Patrice Larroque hypothesizes that early blues singers may have been influenced by the trochaic rhythm of English. English is stressed and timed, which means that there is a regular beat to the language, just like there is a beat in a blues song. This regular beat falls on important words in the sentence and unimportant ones do not get stressed. They are "squeezed" between the salient words to keep the rhythm. The apparent contradiction between the fundamentally trochaic rhythm of spoken English and the syncopated ternary rhythm of blues may be resolved as the stressed syllables of the trochee (a stressed-unstressed sequence) is naturally lengthened and assumes the role of one strongly and one weakly stressed syllable in a ternary rhythm. The book suggests investigating the rhythm of English and the rhythm of blues in order to show how the linguistic rhythm of a culture can be reflected in the rhythm of its music.

Over the past few decades new ways of conceiving the relation between people, practices and institutions have been developed, enabling an understanding of human conduct in complex situations that is distinctive from traditional psychological and sociological conceptions. This distinctiveness is derived from a sophisticated analytic approach to social action which combines conversation analysis with the fresh treatment of epistemology, mind, cognition and personality developed in discursive psychology. This text is the first to showcase and promote this new method of discursive research in practice. Featuring contributions from a range of international academics, both pioneers in the field and exciting new researchers, this book illustrates an approach to social science issues that cuts across the traditional disciplinary divisions to provide a rich participant-based understanding of action.

The study of text cohesion and coherence has been a topic of heated discussion in Linguistics since the 1990s. Western linguists have developed two major theoretical frameworks to describe the relationship between the two concepts: one posits that cohesive devices are important means to ensure cohesion; the other argues that coherence does not rely on cohesion. Yet neither has complete explanatory power over reality; nor can they solve real-life problems. This title proposes a creative, concrete, and highly operational theoretical model that unites cohesion and coherence using authentic English or Chinese examples. The authors clarify the concepts of coherence and expand the scope of the research by focusing on a variety of internal and external factors, such as psycho-cognitive and socio-cultural factors. Moreover, the authors propose that the new theoretical paradigm can be applied to a range of other disciplines, including translation and foreign language teaching. This title has been one of the most cited works on cohesion and coherence in China. Students and scholars of discourse analysis, linguistics, and language education will find this an invaluable reference.

Language is of central importance in children's development and vital for their success at school and in the world beyond. Designed for the many professionals involved in encouraging language development, Early Language Development, originally published in 1990, will enable them to get to grips with the practical issues of helping children with language difficulties. John Harris provides an invaluable summary of recent research on language development and how it relates to the practical concerns of language assessment and language teaching. Readers are given a clear account of the ways in which research has expanded our understanding of just what language is and how this has led to different approaches to language assessment. Various theories of language development are summarised and discussed in terms of their implications for language teaching. Dr Harris also describes different ways of encouraging language development and explains how teachers and therapists can overcome the special problems faced by children with particular difficulties, such as visual impairment, hearing impairment, general learning difficulties, and environmental deprivation. With its emphasis on the relevance of research-based knowledge to practical concerns, the book provides a useful bridge between the world of research and practice. It will be of particular interest to teachers of young children, speech therapists, and child psychologists, as well as to students taking courses on child development, and to parents of young children.

This book offers original insights around a fascinating idea: Perception and the rest of cognition, crucially including language, are closer to each other than the Cartesian tradition dared to dream. By combining recent results in cognitive neuroscience, the philosophy of perception, and the syntax of natural language, the book demonstrates that there is continuity between higher and lower cognition. Percepts from perceptual experience are propositional, conceptual, and they are not divorced from objective reality. Human cognition is merged with the natural world, able to reflect it in complex ways and interact with it in modalities that are since the very beginning computationally complex and rich in content.

This book sheds new light on the nature of gerunds in English, utilizing data from very large electronic corpora in order to compare pairs of patterns viewed as constructions. It serves as a contribution to the study of complementation, an under-researched area of investigation which bridges observations at the intersection of lexico-grammar, syntax and semantics. As a result, the reader develops their understanding of the meaning and use of each pattern within the system of English predicate complementation as it has evolved in recent times. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of English linguistics, especially English grammar.

