Recent developments in contact linguistics suggest considerable overlap of branches such as historical linguistics, variationist sociolinguistics, pidgin/creole linguistics, language acquisition, etc. This book highlights the complexity of contact-induced language change throughout the history of English by bringing together cutting-edge research from these fields. Special focus is on recent debates surrounding substratal influence in earlier forms of English (particularly Celtic influence in Old English), on language shift processes (the formation of Irish and overseas varieties) but also on dialects in contact, the contact origins of Standard English, the notion of new epicentres in World English, the role of children and adults in language change as well as transfer and language learning. With contributions from leading experts, the book offers fresh and exciting perspectives for research and is at the same time an up-to-date overview of the state of the art in the respective fields.

Singapore English is a focal point across the many subfields of linguistics, as its semantic, syntactic and phonetic/phonological qualities tell us a great deal about what happens when very different types of language come together. Sociolinguists are also interested in the relative status of Singapore English compared to other languages in the country. This book charts the history of Singapore English and explores the linguistic, historical and social factors that have influenced the variety as it is spoken today. It identifies novel grammatical features of the language, discusses their structure and function, and traces their origins to the local languages of Singapore. It places grammatical system and usage at the core of the analysis, and shows that introspective and corpus data are complementary. This study will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on language contact, world varieties of English, historical linguistics and sociolinguistics.

The broad arc of islands north of Australia that extends from Indonesia east towards the central Pacific is home to a set of human populations whose concentration of diversity is unequaled elsewhere. Approximately 20% of the worlds languages are spoken here, and the biological and genetic heterogeneity among the groups is extraordinary. Anthropologist W.W. Howells once declared diversity in the region so Protean as to defy analysis. However, this book can now claim considerable success in describing and understanding the origins of the genetic and linguistic variation there. In order to cut through this biological knot, the authors have applied a comprehensive battery of genetic analyses to an intensively sampled set of populations, and have subjected these and complementary linguistic data to a variety of phylogenetic analyses. This has revealed a number of heretofore unknown ancient Pleistocene genetic variants that are only found in these island populations, and has also identified the genetic footprints of more recent migrants from Southeast Asia who were the ancestors of the Polynesians. The book lays out the very complex structure of the variation within and among the islands in this relatively small region, and a number of explanatory models are tested to see which best account for the observed pattern of genetic variation here. The results suggest that a number of commonly used models of evolutionary divergence are overly simple in their assumptions, and that often human diversity has accumulated in very complex ways.

Atypical demonstratives have not received adequate attention in the literature so far, or have even been completely neglected. By providing fresh insights and discussing new facets, this volume contributes to the better understanding of this group of words, starting from specific empirical phenomena, and advances our knowledge of the various properties of demonstratives, their syntactic multi-functionality, semantic feature specifications and pragmatic functions. In addition, some of the papers discuss different grammaticalization processes involving demonstratives, in particular how and from which lexical and morphosyntactic categories they originate cross-linguistically, and which semantic or pragmatic mechanisms play which role in their emergence. As such, the different contributions guide the readers on an adventurous journey into the realm of different exotic species of demonstratives, whose peculiar properties offer new exiting insights into the complex nature of demonstrative expressions themselves.

In view of the considerable number of recent publications devoted to various applications of Cognitive Linguistics, the book focusses on fields that have not been extensively dealt with within the CL framework. The book gathers presentations that deal with fields of application as defined in the introduction to the first volume in the ACL series (Kristiansen et al 2006). The articles in the first section ("From loop to cycle") are defining papers written by eminent scholars whose position within the field of CL has been firmly established. They touch upon issues of continuing relevance to the discipline and introduce thematic areas covered in the next four sections of the volume. Papers in these sections are mainly written by young scholars, whose research illustrates various ways to implement the cycle through different forms of contextualization, either presenting descriptive applications that lead to theoretical amendments or widening the field of possible applications, often interdisciplinary, e.g. to theological or metaphysical discourse. Frequently, section papers provide illustration for the empirical turn in Cognitive Linguistics, demonstrating the ways in which application of theory to new data using new methodologies leads to refinement, development or modification of the theoretical framework. The book is of relevance to students of (applied) linguistics, interested or specializing in language acquisition and pedagogy, intercultural communication, literary and translation studies, as well as to academics and students representing cognate disciplines.

"Jenkins' rare combination of psychological theorizing and archival research in several countries and time periods yields a fascinating new take on the central question of when states over-estimate or under-estimate others' resolve. The biases that leaders and elites fall prey to appear to vary with their emotional states and senses of well-being, factors that most scholars have ignored."-Robert Jervis, author of How Statesmen Think This groundbreaking book explains how the happiness levels of leaders, politicians and diplomats affect their assessments of the resolve of their state's adversaries and allies. Its innovative methodology includes case studies of the origins of twelve wars with Anglo-American involvement from 1853 to 2003 and the psycholinguistic text mining of the British Hansard and the U.S. Congressional Record.

