Language and Discourse: Test and Protest
A Festschrift for Petr Sgall
LANGUAGE AND DISCOURSE:
TEST AND PROTEST
A Festschrift for Petr Sgall
edited by
Jacob L. Mey
JOHN BENJAMINS PUBLISHING COMPANY
AMSTERDAM/PHILADELPHIA
1986
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Language and discourse.
(Linguistic & literary studies in Eastern Europe (LLSEE), ISSN 0165-7712; v. 19)
Bibliography: p.
1. Linguistics. 2. Sgall, Petr, 1926- . I. Mey, Jacob. II. Sgall, Petr, 1926- . III.
Series.
P26.S43L36 1986 410 86-6882
ISBN 90 272 3526 0 (alk. paper)
© Copyright 1986 - John Benjamins B.V.
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.
PREFACE

PREFACE
At the time of publication of this volume, Petr Sgall
will be the youngest sexagenarian among European linguists.
Petr was born on May 27, 1926, and has recently authored
two new books, while two others are ready to go into print.
It may, therefore, seem somewhat premature to publish a
Festschrift in his honor; however, as evidenced by the
number of contributors to this volume, many of his
colleagues do not share this view, and have decided to
offer him their homage, long before his productivity starts
declining (if it ever does!).
As one who had seen his world break down, and his
father and many of his relatives perish in the Nazi Holo­
caust, young Petr might easily have yielded to the then
current illusions about an easy rebuilding of a so much
better world. However, his experiences have brought him to
recognize the importance of obeying, and even transcending,
the wisdom of the old adage Audiatur et altera pars; and
to accept things only cum grano salis, if at all.
In the beginning of his career, Petr had as his
teachers people from the old Prague School. He soon began
to protest against their theories of poetic language, as
well as against some other structuralist tenets. Also,
when he studied Indo-European linguistics (with KuryXowicz
and others), soon he started protesting against the one-
viii PREFACE
-sidedness of the diachronic view. In his sociolinguistic
work, Petr protested against the official attitudes
towards the culture of language, as embodied in the views
of many Czech linguists. In text linguistics, he protested
against the unwarranted parallelism of treating the
structure of discourse as if it were similar to that of
the sentence. When Chomskyan linguistics made its appear­
ance on the scene, Petr saw it as his duty to raise his
voice in protest against the notion of non-relationally
based transformations and against the neglect of semant­
ics; also, rather than succumb to a one-sided influence,
he called for mutual respect and understanding, asking
for linguistic ideas to be allowed to cross the Atlantic
ocean in both directions.
In the same vein, Petr has attempted to convince
computer people that they may have some use for linguist­
ics, and linguists that an active interest in computers
and computation will widen the perspective of their own
science. He has tried to persuade European structuralist
linguists that the generative attempts at formalization
are not the devil's own work, and to convince Barbara
Partee that variables and parentheses belong in logic,
rather than in linguistic representations, and finally to
have Chomsky accept the view that it was a pity to abandon
Cartesian Linguistics altogether!
Petr has formulated the principles of a relatively
economical type of linguistic description, by postulating
and working out a language-specific level of meaning that
includes a detailed representation of topic and focus. In
addition, he has founded a research team which he infected
with his own spirit of workoholism to make them become
enthusiastically engaged in formal grammar, as well as in
PREFACE iX
language comprehension and other areas of computational
linguistics.
Basically always having been a heretic, Petr has not
been prevented by this attitude from broadening the scope
of his interests. Far from it: his concerns range from
linguistic typology to theoretical semantics, from sentence
structure to orthography, and from mathematical methods
in linguistics to psycholinguistics, not to speak of
possible uses of computers in linguistics for a variety
of purposes.
The present volume bears testimony to this multifar­
ious and variegated character of Petr's background and
current activities. If it may strike someone as being too
broad in its orientation, it is only to be piously wished
for that this kind of variety will contribute to broader
and deeper understanding between linguists of various
backgrounds, and bring together different disciplines
that share, as their common orientation, the study of
cognition and communication.
Finally, as the grateful Editor of this volume, I
would like to express my sincere thanks to Eva Hajčiová
for her invaluable help of all kinds.
Jacob Mey