Fortunately, scholarly and political conferences have nothing in common. The success of a political convention depends on the generic agreement of the majority or totality of its participants. The use of votes and vetoes, however, is alien to scholarly discussion, where disagreement generally proves to be more productive than agreement. Disagreement discloses antinomies and tensions within the ...

During the past quarter of a century, Brain and Language (B & L) has recorded and stimulated research on the biological/neurological basis for human language. As noted in the Whitaker editorial in the first issue of the first volume (Whitaker, 1974), although for centuries scholars of different disciplines had been interested in the question of brain function and cognition, specifically languag...

The importance of ashtādhyaȳı is three fold. The first one, as is well known, as an almost exhaustive grammar for any natural language with meticulous details yet small enough to memorize. Though ashtādhyāȳı is written to describe the then prevalent Sanskrit language, it provides a grammatical framework which is general enough to analyse other languages as well. This makes the study of ashtādhy...

The goal of this article is to familiarize the reader who has background in theoretical linguistics with some of the recent research in aphasiology. Needless to say, it is far beyond the space limitation, and my capacity, to present all work carried out in the field of language impairment, even during the last decade. My goal is more modest: I will attempt to demonstrate how the interaction of ...

An expression is vague, if its meaning is not precise. For vagueness at the sentence-level this means that a vague sentence does not give rise to precise truth conditions. This is a problem for the standard theory of meaning within linguistics, because this theory presupposes that each sentence has a precise meaning with respect to each context of use. The philosophical discussion on ‘vagueness...

TEX has long been associated with mathematics and “hard” sciences such as physics. But even during the early days of TEX, linguists were attracted to the system, and today a growing number of them are turning to TEX (LATEX, ConTEXt). Aside from the general advantages of TEX for producing academic papers, it offers linguists largely intuitive means for dealing with often complex notational issue...