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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Historical & comparative linguistics > General
Focusing mainly on classifiers, Numeral Classifiers and Classifier Languages offers a deep investigation of three major classifier languages: Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. This book provides detailed discussions well supported by empirical evidence and corpus analyses. Theoretical hypotheses regarding differences and commonalities between numeral classifier languages and other mainly article languages are tested to seek universals or typological characteristics. The essays collected here from leading scholars in different fields promise to be greatly significant in the field of linguistics for several reasons. First, it targets three representative classifier languages in Asia. It also provides critical clues and suggests solutions to syntactic, semantic, psychological, and philosophical issues about classifier constructions. Finally, it addresses ensuing debates that may arise in the field of linguistics in general and neighboring inter-disciplinary areas. This book should be of great interest to advanced students and scholars of East Asian languages.
In the sign languages of the deaf some signs can meaningfully point toward things or can be meaningfully placed in the space ahead of the signer. Such spatial uses of signs are an obligatory part of fluent grammatical signing. There is no parallel for this in vocally produced languages. This book focuses on American Sign Language to examine the grammatical and conceptual purposes served by these directional signs and demonstrates a remarkable integration of grammar and gesture in the service of constructing meaning.
The Evolution of Spanish Past Forms examines how Spanish past forms have changed diachronically. With examples from Medieval Spanish, Golden Age Spanish, and Modern Spanish literary works, this book demonstrates how language is dynamic and susceptible to change. The past forms considered here include the preterit, the imperfect, the imperfect progressive with estar (temporal to be), the present perfect, the imperfect progressive with other auxiliary verbs, the preterit progressive with estar, and the preterit progressive with other auxiliary verbs. This book will be of interest to scholars and graduate students investigating tense and aspect phenomena in Spanish and other languages, grammaticalization processes, and language variation and change.
The purpose of this book is to dispel misunderstanding about the genesis of the Homeric poems and other knotty problems in oral studies, such as the meaning of "orality," "literacy," "tradition," "memorization," and "text." The study is about the nature and history of writing--how it was used in the Ancient Near East, and especially in Greece, and its relationship to Homer. It suggests that a Semite invented the Greek alphabet, heir to an ancient bilingual Eastern tradition of recording poetry by dictation.
This accessible book provides a foundational understanding of the science of deception and lie detection. Focusing on core issues for the field, it discusses classic and current psychological research into lying as well as theoretical approaches to understanding human lie detection. The book explores engaging questions around how people lie, how people make decisions about believing others, and how we can detect deception. Each chapter is clearly structured to support students of all levels by summarising content, presenting key research and systematically evaluating findings. Chapters explore topics including some of the most promising current lie detection techniques, how and why people lie, how lying develops in children, and whether unconscious thinking can boost lie detection accuracy. Providing an overview of key issues in deception, this book will be of great interest to students and lecturers in the field of deception and lie detection, as well as anyone generally interested in this fascinating field of research.
The importance of discourse markers (words like "so," "however," and "well") lies in the theoretical questions they raise about the nature of discourse and the relationship between linguistic meaning and context. Diane Blakemore asserts that the exercise in classification that has dominated discourse marker research should be replaced by the investigation of the way in which linguistic expressions contribute to the inferential processes involved in utterance understanding.
This book offers a comprehensive overview of Chinese medicine terminology translation, defining the most central concepts in Chinese traditional medicine, providing simplified Chinese characters, Mandarin Pronunciation in pinyin, citations for 111 of the most key concepts in traditional Chinese medicine and culture. Covering definitions of terms relating to essence, qi, yin-yang theory, five elements and visceral manifestation in traditional medicine, it offers a selection of English versions of each term in addition to a standard English version, drawing on the translation history of traditional Chinese medicine. It provides a useful resource to understand the fundamental terms of traditional Chinese medicine and culture in Chinese and English, and their relevance to cross-cultural discourse.
English Lexicogenesis investigates the processes by which novel words are coined in English, and how they are variously discarded or adopted, and frequently then adapted. Gary Miller looks at the roles of affixation, compounding, clipping, and blending in the history of lexicogenesis, including processes taking place right now. The first four chapters consider English morphology and the recent types of word formation in English: the first introduces the morphological terminology used in the work and the book's theoretical perspectives; chapter 2 discusses productivity and constraints on derivations; chapter 3 describes the basic typology of English compounds; and chapter 4 considers the role of particles in word formation and recent construct types specific to English. Chapters 5 and 6 focus respectively on analogical and imaginative aspects of neologistic creation and the roles of metaphor and metonymy. In chapters 7 and 8 the author considers the influence of folk etymology and tabu, and the cycle of loss of expressivity and its renewal. After outlining the phonological structure of words and its role in word abridgements, he examines the acoustic and perceptual motivation of word forms. He then devotes four chapters to aspects and functions of truncation and to reduplicative and conjunctive formations. In the final chapter he looks at the relationship between core and expressive morphology and the role of punning and other forms of language play, before summarizing his arguments and findings and setting out avenues for future research.
