By highlighting relations between experimental and theoretical work, this volume explores new ways of addressing one of the central challenges in the study of language and cognition. The articles bring together work by leading scholars and younger researchers in psychology, linguistics and philosophy. An introductory chapter lays out the background on concept composition, a problem that is stimulating much new research in cognitive science. Researchers in this interdisciplinary domain aim to explain how meanings of complex expressions are derived from simple lexical concepts and to show how these meanings connect to concept representations. Traditionally, much of the work on concept composition has been carried out within separate disciplines, where cognitive psychologists have concentrated on concept representations, and linguists and philosophers have focused on the meaning and use of logical operators. This volume demonstrates an important change in this situation, where convergence points between these three disciplines in cognitive science are emerging and are leading to new findings and theoretical insights. This book is open access under a CC BY license.

Basics of Latin: A Grammar with Readings and Exercises from the Christian Tradition by Derek Cooper introduces students, independent learners, and homeschoolers to the basics of Latin grammar with all readings and exercises taken from texts in the Christian tradition. As part of the widely-used Zondervan Language Basics series of resources, Cooper's Latin grammar is a student-friendly introduction. It helps students learn by: Minimizing technical jargon Providing only the information needed to learn the basics Breaking the grammar of language down into manageable and intuitive chunks Illustrating the grammar in question by its use in rich selections from ancient Christian authors. Providing grammar, readings, exercises, and a lexicon all in one convenient volume. Basics of Latin provides an ideal first step into this important language and focuses on getting the student into texts and translation as quickly as possible.

This volume is one of the first detailed expositions of the history of different varieties of English. It explores language variation and varieties of English from an historical perspective, covering theoretical topics such as diffusion and supraregionalization as well as concrete descriptions of the internal and external historical developments of more than a dozen varieties of English.

Introducing English Syntax provides a basic introduction to syntax for students studying English as a foreign language at university. Examining English phrase and sentence structure from a descriptive point of view, this book develops the reader's understanding of the characteristic features of English sentence construction and provides the necessary theoretical apparatus for engaging with the language. Key features include: A unique framework combining theoretical and practical approaches to provide an insight into the intricacies of English syntax; An accessible and clear style which guides the learner through analysis, application and practical construction of sentences; A range of exercises at the end of each chapter and a brand new e-resource housing answers and commentaries to these exercises. This book requires no previous knowledge of linguistics and is essential reading for students and teachers of applied linguistics and EFL/ESL, as well as those who seek a basic grounding in English sentence structure.

Open The Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities and you'll find both a word and a day to remember, every day of the year. Each day has its own dedicated entry, on which a curious or notable event--and an equally curious or notable word--are explored. On the day on which flirting was banned in New York City, for instance, you'll discover why to "sheep's-eye" someone once meant to look at them amorously. On the day on which a disillusioned San Franciscan declared himself Emperor of the United States, you'll find the word "mamamouchi," a term for people who consider themselves more important than they truly are. And on the day on which George Frideric Handel completed his 259-page Messiah after twenty-four days of frenzied work, you'll see why a French loanword, literally meaning "a small wooden barrow," is used to refer to an intense period of work undertaken to meet a deadline. The English language is vast enough to supply us with a word for every occasion--and this linguistic "wunderkammer" is here to prove precisely that. So whatever date this book has found its way into your hands, there's an entire year's worth of linguistic curiosities waiting to be found.

This book discusses evolution of the human brain, the origin of speech and language. It covers past and present perspectives on the contentious issue of the acquisition of the language capacity. Divided into two parts, this insightful work covers several characteristics of the human brain including the language-specific network, the size of the human brain, its lateralization of functions and interhemispheric integration, in particular the phonological loop. Aboitiz argues that it is the phonological loop that allowed us to increase our vocal memory capacity and to generate a shared semantic space that gave rise to modern language. The second part examines the neuroanatomy of the monkey brain, vocal learning birds like parrots, emergent evidence of vocal learning capacities in mammals, mirror neurons, and the ecological and social context in which speech evolved in our early ancestors. This book's interdisciplinary topic will appeal to scholars of psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, biology and history.

