Time is the most fundamental category of human cognition and action, and all human languages have developed many devices to express it. These include verbal categories, such as tense and aspect, but also adverbials, particles, and principles of discourse organisation. This book is intended as a tutorial for the study of how time is expressed in natural languages. Its chapters take the reader through a number of foundational issues, such as the various notions of time and the various means to express it; other chapters are devoted to more specific questions, such as the acquisition of time, its modelling in formal semantics and in computational linguistics, or how its expression can be empirically investigated.

* Draws on work across multiple disciplines, from astrobiology and physics to linguistics and the social sciences, making it appealing to graduates from a wide variety of fields. * The first accessible introduction into the important work of philosopher Howard Pattee. * Aims to equip readers with new approaches to simple and complex systems theory to take into any respective discipline.

This book aims to assess the nature of morphological complexity, and the properties that distinguish it from the complexity manifested in other components of language. Of the many ways languages have of being complex, perhaps none is as daunting as what can be achieved by inflectional morphology: this volume examines languages such as Archi, which has a 1,000,000-form verb paradigm, and Chinantec, which has over 100 inflection classes. Alongside this complexity, inflection is notable for its variety across languages: one can take two unrelated languages and discover that they share similar syntax or phonology, but one would be hard pressed to find two unrelated languages with the same inflectional systems. In this volume, senior scholars and junior researchers highlight novel perspectives on conceptualizing morphological complexity, and offer concrete means for measuring, quantifying and analysing it. Examples are drawn from a wide range of languages, including those of North America, New Guinea, Australia, and Asia, alongside a number of European languages. The book will be a valuable resource for all those studying complexity phenomena in morphology, and for theoretical linguists more generally, from graduate level upwards.

Synthesizing a range of studies on morphological processing from the past 30 years, this edited collection presents the current state of knowledge on morphological processing and defines classroom practices to help students conceptualise the role of morphology in reading, spelling, and vocabulary development. Research has increasingly indicated the importance of morphological tasks in relation to reading, spelling, and vocabulary acquisition in the classroom. Chapter authors present the theoretical considerations guiding morphological processing research to date, address the use of morphology with reference to different populations of learners, and propose effective and innovative instructional strategies for integrating morphology in the classroom.

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).

Insa Gulzow analyzes the acquisition of intensifiers by children acquiring German or English as their first language. Based on a comparative analysis of intensifiers and related expressions in the two languages, she examines the longitudinal production data of six German-speaking and six English-speaking children with regard to when and in which contexts the intensifiers German selbst/selber and English x-self (myself, yourself, himself, etc.) appear. As intensifiers evoke alternatives to the referent of their focus and relate a central referent to more peripheral alternative referents, they are an important linguistic means to structure the participants of a child's early discourse. By integrating intensifiers into their utterances, children can identify themselves as central. The notion of being included or excluded in a certain state of affairs is relevant for children when interacting with their parents and/or other children. In the course of development, children acquire a number of both linguistic and non-linguistic skills that characterize them as increasingly independent and competent agents. In this process, intensifiers are an important linguistic device with which children can negotiate and comment on their participation in a given event. The three parts of the volume consist first, of a detailed analysis of the intensifiers selbst/selber and x-self and related expressions such as allein and by x-self in the two languages. Special attention is given to the fact that in English, intensifiers and reflexive pronouns are identical expressions while in German they are distinct. Second, previous results of comprehension studies are carefully reviewed in order to relate them to the findings in longitudinal production data. Third, a detailed analysis of the children's early use of intensifiers and related expressions is presented.

Originally published in 1980, this is a book about the psychology of figurative language. It is however, eclectic and therefore should be of interest to professionals and students in education, linguistics, philosophy, sociolinguistics, and other concerned with meaning and cognition. The editors felt there was a pressing need to bring together the growing empirical efforts of this topic. In a sense, recognition of the theoretical importance of figurative language symbolized the transition from the psycholinguistics of the 1960s to that of the late 1970s, that is from a linguistic semantics to a more comprehensive psychological semantics with a healthy respect for context, inference, world knowledge, and above all creative imagination. The organization of the volume reflects the more basic, general concerns with cognition - from historical and philosophical background, through problems of mental representation and semantic theory, to developmental trends, and to applications in problem solving.