Healing the Reason-Emotion Split draws on research from experimental psychology and neuroscience to dispel the myth that reason should be heralded above emotion. Arguing that reason and emotion mutually benefit our decision-making abilities, the book explores the idea that understanding this relationship could have long-term advantages for our management of society's biggest problems. Levine reviews how reason and emotion operated in historical movements such as the Enlightenment, Romanticism and 1960s' counterculture, to conclude that a successful society would restore human connection and foster compassion in economics and politics by equally utilizing reason and emotion. Integrating discussion on classic and contemporary neurological studies and using allegory, the book lays out the potential for societal change through compassion, and would be of interest to psychologists concerned with social implications of their fields, philosophy students, social activists, and religious leaders.
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.
*Winner of AEDEAN Leocadio Martin Mingorance Book Award on Theoretical and Applied English Linguistics (2021)* *Winner of ESLA Guadalupe Aguado Research Award for Young Researchers (2022)* *Winner of ESSE Book Award 2022 for Young Researchers in the category 'English Language and Linguistics* This book uses corpus-based methodologies to investigate the wide variety of factors behind verb number agreement with complex collective noun phrases in English. The literature on collective nouns and their agreement patterns spans an array of disciplines and approaches. However, little of the research conducted to date has focused on the influence of of-dependents on verb number with relational collective nouns, as in examples such as a bunch of or a group of. Drawing on data from two case studies - one based on the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), and the other on the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) - Fernandez-Pena uses statistical modelling to unpack the different morphological, syntactic, semantic and lexical dimensions of the variables affecting verb number agreement with complex collective noun phrases in English. This multidimensional analysis of the significance of of-dependents in the patterning and contemporary usage of collective nouns offers new insight into and understanding of both synchronic variation and diachronic change. This book is an essential read for scholars of English language variation and change, historical linguistics, corpus linguistics, and usage-based approaches to the study of language.
What are place names? From where do they originate? How are they structured? What do they signify? How important are they in our life? This groundbreaking book explores these compelling questions and more by providing a thorough introduction to the assumptions, theories, terminology, and methods in toponymy and toponomastics - the studies of place names and proper names respectively. It is the first comprehensive resource on the topic in a single volume, and explores the history and development of toponyms, focusing on the conceptual and methodological issues pertinent to the study of place names around the world. It presents a wide range of examples and case studies illustrating the structure, function, and importance of toponyms from ancient times to the present day. Wide ranging yet accessible, it is an indispensable source of knowledge for students and scholars in linguistics, toponymy and toponomastics, onomastics, etymology, and historical linguistics.
"A History of English" provides an intelligent and accessible
synthesis of modern sociolinguistic approaches to the development
of the English language. Beginning with the pre-history of English, each chapter provides sociohistorical context, an overview of the major structural changes at each stage of the language and discussion of topics of particular sociolinguistic interest. Textual examples are given from a number of genres of writing including classical literature, letters, prose writings, modern popular literature and software documentation. The volume concludes with a discussion of the future of English language.
The present volume contributes to the growing body of work on sentence pro- cessing. The goal of work in this area is to construct a theory of human sen- tence processing in general, i.e., given a grammar of some particular language and a general characterization of the human sentence processing mechanisms, the particular processing system for that language should follows automati- cally. At least that's the goal. What is needed in order to pursue this goal is systematic in-depth analysis of the sentence routines of individual languages. With respect to German, that is precisely what the present volume delivers. In sharp contrast to a decade ago, the study of German sentence process- ing is flourishing today. Four lively and active centers have emerged. The University of Freiburg is one prominent center, represented in the present vol- ume by the editors Barbara Hemforth and Lars Konieczny (who was at Freiburg for many years) as well as by Christoph Scheepers (who is now in Glasgow) and Christoph Holscher. The University of Potsdam has recently begun an interdisciplinary collaboration on sentence processing involving Matthias Schlesewsky, Gisbert Fanselow, Reinhold Kliegl and Josef Krems. The University of Jena has several investigators trained in linguistics and interested in language processing. That group is represented here by Markus Bader and also includes his colleagues Michael Meng and Josef Bayer.
In this re-evaluation of the writings of Joseph Conrad, Michael Greaney places language and narrative at the heart of his literary achievement. As a trilingual Polish expatriate, Conrad brought a formidable linguistic self-consciousness to the English novel and tensions between speech and writing are the defining obsessions of his career. Greaney examines a wide range of Conrad's work, combining recent critical approaches to language in post-structuralism with an impressive command of linguistic theory.
In this enlightening biography, award- winning academic psychologist Michael Corballis tells the story of how the field of cognitive psychology evolved and the controversies and anecdotes that occurred along the way. Since the Second World War, psychology has undergone several scientific movements, from behaviourism to cognitive psychology and finally to neuroscience. In this fascinating biography, Corballis recounts his career as a researcher who played a part in these monumental changes in psychology. Beginning with his boarding-school education in New Zealand, Corballis goes on to recount his PhD studies and behavioural research into mirror-image discriminations in pigeons, the uprising of the "cognitive revolution" amidst 1960s counterculture and his switch to become a cognitive psychologist, his research into brain asymmetry and the evolution of language and its origin of manual gestures, and the development of mental time travel in animals. Featuring stories of prominent scientists who were integral in psychology's biggest discoveries and insight into the heated debates and controversies in psychology during a time of great scientific and sociocultural change, this biography is a must-read for those interested in how psychology became established as a science.
