Heidegger characterizes the relationship between language and Being as "language is the house of Being", negating the idea that language is merely a tool ready to be used at hand. Drawing on this idea, as well as ideas from anthropology, pragmatics, and folklore studies, the author argues that "language is the last homestead of human beings", meaning that mankind lives within language, has to live within language, and lives in formulaic speech events. The author takes Western classic works on the philosophy of language and his own insights of language use, rooted in traditional Chinese culture, in order to develop his own localized theory. In this title, the author explores the philosophical aspect of man's survival by presenting day-to-day exchange routines such as weddings and fortune-telling dialogues in the Chinese context. Awarded the first prize for Academic Excellence in Philosophy and Social Sciences in Guangdong Province, and second prize in the second Xu Guozhang Award for Foreign Language Studies, this is a must-read for researchers interested in philosophy of language and pragmatics.

Speech acts, those actions carried out mainly by means of language, are used in English in a range of complex ways. However, they have rarely been covered in English as a foreign language (EFL) materials and textbooks. Bringing together current theories from pragmatics and cognitive linguistics, this book addresses this gap by providing a comprehensive model of directive speech acts and showing how to teach them to learners of English. It provides a review of the strengths and weaknesses of current theories of illocution and a critical assessment of existing EFL textbooks. Descriptions of the meaning and form of directive speech act constructions are given in the cognitive pedagogical grammar of directive speech acts (included), which offers a wealth of examples to make the information accessible to non-specialist readers. The book also provides a wide range of practical activities, showing how research on illocutionary acts can be implemented in practice.

A state-of-the-art survey of complex words, this volume brings together a team of leading international morphologists to demonstrate the wealth and breadth of the study of word-formation. Encompassing methodological, empirical and theoretical approaches, each chapter presents the results of cutting-edge research into linguistic complexity, including lexico-semantic aspects of complex words, the structure of complex words, and corpus-based case studies. Drawing on examples from a wide range of languages, it covers both general aspects of word-formation, and aspects specific to particular languages, such as English, French, Greek, Basque, Spanish, German and Slovak. Theoretical considerations are supported by a number of in-depth case studies focusing on the role of affixes, as well as word-formation processes such as compounding, affixation and conversion. Attention is also devoted to typological issues in word-formation. The book will be an invaluable resource for academic researchers and graduate students interested in morphology, linguistic typology and corpus linguistics.

Drawing on cutting-edge ideas from the biological and cognitive sciences, this book presents both an innovative neuro-computational model of language comprehension and a state-of-the-art review of current topics in neurolinguistics. It explores a range of newly-emerging topics in the biological study of language, building them into a framework which views language as grounded in endogenous neural oscillatory behaviour. This allows the author to formulate a number of hypotheses concerning the relationship between neurobiology and linguistic computation. Murphy also provides an extensive overview of recent theoretical and experimental work on the neurobiological basis of language, from which the reader will emerge up-to-date on major themes and debates. This lively overview of contemporary issues in theoretical linguistics, combined with a clear theory of how language is processed, is essential reading for scholars and students across a range of disciplines.

Most of the Bible's verses that occur in Aramaic are in Ezra and Daniel, a linguistic occurrence that developed as a result of Israel's exile in Babylon. Totaling 269 verses, Aramaic is key language students of the Old Testament will need to master. Basics of Biblical Aramaic, Second Edition by Miles V. Van Pelt is designed for students who are already familiar with biblical Hebrew and now want to obtain a working knowledge of biblical Aramaic in a single semester. Thus, the grammar is designed for scholars or comparative linguistic analysis, but for all students who wish to faithfully study, teach, and preach the Old Testament. Modeled on Miles Van Pelt's bestselling Basics of Biblical Hebrew, Basics of Biblical Aramaic, Second Edition includes: Thorough explanation of Aramaic's grammatical conventions Chapter exercises A complete lexicon of Aramaic words found in the Bible An annotated text of all 269 Bible verses originally written in Aramaic In the second edition the grammar features: Two-color scheme for the Aramaic text A complete update to secondary sources Expanded and revised annotations of the biblical texts in Aramaic