Nominated for the Best contribution to Slavic Linguistics/AATSEEL book award 2011 The concept of complex emotions is obviously polysemous. On the one hand, we can interpret it as a non-basic, non-prototypical, or culture-specific notion, on the other - and this is the interpretation we propose in this work - a complex emotion concept can be looked upon as a concept whose complexity emerges in interaction, due to the complex nature of its object. Our interpretation is thus construction-based, one in which meaning is not to be found exclusively in the lexical semantics of the term, but also in the, clearly meaning-laden, grammatical construction, e.g. a complement clause, expressing the object or cause of the emotion. The construal of a scene mapped on the form of a complex sentence involves the emotion that is unambiguously complex and not necessarily universal or prototypical. We argue throughout this book that cross-linguistic grammatical mismatches are a visible sign of conceptual and categorizational distinctions between the conceptualization of emotion in different languages and cultures. They also signal differences in what individual speakers consider salient in a portrayed scene. We offer a contrastive corpus-based study of Polish and English emotion concepts and the linguistic patterns they enter. Our theoretical approach combines lexical semantics and cognitive linguistics and proposes a cognitive corpus linguistics methodology. It is a cognitive linguistic endeavor in which we analyze grammatical category mismatches and provide detailed semantic analyses of different complement choices of emotion predicates. We also discuss insights into Polish and English cultural values gleaned from the different underlying categorizations of emotions. Combining theoretical analyses with pedagogical theory and classroom applications, this work breaks new ground and will reach audiences of linguists, teachers and students of Polish, teachers and students of English, translators, and other language researchers and practitioners.

A History of the Chinese Language provides a comprehensive introduction to the historical development of the Chinese language from its Proto-Sino-Tibetan roots in prehistoric times to Modern Standard Chinese. Taking a highly accessible and balanced approach, it presents a chronological survey of the various stages of the Chinese language, covering key aspects such as phonology, syntax, and semantics. The second edition presents a revised and updated version that reflects recent scholarship in Chinese historical linguistics and new developments in related disciplines. Features include: Coverage of the major historical stages in Chinese language development, such as Old Chinese, Middle Chinese, Early Modern Chinese, and Modern Standard Chinese. Treatment of core linguistic aspects of the Chinese language, including phonological changes, grammatical development, lexical evolution, vernacular writing, the Chinese writing system, and Chinese dialects. Inclusion of authentic Chinese texts throughout the book, presented within a rigorous framework of linguistic analysis to help students to build up critical and evaluative skills and acquire valuable cultural knowledge. Integration of materials from different disciplines, such as archaeology, genetics, history, and sociolinguistics, to highlight the cultural and social background of each period of the language. Written by a highly experienced instructor, A History of the Chinese Language will be an essential resource for students of Chinese language and linguistics and for anyone interested in the history and culture of China.

The aim of Language for those who have Nothing is to think psychiatry through the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin. Using the concepts of Dialogism and Polyphony, the Carnival and the Chronotope, a novel means of navigating the clinical landscape is developed. Bakhtin offers language as a social phenomenon and one that is fully embodied. Utterances are shown to be alive and enfleshed and their meanings realised in the context of given social dimensions. The organisation of this book corresponds with carnival practices of taking the high down to the low before replenishing its meaning anew. Thus early discussions of official language and the chronotope become exposed to descending levels of analysis and emphasis. Patients and practitioners are shown to occupy an entirely different spatio-temporal topography. These chronotopes have powerful borders and it is necessary to use the Carnival powers of cunning and deception in order to enter and to leave them. The book provides an overview of practitioners who have attempted such transgression and the author records his own unnerving experience as a pseudopatient. By exploring the context of psychiatry's unofficial voices: its terminology, jokes, parodies, and everyday narratives, the clinical landscape is shown to rely heavily on unofficial dialogues in order to safeguard an official identity.

The topic of the volume is the contrast between borrowable categories and those which resist transfer. Resistance is illustrated for the unattested emergence of grammatical gender, the negligible impact of English and Spanish on the number category in Patagonian Welsh, the reluctance of replicas to borrow English but. MAT-borrowing does not imply the copying of rules as the Spanish function-words in the Chamorro irrealis show. Chamorro and Tetun Dili look similar on account of their contact-induced parallels. The languages of the former USSR have borrowed largely identical sets of conjunctions from Russian, Arabic, and Persian to converge in the domain of clause linkage. Resistance against and susceptibility to transfer call for further investigations to the benefit of language-contact theory.