Sue Savage-Rumbaugh's work on the language capabilities of the bonobo Kanzi has intrigued the world because of its far-reaching implications for understanding the evolution of the human language. This book takes the reader behind the scenes of the filmed language tests. It argues that while the tests prove that Kanzi has language, the even more remarkable manner in which he originally acquired it - spontaneously, in a culture shared with humans - calls for a re-thinking of language, emphasizing its primal cultural dimensions.

This compilation of invited contributions, gathering an international collection of cognitive and functional linguists, offers an outline of original empirical work carried out in grounding theory. Grounding is a central notion in cognitive grammar that addresses the linking of semantic content to contextual factors that constitute the subjective ground (or situation of speech). The volume illustrates a growing concern with the application of cognitive grammar to constructions establishing deixis and reference. It proposes a double focus on nominal and clausal grounding, as well as on ways of integrating analyses across these domains.

This book examines the impact of ancient DNA research and scientific evidence on our understanding of the emergence of Indo-European languages in prehistory. Offering cutting-edge contributions from an international team of scholars, it considers the driving forces behind the Indo-European migrations during the 3rd and 2nd millenia BC. The volume explores the rise of the world's first pastoral nomads the Yamnaya Culture in the Russian Pontic steppe including their social organization, expansions, and the transition from nomadism to semi-sedentism when entering Europe. It also traces the chariot conquest in the late Bronze Age and its impact on the expansion of the Indo-Iranian languages into Central Asia. In the final section, the volumes consider the development of hierarchical societies and the origins of slavery. A landmark synthesis of recent, exciting discoveries, the book also includes an extensive theoretical discussion regarding the integration of linguistics, genetics, and archaeology, and the importance of interdisciplinary research in the study of ancient migration.

English verbs of speaking have been affected by profound and intriguing changes, in particular between Old and Middle English. These changes crucially involve the loss of the verb cwethan and its replacement by say, which remains the most common verb of speaking to this day. The present study provides an exhaustive corpus-based, cross-period, and multi-dimensional appraisal of verbs of speaking used as part of the linguistic expression of communication in the history of English situated within a frame-semantic and constructionist framework. Moreover, it elucidates the fascinating changes affecting the verbs used to talk about communication between Old and Middle English. Also, this study sheds light on the functions of medially placed reporting clauses emerging in the Middle English period.

Browning's world is essentially interactive, a dramatized process drawing speaker and reader together. This volume argues that Browning's poems both encourage and require the kind of engagement typically required of the Victorians in their conversations, and explores what Victorians thought conversation was and how it functioned in their society. To value the conversational in Browning's poetry is to value the unscripted and inordinate. This book poses questions about the sources and narrative structures of the verse, even its layout on the page. By examining a series of specific poems in the context of Victorian conversation and society, Andrew St George offers the modern reader a new way of appreciating some of Browning's most significant work.

This book addresses the question whether translation students can successfully increase their information competence as a result of a purposeful intervention. As translation technologies have become a staple in the translation industry, the ability to interact with the Web to solve translation problems is now a basic market requirement. Although there is a growing body of empirical research into web search behaviors of translators and the use of web-based resources in translation, none of the studies aimed at incorporating information competence strategy training into a translation course. The study described in this volume aims to fill this gap. The book will be of interest to translator educators as well as to professional translators who want to improve their web search expertise.

This volume examines the determining role of context in the production and reception of news texts from the seventeenth century until the first half of the twentieth century. The context is understood as historical, social, political, professional, textual and material, with chapters focusing on how such a context or contexts influenced the language and reception of the news texts in question. The contributors to the volume are experts in their field of research and have employed a variety of methodological approaches in their analyses of the interrelationship between context and historical news discourse. These include historical pragmatics, historical discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis, appraisal theory, frame theory, and corpus linguistics. The volume is divided into three sections: British News Contexts, International News Contexts, and Advertising Contexts. The first two sections offer a wide-ranging examination of how context has determined the writing and understanding of news in both the British and international domain. The third section in the volume on advertising contexts and discourse is not just justified by the fundamental importance of advertising in the development and history of the press but also by the social and political relevance of the topics examined in the advertisements. These include studies on mental health and asylum advertisements, runaway slaves classified advertisements, and embedded nationalistic content and ideology in Irish newspaper advertisements of the 1930s.