Twenty-four researchers from various academic disciplines dealing with the production of language, such as theoretical and applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, social psychology, psycholinguistics, and psychology of language, contributed to this volume. The chapters center on five areas: psycholinguistic models of production; second language speech production; cognition and production; narrative understanding and production; and verbal interaction. The aim of the volume is to come to a general picture of the range of questions and methods of investigation dealing with language production.

The volume explores the relationship between linguistic universals and language variation. Its contributions identify the recurrent patterns and principles behind the complex spectrum of observable variation. The volume bridges the gap between cross-linguistic variation, regional variation, diachronic variation, contact-induced variation as well as socially conditioned variation. Moreover, it addresses fundamental methodological and theoretical issues of variation research. The volume brings together internationally renowned specialists of their fields while, at the same time, offering a platform for gifted and highly talented young researchers. The authors come from different theoretical backgrounds and through their work illustrate a rich array of scientific methods. All authors share a strong belief in empirically founded theoretical work. The contributions span a high number of languages and dialects from many parts of the world. They are extremely broad in their empirical coverage addressing an impressive selection of grammatical domains.

This book is about the nature of expression in speech. It is a comprehensive exploration of how such expression is produced and understood, and of how the emotional content of spoken words may be analysed, modelled, tested, and synthesized. Listeners can interpret tone-of-voice, assess emotional pitch, and effortlessly detect the finest modulations of speaker attitude; yet these processes present almost intractable difficulties to the researchers seeking to identify and understand them. In seeking to explain the production and perception of emotive content, Mark Tatham and Katherine Morton review the potential of biological and cognitive models. They examine how the features that make up the speech production and perception systems have been studied by biologists, psychologists, and linguists, and assess how far biological, behavioural, and linguistic models generate hypotheses that provide insights into the nature of expressive speech. The authors use recent techniques in speech synthesis and automatic speech recognition as a test bed for models of expression in speech.Acknowledging that such testing presupposes a comprehensive computational model of speech production, they put forward original proposals for its foundations and show how the relevant data structures may be modelled within its framework. This pioneering book will be of central interest to researchers in linguistics and in speech science, pathology, and technology. It will also be valuable for behavioural and cognitive scientists wanting to know more about this vital and elusive aspect of human behaviour.

Sentence First, Arguments Afterward collects the most important papers of Lila Gleitman's career, spanning over 50 years of work. These papers explore the nature of linguistic knowledge in children and adults by asking how children acquire language, how language and thought are related, the nature of concepts, and the role of syntax in shaping the direction of word learning. With an exclusive foreword by Noam Chomsky and an essay by Jeffrey Lidz contextualizing Gleitman's work in the emergence of the field of cognitive science, this book promises to be valuable both for its historical perspective on language and its acquisition and for the lessons it offers to current practitioners.

The notion of a 'standard' variety of English has been the subject of a considerable body of research. Studies have tended to focus on the standard features of British and American English. However, more recently interest has turned to the other varieties of English that have developed around the world and the ways in which these have also been standardised. This volume provides the first book-length exploration of 'standard Englishes', with chapters on areas as diverse as Canada, the Caribbean, Africa, Asia, New Zealand and the South Pacific. This is a timely and important topic, edited by a well-known scholar in the field, with contributions by the leading experts on each major variety of English discussed. The book presents in full the criteria for defining a standard variety, and each chapter compares standards in both spoken and written English and explores the notion of register within standard varieties.

When we think of everyday language use, the first things that come to mind include colloquial conversations, reading and writing e-mails, sending text messages or reading a book. But can we study the brain basis of language as we use it in our daily lives? As a topic of study, the cognitive neuroscience of language is far removed from these language-in-use examples. However, recent developments in research and technology have made studying the neural underpinnings of naturally occurring language much more feasible. In this book, a range of international experts provide a state-of-the-art overview of current approaches to making the cognitive neuroscience of language more 'natural' and closer to language use as it occurs in real life. The chapters explore topics including discourse comprehension, the study of dialogue, literature comprehension and the insights gained from looking at natural speech in neuropsychology.