This book presents a typological overview of the case system of Eastern Indo-Aryan (EIA) languages. It utilizes a cognitive framework to analyse and compare the case markers of seven EIA languages: Angika, Asamiya, Bhojpuri, Bangla, Magahi, Maithili and Odia. The book introduces semantic maps, which have hitherto not been used for Indian languages, to plot the scope of different case markers and facilitate cross-linguistic comparison of these languages. It also offers a detailed questionnaire specially designed for fieldwork and data collection which will be extremely useful to researchers involved in the study of case. A unique look into the linguistic traditions of South Asia, the book will be indispensable to academicians, researchers, and students of language studies, linguistics, literature, cognitive science, psychology, language technologies and South Asian studies. It will also be useful for linguists, typologists, grammarians and those interested in the study of Indian languages.

Grammar and Conceptualization documents some major developments in the theory of cognitive grammar during the last decade. By further articulating the framework and showing its application to numerous domains of linguistic structure, this book substantiates the claim that lexicon, morphology, and syntax form a gradation consisting of assemblies of symbolic structures (form-meaning pairings).

Macrostructures are higher-level semantic or conceptual structures that organize the 'local' microstructures of discourse, interaction, and their cognitive processing. They are distinguished from other global structures of a more schematic nature, which we call superstructures. Originally published in 1980, the theory of macrostructures outlined in this book is the result of research carried out during the previous 10 years in the domains of literary theory, text grammar, the general theory of discourse, pragmatics, and the cognitive psychology of discourse processing. The presentation of the theory is systematic but informal and at this stage was not intended to be fully formalized.

* The first book of its kind to approach the topic of humor from a social psychological perspective. * Includes contributions from leading international scholars to offer a broad, global overview of the social psychology of humor. * Focuses on current, cutting-edge research to provide future directions in the field for years to come.

* The first book of its kind to approach the topic of humor from a social psychological perspective. * Includes contributions from leading international scholars to offer a broad, global overview of the social psychology of humor. * Focuses on current, cutting-edge research to provide future directions in the field for years to come.

'His cornucopia of tellers and tales is a delight, a riveting celebration of a genre that revels in its own hybridity and the imaginative riches produced by the crossing of cultural and literary borders' Financial Times 'Like a child after the Pied Piper I pursued Jubber into a world both human and full of magic. A carnival of a book, rigorously researched and jostling with life' Amy Jeffs, author of Storyland: A New Mythology of Britain 'Magical tales about magical tales and tellers. Jubber, congenially and fascinatingly, explores the land from which the great fairy stories seeped, making the stories more resonant, powerful and important than ever' Charles Foster, author of Being a Human and Being a Beast The surprising origins and people behind the world's most influential magical tales: the people who told and re-shaped them, the landscapes that forged them, and the cultures that formed them and were in turn formed by them. Who were the Fairy Tellers? In this far-ranging quest, award-winning author Nicholas Jubber unearths the lives of the dreamers who made our most beloved fairy tales: inventors, thieves, rebels and forgotten geniuses who gave us classic tales such as 'Cinderella', 'Hansel and Gretel', 'Beauty and the Beast' and 'Baba Yaga'. From the Middle Ages to the birth of modern children's literature, they include a German apothecary's daughter, a Syrian youth running away from a career in the souk and a Russian dissident embroiled in a plot to kill the tsar. Following these and other unlikely protagonists, we travel from the steaming cities of Italy and the Levant, under the dark branches of the Black Forest, deep into the tundra of Siberia and across the snowy fells of Lapland. In the process, we discover a fresh perspective on some of our most frequently told stories. Filled with adventure, tragedy and real-world magic, this bewitching book uncovers the stranger lives behind the strangest of tales.

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.