Asia is now home to some 800 million multilingual speakers of English, more than the total number of native English speakers, and how they use English is continuously evolving and changing to reflect their cultural backgrounds and everyday experiences. Can English, therefore, be considered an Asian language? Drawing upon the Asian Corpus of English, this book will be the first comprehensive account of the roles, uses and features of English in Asia, encompassing several different varieties of Asian English. Chapters cover the distinctive linguistic features of English in different settings, such as in law, religion and popular culture, as well as the use of local rhetorical, pragmatic and cultural styles and its use as a lingua franca among Asian multilinguals. It will also examine the role of English in education - from primary through to higher education - and consider the implications of this for other languages of Asia.

This book offers a comprehensive account of adjuncts in generative grammar, seeking to reconcile the differing ways in which they have been treated in the past by proposing a method of analysis grounded in simplification based on Simplest Merge. The volume provides an up-to-date review of the existing literature on adjuncts and outlines their characteristic properties and the subsequent difficulties in adequately defining and treating them. The book compares previous attempts to account for adjuncts which have tended to use additional mechanisms or syntactic operations as a jumping-off point from which to propose a new way forward for analyzing them grounded in minimalist theory. Adopting an approach in the spirit of the strong minimalist thesis (SMT), Bode suggests an analysis of adjuncts which applies a minimalist approach based on theoretical simplicity, one which does not resort to extra mechanisms in capturing the empirical properties of adjuncts. Offering a comprehensive overview of research on adjuncts and foundational minimalist principles, this book will be of particular interest to graduate students and practicing researchers interested in syntax.

This book offers the first comprehensive account of the development of the Romanian morphological system. Romanian is one of the most morphologically complex Romance languages, but has remained relatively understudied compared with better-known languages such as French and Spanish. Following an introduction that provides an outline of the history of Romanian, its writing system and major typological characteristics, and the major patterns of allomorphy, chapters in this volume explore a range of fascinatingly complex aspects of Romanian grammar whose structure and history have to date been largely inaccessible to the English-speaking world. Among the most distinctive morphological characteristics of Romanian discussed by the authors are its inflexional case system; the highly unpredictable formation of the plural; the existence of a non-finite verb form that appears to be the continuation of the Latin supine; the near-absence of distinctive subjunctive morphology; and the complex patterns of allomorphy brought about by successive sound change. The frequently controversial origins of many of these developments have important implications for broader historical Romance linguistics and indeed for morphological theory more generally.

1. This title offers an extensive study of the conceptual metaphors in the perception domain. 2. The authors adopts contrastive perspective to reveal the similarities and differences between English and Chinese. 3. This title provides a thorough consideration of embodied motivation for various metaphorical mappings, which would benefit a variety of readership groups.

This collection showcases the contributions of the study of endangered and understudied languages to historical linguistic analysis, and the broader relevance of diachronic approaches toward developing better informed approaches to language documentation and description. The volume brings together perspectives from both established and up-and-coming scholars and represents a globally and linguistically diverse range of languages.The collected papers demonstrate the ways in which endangered languages can challenge existing models of language change based on more commonly studied languages, and can generate innovative insights into linguistic phenomena such as pathways of grammaticalization, forms and dynamics of contact-driven change, and the diachronic relationship between lexical and grammatical categories. In so doing, the book highlights the idea that processes and outcomes of language change long held to be universally relevant may be more sensitive to cultural and typological variability than previously assumed. Taken as a whole, this collection brings together perspectives from language documentation and historical linguistics to point the way forward for richer understandings of both language change and documentary-descriptive approaches, making this key reading for scholars in these fields.

This book implements a multidisciplinary approach in describing language both in its ontogenetic development and in its close interrelationship with other human subsystems such as thought, memory, and activity, with a focus on the semantic component of the evolutionary-synthetic theory. The volume analyzes, among others, the mechanisms for grammatical polysemy, and brings to light the structural unity of artefact and natural concepts (such as CHAIR, ROAD, LAKE, RIVER, TREE). Additionally, object and motor concepts are defined in terms of the language of thought, and their representation in neurobiological memory codes is discussed; finally, the hierarchic structure of basic meanings of concrete nouns is shown to arise as a result of their step-by-step development in ontogeny.

Building on the success of previous editions, Focus on Grammar 5th Edition continues to leverage its successful four-step approach that lets learners move from comprehension to communication within a clear and consistent structure. Centred on thematic instruction, Focus on Grammar combines comprehensive grammar coverage with abundant practice, critical thinking skills, and ongoing assessment, helping students communicate confidently, accurately, and fluently in everyday situations. The 5th Edition continues to incorporate the findings of corpus linguistics in grammar notes, charts, and practice activities, while never losing sight of what is pedagogically sound and useful.