The twelve contributions in this volume all focus on the question of whether developing grammars contain, at each stage of language acquisition, the full range of functional categories such as INFL, AGR, or COMP. The evidence examined is the placement of verbs, especially in verb-second constructions. Since the position of verbal elements depends on the finiteness distinction (the presence of agreement and tense markings), the development of these phenomena is studied as well. Although there is consensus among the authors that grammars in the course of language acquisition conform at each stage to the principles of universal grammar, they disagree on whether the full repertoire of functional categories is available from early on, or whether some are implemented only later. The studies presented here investigate monolingual and bilingual first language acquisition as well as adult second language acquisition. The languages studied are Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Sesotho, and Swedish.
The aim of this book is to let us see our language as a living and developing human activity in a period of history which offers special advantages for the purpose. Miss Tucker's method is to analyse in the course of a connected narrative a large, wide-ranging body of words and phrases from two principal points of view. In Part One, using as the basis of evidence and discussion a few representative critical journals, including those with which Johnson, Goldsmith, Smollett, and Burke were prominently associated, she asks how the eighteenth century looked at its own language: what, for example, it esteemed elegant or vulgar, held correct or a solecism, found new or old-fashioned, impressive or funny. In Part Two the emphasis shifts from the eighteenth century's views of itself to our views of the eighteenth century as we look back. Here the interest centres by contrast on our difficulties, our discoveries, and our conclusions and in the process our understanding of eighteenth century literature and manners is immeasurably sharpened.
Traditionally, due to the availability of technology, psycholinguistic research has focused mainly on Western languages. However, this focus has recently shifted towards a more diverse range of languages, whose structures often throw into question many previous assumptions in syntactic theory and language processing. Based on a case study in field-based comparative psycholinguistics, this pioneering book is the first to explore the neurocognition of endangered 'object-before-subject' languages, such as Kaqchikel and Seediq. It draws on a range of methods - including linguistic fieldwork, theoretical linguistic analysis, corpus research, questionnaire surveys, behavioural experiments, eye tracking, event-related brain potentials, functional magnetic resonance imaging, and near-infrared spectroscopy - to consider preferred constituent orders in both language and thought, examining comprehension as well as production. In doing so, it highlights the importance of field-based cross-linguistic cognitive neuroscientific research in uncovering universal and language-particular aspects of the human language faculty, and the interaction between language and thought.
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.
Language plays a central role in human life. However, the term 'language' as defined in the language sciences of the 20th century and the traditions these have drawn on, have arguably, limited our thinking about what language is and does. The two inter-linked volumes of Thibault's study articulate crucially important aspects of an emerging new perspective shift on language - the Distributed Language view - that is now receiving more and more attention internationally. Rejecting the classical view that the fundamental architecture of language can be localized as a number of inter-related levels of formal linguistic organization that function as the coded inputs and outputs to each other, the distributed language view argues that languaging behaviour is a bio-cultural organisation of process that is embodied, multimodal, and integrated across multiple space-time scales. Thibault argues that we need to think of human languaging as the distinctively human mode of our becoming and being selves in the extended human ecology and the kinds of experiencing that this makes possible. Paradoxically, this also means thinking about language in non-linguistic ways that break the grip of the conventional meta-languages for thinking about human languaging. Thibault's book grounds languaging in process theory: languaging and the forms of experience it actualizes is always an event, not a thing that we 'use'. In taking a distinctively interdisciplinary approach, the book relates dialogical theories of human sense-making to the distributed view of human cognition, to recent thinking about distributed language, to ecological psychology, and to languaging as inter-individual affective dynamics grounded in the subjective lives of selves. In taking this approach, the book considers the coordination of selves in social encounters, the emergent forms of self-reflexivity that characterise these encounters, and the implications for how we think of and live our human sociality, not as something that is mediated by over-arching codes and systems, but as emerging from the endogenous subjectivities of selves when they seek to coordinate with other selves and with the situations, artefacts, social institutions, and technologies that populate the extended human ecology. The two volumes aim to bring our understanding of human languaging closer to human embodiment, experience, and feeling while also showing how languaging enables humans to transcend local circumstances and thus to dialogue with cultural tradition. Volume 1 focuses on the shorter timescales of bodily dynamics in languaging activity. Volume II integrates the shorter timescales of body dynamics to the longer cultural-historical timescales of the linguistic and cultural norms and patterns to which bodily dynamics are integrated.
Secret Manipulations is the first comprehensive study of African
register variation, polylectality, and derived languages. Focusing
on a specific form of language change-deliberate manipulations of a
language by its speakers-it provides a new approach to local
language ideologies and concepts of grammar and metalinguistic
knowledge. |
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