The languages and dialects of Europe, this book shows, are becoming increasingly alike. Furthermore this unifying process goes at least as far back as the Roman empire, is accelerating, and affects every one of Europe's 150 or so languages including those of different families such as Basque and Finnish. The changes are by no means restricted to lexical borrowing but involve every grammatical aspect of the language. They are usually so minute that neither native speakers nor trained linguists notice them. But they accumulate and give rise to new grammatical structures that lead in turn to new patterns of areal relationship. Professor Heine and Professor Kuteva look for the causes of linguistic change in cultural and economic exchanges across national and regional boundaries and in the processes that occur when speakers learn or are in close contact with another language. Testing their data and conclusions against findings from elsewhere in the world, the authors reconstruct and reveal when, how, and why common grammatical structures have evolved and continue to evolve in processes of change that will, they argue, transform the linguistic landscape of Europe. The book is written in clear, non-technical language. It will appeal to scholars and students of language change and variation in Europe and elsewhere. It will also interest everyone concerned to understand the nature of language and language change.

This is the most comprehensive survey ever published of auxiliary verb constructions, as in 'he could have been going to drink it' and 'she does eat cheese'. Drawing on a database of over 800 languages Dr Anderson examines their morphosyntactic forms and semantic roles. He investigates and explains the historical changes leading to the cross-linguistic diversity of inflectional patterns, and he presents his results within a new typological framework. The book's impressive range includes data on variation within and across languages and language families. In addition to examining languages in Africa, Europe, and Asia the author presents analyses of languages in Australasia and the Pacific and in North, South, and Meso-America. In doing so he reveals much that is new about the language families of the world and makes an important contribution to the understanding of their nature and evolution. His book will interest scholars and researchers in language typology, historical and comparative linguistics, syntax, and morphology.

The preposition is of particular interest to syntacticians, historians and sociolinguists of English, as its placement within a sentence is influenced by syntactic and sociolinguistic constraints, and by how the 'rules' regarding prepositions have changed over time, as a result of language change, of change in attitudes towards language, and of processes such as standardization. This book investigates preposition placement in the early and late Modern English periods (1500-1900), with a special focus on preposition stranding (The house which I live in) in opposition to pied piping (The house in which I live). Based on a large-scale analysis of precept and usage data, this study reassesses the alleged influence of late eighteenth-century normative works on language usage. It also sheds new light on the origins of the stigmatisation of preposition stranding. This study will be of interest to scholars working on syntax and grammar, corpus linguistics, historical linguistics and sociolinguistics.

This book considers how languages have traditionally been divided into families, and asks how they should classified in the future. It describes and applies computer programs from biology and evolutionary genetics to data about languages and shows how the power of the computer can be harnessed to throw light on long-standing problems in historical linguistics. It tests current theories and hypotheses, shows how new ideas can be formulated, and offers a series of demonstrations that the new techniques applied to old data can produce convincing results that are sometimes startlingly at odds with accepted wisdom. April and Robert McMahon combine the expertise and perspectives of an historical linguist and a geneticist. They analyse the links between linguistic and population genetics, and consider how far language can be used to discover and understand the histories and interrelations of human populations. They explore the origins and formation of the Indo-European languages and examine less well studied languages in South America. Their book will be of great practical importance to students and researchers in historical and comparative linguistics and will interest all those concerned with the classification and diffusion of languages in fields such as archaeology, genetics, and anthropology. Its approachable style will appeal to general readers seeking to know more about the relationship between linguistic and human history.

The initial state of learner spontaneous input processing in foreign language learning, as well as the extent to which this processing leads to intake, is of central importance to theoreticians and teachers alike. In this collection of original studies, leading experts examine a range of issues, such as what learners do when faced with a language they know little or nothing about, what factors appear to mediate beginning learners' processing of input, how beginners treat two types of information - form and meaning - in the input, and how adult cognition deals with stimulus frequency at this initial stage. This book provides a microscopic view on learners' processing of foreign language input at the early stages of learning, and evaluates a variety of methodological options within the context of ab initio processing of foreign languages other than English, such as German, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, and Spanish.

People constantly talk to each other about experience or knowledge resulting from spatial perception; they describe the size, shape, orientation and position of objects using a wide range of spatial expressions. The semantic treatment of such expressions presents particular challenges for natural language processing. The meaning representation used must be capable of distinguishing between fine-grained sense differences and ambiguities grounded in our experience and perceptual structure. While there have been many different approaches to the representation and processing of spatial expressions, most computational characterisations have been restricted to particularly narrow problem domains. The chapters in the present volume reflect a commitment to the development of cognitively informed computational treatments of spatial language and spatial representation. Therefore the chapters present computational work, empirical work, or a combination of both. The book will appeal to all those interested in spatial language and spatial representation, whether they work in artificial intelligence, cognitive science, cognitive psychology or linguistics.