In this book, D. Robert Ladd focuses on problems with the one-dimensional idealization of language on which much linguistic theory is based. Strings of sequentially-ordered elements play an important role as theoretical abstractions in both phonology and syntax. Yet many well-known phonological phenomena (such as vowel harmony, ablaut morphology, and pitch features) are problematic for this one-dimensional idealization, and many attempts (such as autosegmental phonology) have been made to allow for these troublesome characteristics in our theories. The book deals with diverse aspects of these problematical non-sequential phenomena. The five main chapters cover distinctive features and autosegments, systematic phonetics, the definition of 'prosody', aspects of vocal paralinguistic communication and 'gradience', and duality of patterning. Each chapter reviews a wide range of relevant literature, generally going back to the beginnings of modern linguistics in the early twentieth century, and all of them can usefully be read as free-standing synthetic overviews of the issues they discuss. The final chapter suggests that phonological structure, sequential or otherwise, can be seen as a special case of the segmentation of continuous action into discrete events, and that research on this general topic within cognitive psychology is relevant to phonological theory. Professor Ladd's unique work makes a fundamental contribution to phonology and phonetics and to linguistic theory more generally. His book will interest all theoretical linguists and cognitive scientists concerned with understanding the relation between phonological representations and the speech signal.

How do bilinguals experience emotions? Do they perceive and express emotions similarly or differently in their respective languages? Does the first language remain forever the language of the heart? What role do emotions play in second language learning and in language attrition? Why do some writers prefer to write in their second language? In this provocative book, Pavlenko challenges the monolingual bias of modern linguistics and psychology and uses the lens of bi- and multilingualism to offer a fresh perspective on the relationship between language and emotions. Bringing together insights from the fields of linguistics, neurolinguistics, psychology, anthropology, psychoanalysis and literary theory, Pavlenko offers a comprehensive introduction to this cross-disciplinary movement. This is a highly readable and thought-provoking book that draws on empirical data and first hand accounts and offers invaluable advice for novice researchers. It will appeal to scholars and researchers across many disciplines.

This innovative work highlights interdisciplinary research on phonetics and phonology across multiple languages, building on the extensive body of work of Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kolaczyk on the study of sound structure and speech. // The book features concise contributions from both established and up-and-coming scholars who have worked with Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kolaczyk across a range of disciplinary fields toward broadening the scope of how sound structure and speech are studied and how phonological and phonetic research is conducted. Contributions bridge the gap between such fields as phonological theory, acoustic and articulatory phonetics, and morphology, but also includes perspectives from such areas as historical linguistics, which demonstrate the relevance of other linguistic areas of inquiry to empirical investigations in sound structure and speech. The volume also showcases the rich variety of methodologies employed in existing research, including corpus-based, diachronic, experimental, acoustic and online approaches and showcases them at work, drawing from data from languages beyond the Anglocentric focus in existing research. // The collection reflects on Katarzyna Dziubalska-Kolaczyk's pioneering contributions to widening the study of sound structure and speech and reinforces the value of interdisciplinary perspectives in taking the field further, making this key reading for students and scholars in phonetics, phonology, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics, and speech and language processing.

In today's global commerce and communication, linguistic diversity is in steady decline across the world as speakers of smaller languages adopt dominant forms. While this phenomenon, known as 'language shift', is usually regarded as a loss, this book adopts a different angle and addresses the following questions: What difference does using a new language make to the way speakers communicate in everyday life? Can the grammatical and lexical architectures of individual languages influence what speakers express? In other words, to what extent does adopting a new language alter speakers' day-to-day communication practices, and in turn, perhaps, their social life and world views? To answer these questions, this book studies the expression of emotions in two languages on each side of a shift: Kriol, an English-based creole spoken in northern Australia, and Dalabon (Gunwinyguan, non-Pama-Nyungan), an Australian Aboriginal language that is being replaced by Kriol. This volume is the first to explore the influence of the formal properties of language on the expression of emotions, as well as the first description of the linguistic encoding of emotions in a creole language. The cross-disciplinary approach will appeal to linguists, psychologists, anthropologists and other social scientists.