A rich, provocative and entertaining history of women's words - of the language we have, and haven't, had to share our lives. 'Fascinating, intriguing, witty, a gem of a book' Kate Mosse 'Vivid, philosophical, absorbing and urgent, this superb book teems with historical marvels and their 21st century resonances.' Rebecca Wragg Sykes, author of Kindred 'Revelatory ... There is a nugget of joy and wisdom on every single page' Victoria Whitworth, historian and author of Daughter of the Wolf So many of the words we use to articulate the experiences women share feel awkward or alien. Medical terms are accurate but antiseptic. Slang often perpetuates stereotypes. Where are the plain, honest words for women's daily lives? From the dawn of Old English to the present day, Dr. Jenni Nuttall guides readers through the evolution of the words we have used to describe bodies, menstruation, sexuality, the consequences of male violence, childbirth, paid and unpaid work, and gender. Along the way, she argues that, paradoxically, as women have made slow progress towards equality, we've lost some of the most expressive and eloquent bits of our vocabulary. Inspired by Nuttall's deep knowledge of the English language as well as conversations with her teenage daughter, this is a book for anyone who loves language - and for feminists who want to look to the past in order to move forward.

A much-cited and highly influential text by Alastair Pennycook, one of the world authorities in sociolinguistics, The Cultural Politics of English as an International Language explores the globalization of English by examining its colonial origins, its connections to linguistics and applied linguistics, and its relationships to the global spread of teaching practices. Nine chapters cover a wide range of key topics including: international politics colonial history critical pedagogy postcolonial literature. The book provides a critical understanding of the concept of the 'worldliness of English', or the idea that English can never be removed from the social, cultural, economic or political contexts in which it is used. Reissued with a substantial preface, this Routledge Linguistics Classic remains a landmark text, which led a much-needed critical and ideologically-informed investigation into the burgeoning topic of World Englishes. Key reading for all those working in the areas of Applied Linguistics, Sociolinguistics and World Englishes.

The Gothic version of the New Testament is the oldest extant writing in a Germanic language and one of the earliest translations from the Greek. This volume offers a re-examination of fundamental questions concerning the historical and cultural context in which the version was prepared, the codicology of the manuscripts, and the value of the Gothic text for the reconstruction of the underlying Greek, together with a history of text-critical research and a new evaluation of the significance of the Gothic text in the light of current New Testament textual criticism.

Prominent researchers from the US, Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Spain contribute experimental reports on language development of children who are acquiring Spanish. The chapters cover a wide range of dimensions in acquisition: comprehension and production; monolingualism and bilingualism; typical development, children who are at risk and children with language disorders, phonology, semantics, and morphosyntax. These studies will inform linguistic theory development in clinical linguistics as well as offer insights on how language works in relation to cognitive functions that are associated with when children understand or use language. The unique data from child language offer perspectives that cannot be drawn from adult language. The first part is dedicated to the acquisition of Spanish as a first or second language by typically-developing children, the second part offers studies on children who are at risk of language delays, and the third part focuses on children with specific language impairment, disorders and syndromes.

In his articles Stefan Reif deas with Jewish biblical exegesis and the close analysis of the evolution of Jewish prayer texts. Some fourteen of these that appeared in various collective volumes are here made more easily available, together with a major new study of Numbers 13, an introduction and extensive indexes. Reif attempts to establish whether there is any linguistic, literary and exegetical value in the traditional Jewish interpretation of the Hebrew Bible for the modern scientific approach to such texts and whether such an approach itself is always free of theological bias. He demonstrates how Jewish liturgical texts may illuminate religious teachings about wisdom, history, peace, forgiveness, and divine metaphors. Also clarified in these essays are notions of David, Greek and Hebrew, divine metaphors, and the liturgical use of the Hebrew Bible.

This book presents an investigation of language contact, focusing on Northwestern China. It breaks down the barrier between human sciences and natural sciences in order to reconsider the diversity of languages on the basis of the latest research findings from genetics, linguistics, and other domains, offering valuable insights into when and how the divergence of languages and genes began and language and gene admixture and replacement occurred. The book focuses on language evolution between the border of Gansu and Qinghai Province in China, but the research doesn't neglect the area beyond China's northern borders. Manchu, a dying language belonging to the Tungusic group, is also studied to enhance our understanding of language replacement. This work is the result of a four-year collaboration between teams of geneticists and linguists in France and China.

This volume offers a timely collection of original research papers on the various features and issues surrounding Chinese English, one of the varieties in World Englishes with a large and increasing number of learners and users. The five sections entitled 'Researching Chinese English Pronunciation', 'Researching Chinese English Lexis, Grammar and Pragmatics', 'Researching Perceptions, Attitudes and Reactions towards Chinese English', 'Researching Cultural Conceptualizations and Identities in Chinese English', and 'Chinese Scholarship on Chinese English', bring together three generations of Chinese and overseas researchers, both established and emerging, who offer lively dialogues on the current research, development and future of Chinese English. The introductory chapter by the editors on the state-of-the-art of researching Chinese English, and a concluding chapter by a leading researcher in World Englishes on the future directions for researching Chinese English make this an essential title for those who wish to gain insights on Chinese English.