This book examines the alternation between accusative-dative and dative-accusative order in Old Florentine clitic clusters and its decline in favor of the latter. Based on an exhaustive analysis of data collected from medieval Florentine and Tuscan texts we offer a novel analysis of the rise of the variable order, the transition from one order to the other, and the demise of the alternation that relies primarily on iconicity and analogy. The book employs exophoric pragmatic iconicity, a language-external iconic relationship based on similarity between linguistic structure and the speaker/writer's conceptualization of reality, and endophoric iconicity, a language-internal iconic relationship where the iconic ground is construed between linguistic signs and structures. Analogy is viewed as a productive process that generalizes patterns or extends grammatical rules to formally similar structures, and obtains the form of the analogical relationship between the masculine singular definite article and the third person singular accusative clitic, which shared the same phonotactically constrained distribution patterns. The data indicate that exophoric pragamatic iconicity exploits and maintains the alternation, whereas endophoric iconicity and analogy conspire to end it.

This volume introduces the study of language attrition - the forgetting of language. In this first collection devoted to second language attrition, the contributors focus on contexts of loss where Japanese is either the attriting language, or the replacing language. Bringing together research to substantiate previous hypotheses in the field, this book offers new theoretical and practical insights for those interested in language change.

This book applies linguistic analysis to the poetry of Emeritus Professor Edwin Thumboo, a Singaporean poet and leading figure in Commonwealth literature. The work explores how the poet combines grammar and metaphor to create meaning, making the reader aware of the linguistic resources developed by Thumboo as the basis for his unique technique. The author approaches the poems from a functional linguistic perspective, investigating the multiple layers of meaning and metaphor that go into producing these highly textured, grammatically intricate verbal works of art. The approach is based on the Systemic Functional Theory, which aids the study of how the poet uses language (grammar) to craft his text in a playful way that reflects a love of the language. The multilingual and multicultural experiences of the poet are considered to have contributed to his uniquely creative use of language. This work demonstrates how the Systemic Functional Theory, with its emphasis on exploring the semogenic (meaning-making) power of language, provides the perspective we need to better understand poets' works as intentional acts of meaning. Readers will discover how the works of Edwin Thumboo illustrate well a point made by Barthes, who noted that "Bits of code, formulae, rhythmic models, fragments of social languages, etc. pass into the text and are redistributed within it, for there is always language before and around the text." With a focus on meaning, this functional analysis of poetry offers an insightful look at the linguistic basis of Edwin Thumboo's poetic technique. The work will appeal to scholars with an interest in linguistic analysis and poetry from the Commonwealth and new literature, and it can also be used to support courses on literary stylistics or text linguistics.

The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351049139, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. This volume offers an exhaustive look at the latest research on metacognition in language learning and teaching. While other works have explored certain notions of metacognition in language learning and teaching, this book, divided into theoretical and empirical chapters, looks at metacognition from a variety of perspectives, including metalinguistic and multilingual awareness, and language learning and teaching in L2 and L3 settings, and explores a range of studies from around the world. This allows the volume to highlight a diverse set of methodological approaches, including blogging, screen recording software, automatic translation programs, language corpora, classroom interventions, and interviews, and subsequently, to demonstrate the value of metacognition research and how insights from such findings can contribute to a greater understanding of language learning and language teaching processes more generally. This innovative collection is an essential resource for students and scholars in language teaching pedagogy, and applied linguistics.

This book examines the phenomenon of silence in relation to human behaviour from multiple perspectives, drawing on psychological and cultural-philosophical ideas to create new, surprising connections between silence, quiet and rest. Silence and being quiet are present in everyday life and in politics, but why do we talk about it so rarely? Silence can be cathartic and peaceful, but equally oppressive and unbearable. In the form of communication, we keep secrets to protect ourselves and others, but on the other hand subjects can be silenced with dictatorial posturing - a communicative display of power - and something can be literally 'hushed up' that needs to be disclosed. In unique and engaging style, Theodor Itten explores the multi-layered internal conversation on silence in relation to the self and emotions, demonstrating why it is sometimes necessary in our modern society. Describing and analyzing human behaviour in relation to silence, the book also draws on psychoanalytic ideas by outlining the power of silence in processing our emotions and relationships and hiding innermost feelings. With rich narrative signposts providing thought-provoking and amusing insights, and interpersonal communication examined in relation to everyday life, this is fascinating reading for students and academics in psychology, philosophy, cultural studies, and related areas.