The story of Massah-Meribah is a pluriform tradition within the Hebrew Bible. Part One of this book uses redaction analysis to assess diachronically the six reminiscences of this tradition within Deuteronomy (Deut 6:16; 8:15; 9:22; 32:13, 52; 33:8). The relative chronological relationship of these texts, and the tradition components they preserve, reveals a framework of five formative stages of this story's tradition-history from the perspective of the tradents responsible for the production of Deuteronomy. Part Two is a redactional study of the tradition's narratives in Exod 17:1-7 and Num 20:1-13. Special attention is devoted to the texts that anchor the Massah-Meribah narratives into the Pentateuch. In the end, Part Two not only corroborates the framework detected in Deuteronomy for the formative stages of the Massah-Meribah tradition, but it also carries broad implications for the formation of the Pentateuch in general and the Wilderness Narrative in particular.

This book comprehensively introduces Cognitive Linguistics and applies its tools to religious language. Drawing on authentic samples from a range of faiths, text types, and modes of interactive discourse, the authors accessibly define concepts like embodied cognition, agency, metaphor analysis, and Dynamic Systems Theory; illustrate how they can be used in analyzing religious language; and offer thorough pedagogical material to aid learning and application. Advanced students and scholars of linguistics, discourse analysis, cognitive science, and religious and biblical studies will benefit from this practical guide to understanding and conducting research on religious discourse.

This book investigates a set of marginal syntactic structures which have been singularly influential in the development of generative theory, spotlighting lesser-studied languages of the Indic family while emphasizing implications for linguistic theory more broadly. After first defining what constitutes a marginal syntactic structure, this book then undertakes a micro-comparative approach to the rigorous exploration of fundamental properties of human language, including displacement, ellipsis, unbounded dependencies, and the role of clausal peripheries in such languages as Kashmiri and Romani. In so doing, Manetta interrogates and ultimately affirms the relevance of marked and marginal strings which have proven to be crucial to generative syntax while simultaneously advocating for the role of lesser-studied languages to the study of such properties. This book is key reading for graduate students and researchers in linguistics and syntax more specifically, as well as those interested in the study of Indic languages.

This volume is a concise introduction to the lively ongoing debate between formalist and functionalist approaches to the study of language. The book grounds its comparisons between the two in both historical and contemporary contexts where, broadly speaking, formalists' focus on structural relationships and idealized linguistic data contrasts with functionalists' commitment to analyzing real language used as a communicative tool. The book highlights key sub-varieties, proponents, and critiques of each respective approach. It concludes by comparing formalist versus functionalist contributions in three domains of linguistic research: in the analysis of specific grammatical constructions; in the study of language acquisition; and in interdisciplinary research on the origins of language. Taken together, the volume opens insight into an important tension in linguistic theory, and provides students and scholars with a more nuanced understanding of the structure of the discipline of modern linguistics.

This monograph takes up recent advances in social network methods in sociology, together with data on economic segregation, in order to build a quantitative analysis of the class and network effects implicated in vowel change in a Southern American city. Studies of sociolinguistic variation in urban spaces have uncovered durable patterns of linguistic difference, such as the maintenance of blue collar/white collar distinctions in the case of stable linguistic variables. But the underlying interactional origins of these patterns, and the interactional reasons for their durability, are not well understood, due in part to the near-absence of large-scale network investigation. This book undertakes a sociolinguistic network analysis of data from the Raleigh corpus, a set of conversational interviews collected form natives of Raleigh, North Carolina, from 2008-2017. Acoustic analysis of the corpus shows the rapid, ongoing retreat from the Southern Vowel Shift and increasing participation in national vowel changes. The social distribution of these trends is explored via standard social factors such as occupation as well as innovative network variables, including a measure of nestedness in the community network. The book aims to pursue new network-based questions about sociolinguistic variation that can be applied to other corpora, making this key reading for students and researchers in sociolinguistics and historical linguistics as well as those interested in further understanding how existing quantitative network methods from sociological research might be applied to sociolinguistic data.