In an age of migration, in a world deeply divided through cultural differences and in the context of ongoing efforts to preserve national and regional traditions and identities, the issues of language and translation are becoming absolutely vital. At the heart of these complex, intercultural interactions are various types of agents, intermediaries and mediators, including translators, writers, artists, policy makers and publishers involved in the preservation or rejuvenation of literary and cultural repertoires, languages and identities. The major themes of this book include language and translation in the context of migration and diasporas, migrant experiences and identities, the translation from and into minority and lesser-used languages, but also, in a broader sense, the international circulation of texts, concepts and people. The volume offers a valuable resource for researchers in the field of translation studies, lecturers teaching translation at the university level and postgraduate students in translation studies. Further, it will benefit researchers in migration studies, linguistics, literary and cultural studies who are interested in learning how translation studies relates to other disciplines.

The Song of Songs, a lyric cycle of love scenes without a narrative plot, has often been considered as the Bible's most beautiful and enigmatic book. The present study questions the still dominant exegetical convention that merges all of the Song's voices into the dialogue of a single couple, its composite heroine Shulamit being a projection screen for norms of womanhood. An alternative socio-spatial reading, starting with the Hebrew text's strophic patterns and its references to historical realia, explores the poem's artful alternation between courtly, urban, rural, and pastoral scenes with their distinct characters. The literary construction of social difference juxtaposes class-specific patterns of consumption, mobility, emotion, power structures, and gender relations. This new image of the cycle as a detailed poetic frieze of ancient society eventually leads to a precise hypothesis concerning its literary and religious context in the Hellenistic age, as well as its geographical origins in the multiethnic borderland east of the Jordan. In a Jewish echo of anthropological skepticism, the poem emphasizes the plurality and relativity of the human condition while praising the communicative powers of pleasure, fantasy, and multifarious Eros.

This book provides an in-depth study of translation and translators in nineteenth-century Ireland, using translation history to widen our understanding of cultural exchange in the period. It paints a new picture of a transnational Ireland in contact with Europe, offering fresh perspectives on the historical, political and cultural debates of the era. Employing contemporary translation theories and applying them to Ireland's socio-historical past, the author offers novel insights on a large range of disciplines relating to the country, such as religion, gender, authorship and nationalism. She maps out new ways of understanding the impact of translation in society and re-examines assumptions about the place of language and Europe in nineteenth-century Ireland. By focusing on a period of significant linguistic and societal change, she questions the creative, conflictual and hegemonic energies unleashed by translations. This book will therefore be of interest to those working in Translation Studies, Irish Studies, History, Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies.

This book aims to explain social variation in language, otherwise the meaning and motivation of language change in its social aspect. It is the expanded and improved 2nd edition of the author's self-published volume with the same title, based on revised and adapted posts on the author's Languagelore blog. Each vignette calls attention to points of grammar and style in contemporary American English, especially cases where language is changing due to innovative usage. In every case where an analysis contains technical or recondite vocabulary, a Glossary precedes the body of the essay, and readers can also consult the Master Glossary which contains all items glossed in the text. The unique form of the book's presentation is aimed at readers who are alert to the peculiarities of present-day American English as they pertain to pronunciation, grammar, and style, without "dumbing down" or compromising the language in which the explanations are couched. Praise for the First Edition "Michael Shapiro is one of the great thinkers in the realm of linguistics and language use, and his integrated understanding of language and speech in its semantic and pragmatic structure, grammatical and historical grounding, and colloquial to literary stylistic variants is perhaps unmatched today. This book is a treasure to be shared." Robert S. Hatten, The University of Texas at Austin "Jewel of a book...a gift to us all from Michael Shapiro. Like a Medieval Chapbook it can be a kind of companion whose vignettes on language use can be randomly and profitably consulted at any moment. Some may consider these vignettes opinionated. That would be to ignore how deeply anchored each vignette is in Shapiro's long and rare polyglot experience with language. It could well serve as a night table book, taken up each night to read and reflect upon --to ponder--both in the twilight mind and in the deeper reaches of associative somnolence. There is nothing else like it that I know of." James W. Fernandez, The University of Chicago

This volume shows how the psychology and power of language can create realities. It examines the psychological implications of language as a way of being and not just as an instrument of communication. It discusses how a shift in language gives rise to an existential transformation, and shows how creative modes of expression lead to a radical transformation of beings. Throughout, both the theoretical and practical implications of the psychological power of language are presented, particularly how language may result in a healthier inter- and intrapersonal world. It will interest upper-level students and researchers of language in Psychology, Linguistics, Philosophy and Education, as well as professional counselors.