In A Systemic View as the Base of Philological Thought, Olga Valentinova, Vladimir Denisenko, Sergey Preobrazhenskii, and Mikhail Rybakov explore the interrelation of language material, structure, and functions in various subjects of philological research, such as grammatical systems of language, semantics, linguistic personality, literary text, and formal aspects of verse. Their systemic approach is rooted in the theories of Wilhelm von Humboldt and his followers, including Russian scholars Alexander Potebnya, Gustav Shpet, and more recently Gennadii Prokop'evichMel'nikov (1928-2000). The authors use the concept of systemicity as an opportunity to see the studied whole in development, to show the functional interaction of linear and supra-linear connections, to explain their interdependence, and to predict further changes within the system. This book displays the scientific potential of the systemic approach to linguistics and related spheres, employing the framework of systematicity to revise the modern trends of philology and to map out an alternative paradigm for linguistic and philological thought that could restore the status of philology as a holistic science.

Classical Latin appears to be without regional dialects, yet Latin evolved in little more than a millennium into a variety of different languages (the Romance languages: Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese etc.). Was regional diversity apparent from the earliest times, obscured perhaps by the standardisation of writing, or did some catastrophic event in late antiquity cause the language to vary? These questions have long intrigued Latinists and Romance philologists, struck by the apparent uniformity of Latin alongside the variety of Romance. This book, first published in 2007, establishes that Latin was never geographically uniform. The changing patterns of diversity and the determinants of variation are examined from the time of the early inscriptions of Italy, through to late antiquity and the beginnings of the Romance dialects in the western Roman provinces. This is the most comprehensive treatment ever undertaken of the regional diversification of Latin throughout its history in the Roman period.

This book presents a new reconstruction of Proto-Basque, the mother language of modern Basque varieties, historical Basque, and Aquitanian, grounded in traditional methods of historical linguistics. Building on a long tradition of Basque scholarship, the comparative method and internal reconstruction, informed by the phonetic bases of sound change and phonological typology, are used to explain previously underappreciated alternations and asymmetries in Basque sound patterns, resulting in a radically new view of the proto-language. The comparative method is then used to compare this new Proto-Basque with Proto-Indo-European, revealing regular sound correspondences in basic vocabulary and grammatical formatives. Evaluation of these results supports a distant genetic relationship between Proto-Basque and Proto-Indo-European, and offers new insights into specific linguistic properties of these two ancient languages. This comprehensive volume, which includes a detailed appendix including Proto-Basque/Proto-Indo-European cognate sets, will be of general interest to linguists, archeologists, historians, and geneticists, and of particular interest to scholars in historical linguistics, phonetics and phonology, language change, and Basque and Indo-European studies. Errata for the book can be found at: https://julietteblevins.ws.gc.cuny.edu/proto-basque/

This book introduces readers to the remarkable linguistic diversity of East and Southeast Asia. It contains wide-ranging and accessible discussions of every important aspect of the languages of the region, including word origins, cultural key words, tones and sounds, language families and typology, key syntactic structures, writing systems, and communicative styles. Students of linguistics will welcome the book's treatments of celebrated East Asian features such as classifiers, serial verb constructions, tones, topic-prominence, and honorifics. It shows students of particular Asian languages how their language fits structurally and culturally into the regional language mosaic. With its exercises, solutions, glossary, and many fascinating cases and insights, the book is an ideal introduction to descriptive and field linguistics. Cliff Goddard writes with great clarity and an eye for interesting examples.

Written by respected researchers in their field, this book is about the skills beyond basic word recognition that are necessary for the processing and comprehension of spoken and written language.
Key Features
* The major topics presented are as follows:
* language and text analysis
* cognitive processing and comprehension
* development of literacy
* literacy and schooling
* factors influencing listening and reading

The notions of 'function', 'feature' and 'functional feature' are associated with relatively new developments and insights in several areas of cognition. This book brings together different definitions, insights and research related to defining these notions from such diverse areas as language, perception, categorization and development. Each of the contributors in this book explicitly defines the notion of 'function', 'feature' or 'functional feature' within their own theoretical framework, presents research in which such a notion plays a pivotal role, and discusses the contribution of functional features in relation to their insights in a particular area of cognition. As such, this book not only presents new developments devoted to defining 'function', 'feature' and 'functional feature' in several sub-disciplines of cognitive science, but also offers a focused account of how these notions operate within the cognitive interface linking language and spatial representation. All book chapters are accessible for the interested novice, and offer the specialized researcher new empirical and theoretical insights into defining function, both with respect to the language and space interface and across cognition. The introduction to the book presents the reader with the main issues and viewpoints that are discussed in more detail in each of the book chapters.