Fundamentals of synchronic linguistics

Fundamentals of synchronic linguistics - Goran Hammarstrom

Linguistics Edition  63

This book sums up and further develops ideas of the author's books Linguistische Einheiten im Rahmen der modernen Sprachwissenschaft (Berlin 1966), Linguistic units and items (Berlin 1976) and Linguistic units and items II (Frankfurt am Main 1995). The terminological system generally accepted for phoneme-allophone-phone and morpheme-allomorph-morph is developed so as to include all fundamental facts of language in a five-level description. The levels are α with phonemes, prosodemes, syllabemes etc.; β with contouremes and stylemes; γ with idiolemes, sociolemes and dialemes; δ with proxemes and kinemes; ε with text aspects. In a detailed or "narrow" description an item (variant or realisation) from one level is conditioned by items from all the other levels. Both spoken and written language, and the relationship between them, should be included in a complete description.

The synchronic description of a language is fundamentally taxonomic. In recent years many "explanations", complex "models" and "theories" have been suggested which in the opinion of the author are mostly not adequate because they do not directly describe the language known and used by the speakers and writers.