This volume is a collection of papers by linguists who teach at the newly established English Linguistics Department of the School of English and American Studies at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest. Some of the papers deal with specifically English linguistic topics, while some others are not restricted to English at all but are devoted to various aspects of current linguistic theory and their applicability to a range of languages including Hungarian. The volume contains two papers related to the history of English (by Judit Farkas and Veronika Kniezsa), six papers on current phonological issues (by András Cser, Ádám Nádasdy, Péter Siptár, Péter Szigetvári, Miklós Törkenczy, László Varga), four on current syntactic questions (by Huba Bartos, Lajos Marosán, Mark Newson, Trevor M. Shanklin) and one on a socioliguistic topic (by Andrea Ágnes Reményi). However, since other groupings are also possible, we have chosen not to compartmentalize the volume into sections of Phonology, Syntax, Language History and Sociolinguistics but present the articles in alphabetical order of the authors’ names, instead.
The volume is called The Even Yearbook because it is meant to be the first of a series of books coming out in every even-numbered year, starting in 1994. The Even Yearbook is thus a teachers’ counterpart of The Odd Yearbook, which is an anthology of the best linguistic essays written by our undergraduates and which owes its name to the fact that originally it was to be published in odd-numbered years. (The first Odd Yearbook appeared in 1993, and although we have managed to publish the second in 1994, thus turning The Odd Yearbook into a yearly publication, we have not changed its name, which has been reanalysed from [ [ odd year ] book ] to [ odd [ yearbook ] ] soon after its publication anyway.)
When launching the first Even Yearbook, we must express our gratitude to the FEFA Fund (i.e., the Fund for Alignment with European Higher Education), whose financial assistance has made the publication of the volume possible. We are also indebted to Péter Szigetvári,1) who, besides being one of the contributors, has devoted a lot of his time and energy to the technical editing and computer-printing of the manuscripts.
We hope that the book will be a success and that it will be followed by further Even Yearbook volumes in the future.
December 1994
László Varga
Head of Department