Editor’s Introduction to Volume 1
This first volume of Emerging Works in Diverian Linguistics is designed to exemplify our vision of how the possibilities of furthering the line of research and publication initiated by William Diver and perpetuated by his successors can be enhanced by online publication. We exploit a variety of media: Davis’s manuscript is a full-length book; Contini-Morava and Ho-Fernández offer Power-Point type video presentations; the more traditional written texts are transcriptions of conference talks or drafts of longer essays that could lead to a range of publication destinations and formats. This platform offers enhanced graphic possibilities for the written texts: Miller and Hesseltine contribute papers with striking use of color graphics and photos. Authors are free to use formatting that best suits their topic and is not constrained to a one-size-fits-all style sheet, nor to the length limits of traditional print journals.
An attempt has been made to group and order the entries with an eye to thematicity. Davis and Contini-Morava take a signal-meaning approach that shows how Italian gender and Swahili noun classes at a fundamental level have the same kind of communicative motivation. Huffman’s foundational “From Sound to Signal” takes a deep dive into the nature of linguistic signaling. Two different types of systems of Time are contrasted in Miller’s article on English and Huffman’s on Yiddish. Again highlighting the topic of signals, Hesseltine and Ho-Fernández both deal with grammatical systems that use word order as signals, but in very different semantic domains.
The availability of discussion threads for the individual articles offers a central repository for Seminar-type discussions, which hitherto have often taken place only in fragmented e-mail exchanges, list postings, and the like, thus enhancing the value of each article as a contribution to the collectivity of Diverian scholarship.
We look forward to receiving the reactions and suggestions of readers and hope thereby to build upon the foundation offered in this modest beginning.
AH