This book examines the phenomenon of silence in relation to human behaviour from multiple perspectives, drawing on psychological and cultural-philosophical ideas to create new, surprising connections between silence, quiet and rest. Silence and being quiet are present in everyday life and in politics, but why do we talk about it so rarely? Silence can be cathartic and peaceful, but equally oppressive and unbearable. In the form of communication, we keep secrets to protect ourselves and others, but on the other hand subjects can be silenced with dictatorial posturing - a communicative display of power - and something can be literally 'hushed up' that needs to be disclosed. In unique and engaging style, Theodor Itten explores the multi-layered internal conversation on silence in relation to the self and emotions, demonstrating why it is sometimes necessary in our modern society. Describing and analyzing human behaviour in relation to silence, the book also draws on psychoanalytic ideas by outlining the power of silence in processing our emotions and relationships and hiding innermost feelings. With rich narrative signposts providing thought-provoking and amusing insights, and interpersonal communication examined in relation to everyday life, this is fascinating reading for students and academics in psychology, philosophy, cultural studies, and related areas.

This book discusses how the poor and desperate in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries mobilised their linguistic resources in pursuit of vital pragmatic goals, drawing on three corpora of letters written by the poor. The main question addressed by the book is, 'How were the poor, often armed only with low levels of education and literacy, able to meet the challenge of writing letters vital to their interests, even to their survival?' Timmis argues that the answer lies in the highly strategic approach adopted by the writers, particularly evident in the way formulaic language is used in the pauper and prisoner letters. Formulaic language supports the writers in producing intelligible letters in what they consider an appropriate tone but also allows them to exploit popular cultural motifs of the time. Data is drawn from three sources: pauper letters by the poor applying for parish relief, from around 1795 to 1834; prisoner letters by women awaiting deportation to Australia for defrauding the Bank of England in the early nineteenth century; and anonymous letters by the poor demanding money with menaces. Comparison with the Mayhew Corpus of interviews with the London poor in the 1850s reinforces the idea that part of the writers' approach was to orient away from the vernacular towards a style they perceived to be more elevated. Showing how resourceful people can be in communicating their needs in crises and in turn surfacing new insights into literacy and demotic language awareness, this book will be of interest to students and scholars in corpus linguistics and social history.

Originally published in 1999 Social Theory and Psychoanalysis in Transition is a benchmark critique of Freudian theory in which a dialogue between the Frankfurt School, the Lacanian tradition and post-Lacanian developments in critical and feminist theory is developed. Considering afresh the relations between self and society, Elliot argues for the importance of imagination and the unconscious in understanding issues about the self and self-identity, ideology and power, sexual difference and gender.

This book brings together for the first time a series of previously published papers featuring Ian Roberts' pioneering work on diachronic and comparative syntax over the last thirty years in one comprehensive volume. Divided into two parts, the volume engages in recent key topics in empirical studies of syntactic theory, with the eight papers on diachronic syntax addressing major changes in the history of English as well as broader aspects of syntactic change, including the introduction to the formal approach to grammaticalisation, and the eight papers on comparative syntax exploring head-movement, the nature and distribution of clitics, and the nature of parametric variation and change. This comprehensive collection of the author's body of research on diachronic and comparative syntax is an essential resource for scholars and researchers in theoretical, comparative, and historical linguistics.

This volume contributes to the research in two different research areas: lexical availability studies and vocabulary research in second or foreign languages. Lexical availability is defined as the words that immediately come to mind as a response to a stimulus provided by topics related to domains closely connected to daily life: for instance animals, food and drink, daily activities, politics, or poverty. Lexical availability is a dimension of learners' receptive and productive lexical competence, and, consequently, an important variable of learners' communicative competence. Written by leading researchers in Spanish and English applied linguistics, the studies presented in this volume offer the reader findings and insights from studies conducted in learners with different mother tongues, who learn English or Spanish as their second or third language. "This book made me aware of an approach to vocabulary acquisition which has a long tradition in European research, but has been somewhat neglected by English-speaking researchers. The methodology was pioneered in France where it developed into the Francais Fondamental project - an influential approach to the vocabulary needs of learners of French. It was also taken up by Spanish researchers, and more recently developed by the team at La Rioja University. Where English-language research has focused on the frequency of words in large corpora and the implications of this feature for L2 vocabulary acquisition, the lexical availability tradition takes a much more learner-centred approach to L2 vocabulary skills, directly reflecting learners' needs and learners' ability to do things with small, effective vocabularies. This leads to a set of research priorities that look refreshingly different from the ones we are used to. Read this book. It might change the way you think about vocabulary research." Paul Meara, Swansea University, Wales, UK