This book offers a range of empirically-based case studies in the field of cultural linguistics and neighbouring disciplines such as intercultural pragmatics and language pedagogy. The first section explores intercultural communication and cross-linguistic/cross-cultural investigations in settings such as Brazil, Nigeria, Cameroon, Tanzania, Morocco, France and Canada. The second section focuses on applications of cultural linguistics in the field of foreign language teaching. By drawing on English as a Foreign Language and English as a Second Language contexts, the case studies presented further examine the ramification of cultural linguistics in the language classroom, enabling a better understanding of culture-specific conceptual differences between learners' first and target language(s).

What constitutes our number concept? What makes it possible for us to employ numbers the way we do; which mental faculties contribute to our grasp of numbers? What do we share with other species, and what is specific to humans? How does our language faculty come into the picture? This book addresses these questions and discusses the relationship between numerical thinking and the human language faculty, providing psychological, linguistic, and philosophical perspectives on number, its evolution, and its development in children. Heike Wiese argues that language as a human faculty plays a crucial role in the emergence of systematic numerical thinking. She characterises number sequences as powerful and highly flexible mental tools that are unique to humans and shows that it is language that enables us to go beyond the perception of numerosity and to develop such mental tools.

This book develops a theory of social knowledge based on dialogicality (the capacity of the human mind to conceive and communicate social reality in relation or opposition to otherness) and the theory of social representations. It argues that dialogicality is the sine qua non of the human mind and change is at the center of all social phenomena. Ivana Markova's new book brings together the concept of dialogue and social knowledge and will be an important contribution to social psychology and discourse and communication studies.

This book investigates the interplay of language, emotion and gender in a multilingual context and provides rich insights into the complexities of bilingualism and the field of emotion research, as well as the intersection of both. Combining quantitative and qualitative analyses of data, the book examines multilinguals' verbalisation and perception of emotions in their first language and English, their second language (L2). The research looks at crosslinguistic, intercultural and gender-based differences, thereby highlighting the challenges faced by multilinguals in this context and the potential risks of miscommunication and misinterpretation. Results support the call for a change of paradigm towards a holistic approach to multilingualism and emotion research and highlight the similarities and differences in L2 users of English when expressing their emotions in the different languages. The book will appeal to anyone interested in research on emotions in the context of bi-/multilingualism or second language acquisition, as well as those teaching or learning multiple languages.

This book investigates the interplay of language, emotion and gender in a multilingual context and provides rich insights into the complexities of bilingualism and the field of emotion research, as well as the intersection of both. Combining quantitative and qualitative analyses of data, the book examines multilinguals' verbalisation and perception of emotions in their first language and English, their second language (L2). The research looks at crosslinguistic, intercultural and gender-based differences, thereby highlighting the challenges faced by multilinguals in this context and the potential risks of miscommunication and misinterpretation. Results support the call for a change of paradigm towards a holistic approach to multilingualism and emotion research and highlight the similarities and differences in L2 users of English when expressing their emotions in the different languages. The book will appeal to anyone interested in research on emotions in the context of bi-/multilingualism or second language acquisition, as well as those teaching or learning multiple languages.

Outlining an approach to the development of communicative behavior from early infancy to the onset of single word utterances, Nobuo Masataka's research is rooted in ethology and dynamic action theory. He argues that expressive and communicative actions are organized as a complex and cooperative system with other elements of the infant's physiology, behavior and social environments. This book offers new insights into the precursors of speech and will be of interest to researchers and students of psychology, linguistics and animal behavior biology.

"Greenberg's survey of the earlier history of typology is without rivals, a must read for every linguist who is curious about the intellectual roots of current typology. This wouldn't be a work by Greenberg if it didn't go far beyond simple historiography, providing a highly original and readable framework for understanding the earlier efforts." Prof. Dr. Martin Haspelmath, Max-Planck-Institut fur Evolutionare Anthropologie