With several terms from the First World War still present in modern speech, Languages and the First World War presents over 30 essays by international academics investigating the linguistic aspects of the 1914-18 conflict. The first of the two volumes covers language change and documentation during the period of the war, while the second examines the representation and the memory of the war. Communicating in a Transnational War examines languages at the front, including the subject of interpretation, translation and parallels between languages; communication with the home front; propaganda and language manipulation; and recording language during the war. Representation and Memory examines historiographical issues; the nature of representing the war in letters and diaries; the documentation of language change; the language of representing the war in reportage and literature; and the language of remembering the war. Covered in the process are slang, censorship, soldiers' phrasebooks, code-switching, borrowing terms, the problems facing multilingual armies, and gendered language.

Do the languages people speak influence their economic decisions and social behavior in multilingual societies? This Handbook brings together scholars from various disciplines to examine the links and tensions between economics and language to find the delicate balance between monetary benefits and psychological costs of linguistic dynamics.

This book presents a novel experimental approach to investigating the mental representation of linguistic alternatives. Combining theoretical and psycholinguistic questions concerning the nature of alternative sets, it sheds new light on the theory of focus and the cognitive mechanisms underlying the processing of alternatives. In a series of language comprehension experiments, the author shows that intonational focus and focus particles such as 'only' shape the representation of alternatives in a listener's mind in a fundamental way. This book is relevant to researchers interested in semantics, pragmatics, language processing and memory.

This book presents a novel analysis of the learning of motion event descriptions by Anglophone students of Spanish. The author examines cross-linguistic differences between English and Spanish, focusing on the verbal patterns of motion events, to explore how learners overcome an entrenched first-language preference to move toward the lexicalization pattern of the additional language. His findings highlight the gradual nonlinear process Anglophones traverse to acquire and produce form-meaning mappings describing motion in Spanish. The author suggests that as motion event descriptions are not normally the focus of explicit instruction, students learn this concept primarily from exposure to Spanish. Given its interdisciplinary nature, this book will be of interest to researchers working in Hispanic linguistics, cognitive semantics, and Spanish language learning and teaching.

This book systematically examines the linguistic features and socio-cultural issues of 'Hong Kong English'. The author focuses on authentic data taken from the International Corpus of English (the Hong Kong component) and the Corpus of Global Web-based English to track the ways in which the English language in Hong Kong has been adapted by its users. She also analyses the emergence of new forms and structures in its grammar and discourse. While the phonetic and phonological aspects of this variety of English have been well documented, its grammatical peculiarities and social language use have been hitherto neglected. This book offers original insights into the grammatical and pragmatic/discoursal features of Hong Kong English and will therefore be of interest to those working in fields such as World Englishes and corpus linguistics.

This is a classic edition of Geoffrey Beattie's and Andrew Ellis' influential introduction to the psychology of human language and communication, now including a new reflective introduction from the authors. Drawing on elements from many sub-disciplines, including cognitive and social psychology, psycholinguistics and neuropsychology, the book offers an approach which breaches conventional disciplinary boundaries. Exploring the diverse nature of communication, Beattie and Ellis focus on the range of human communicative channels and the variations which occur both between and within societies and cultures. Written from an informative and entertaining historical perspective, The Psychology of Language and Communication remains a key resource for anyone interested in the psychology of communication, language and linguistics, 30 years on from its first publication.

This book explores pedagogical concepts, metaphors and images of non-white, non-western researchers and research students on the inter/nationalization of education. Specifically, this book draws on the intellectual resources of China and India to explore the pedagogical dynamics and dimensions of the localization/globalization of education with non-Western characteristics. It introduces theoretic-linguistic non-Western concepts from the Tamil, Sanskrit and Chinese languages for use in Western, English-only education and redefines the intellectual basis for internationalising education. Debating whether 'international education' is Western-centric in terms of its privileging and promotion of Euro-American theoretical knowledge, this book contends that the internationalisation of Western-centric education can benefit from the intellectual power and powerfully relevant theorising performed by non-Western international students. It formulates a democratic vision for the internationalisation of education, with the potential to create transnational solidarity and constitute a forum for mobilising debates about global knowledge and power structures. It also provides key tools to use non-Western theoretic-linguistic tools and modes of critique in research undertaken in Anglophone Western universities.