Language Between Description and Prescription is an empirical, quantitative and qualitative study of nineteenth-century English grammar writing, and of nineteenth-century language change. Based on 258 grammar books from Britain and North America, the book investigates whether grammar writers of the time noticed the language changing around them, and how they reacted. In particular, Lieselotte Anderwald demonstrates that not all features undergoing change were noticed in the first place, those that were noticed were not necessarily criticized, and some recessive features were not upheld as correct. The features investigated come from the verb phrase and include in particular variable past tense forms, which -although noticed-often went uncommented, and where variation was acknowledged; the decline of the be-perfect, where the older form (the be-perfect) was criticized emphatically, and corrected; the rise of the progressive, which was embraced enthusiastically, and which was even upheld as a symbol of national superiority, at least in Britain; the rise of the progressive passive, which was one of the most violently hated constructions of the time, and the rise of the get-passive, which was only rarely commented on, and even more rarely in negative terms. Throughout the book, nineteenth-century grammarians are given a voice, and the discussions in grammar books of the time are portrayed. The book's quantitative approach makes it possible to examine majority and minority positions in the discourse community of nineteenth-century grammar writers, and the changes in accepted opinion over time. The terms of the debate are also investigated, and linked to the wider cultural climate of the time. Although grammar writing in the nineteenth century was very openly prescriptivist, the studies in this book show that many prescriptive dicta contained interesting grains of descriptive detail, and that eventually prescriptivism had only a small-scale, short-term effect on the actual language used.

A Survey of Modern English covers a wide selection of aspects of the modern English language. Fully revised and updated, the major focus of the third edition lies in Standard American and British English individually and in comparison with each other. Over and beyond that, this volume treats other Englishes around the world, especially those of the southern hemisphere countries of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa as well as numerous varieties spoken in southern, eastern and western Africa, south and southeast Asia, and the Pacific. The main areas of investigation and interest include: pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary; multiple facets of English dialects and sociolects with an emphasis on gender and ethnicity; questions of pragmatics as well as a longer look at English-related pidgin and creole varieties. This authoritative guide is a comprehensive, scholarly, and systematic review of modern English. In one volume, the book presents a description of both the linguistic structure of present-day English and its geographical, social, gender, and ethnic variations. This is complemented with an updated general bibliography and with exercises at the end of each chapter and their suggested solutions at the end of the volume, all intended to provide students and other interested readers with helpful resources.

A Survey of Modern English covers a wide selection of aspects of the modern English language. Fully revised and updated, the major focus of the third edition lies in Standard American and British English individually and in comparison with each other. Over and beyond that, this volume treats other Englishes around the world, especially those of the southern hemisphere countries of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa as well as numerous varieties spoken in southern, eastern and western Africa, south and southeast Asia, and the Pacific. The main areas of investigation and interest include: pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary; multiple facets of English dialects and sociolects with an emphasis on gender and ethnicity; questions of pragmatics as well as a longer look at English-related pidgin and creole varieties. This authoritative guide is a comprehensive, scholarly, and systematic review of modern English. In one volume, the book presents a description of both the linguistic structure of present-day English and its geographical, social, gender, and ethnic variations. This is complemented with an updated general bibliography and with exercises at the end of each chapter and their suggested solutions at the end of the volume, all intended to provide students and other interested readers with helpful resources.

The Routledge Handbook of Language Contact provides an overview of the state of the art of current research in contact linguistics. Presenting contact linguistics as an established field of investigation in its own right and featuring 26 chapters, this handbook brings together a broad range of approaches to contact linguistics, including: experimental and observational approaches and formal theories; a focus on social and cognitive factors that impact the outcome of language contact situations and bilingual language processing; the emergence of new languages and speech varieties in contact situations, and contact linguistic phenomena in urban speech and linguistic landscapes. With contributions from an international range of leading and emerging scholars in their fields, the four sections of this text deal with methodological and theoretical approaches, the factors that condition and shape language contact, the impact of language contact on individuals, and language change, repertoires and formation. This handbook is an essential reference for anyone with an interest in language contact in particular regions of the world, including Anatolia, Eastern Polynesia, the Balkans, Asia, Melanesia, North America, and West Africa.