This book argues that many of the most prominent features of oral epic poetry in a number of traditions can best be understood as adaptations or stylizations of conversational language use, and advances the claim that if we can understand how conversation is structured, it will aid our understanding of oral traditions. In this study that carefully compares the "special grammar" of oral traditions to the "grammar" of everyday conversation as understood in the field of conversation analysis, Raymond Person demonstrates that traditional phraseology, including formulaic language, is an adaptation of practices in turn construction in conversation, such as sound-selection of words and prosody, and that thematic structures are adaptations of sequence organization in talk-in-interaction. From this he concludes that the "special grammar" of oral traditions can be understood as an example of institutional talk that exaggerates certain conversational practices for aesthetic purposes and that draws from cognitive resources found in everyday conversation. Person's research will be of interest to conversation analysts as well as literary scholars, especially those interested in ancient and medieval literature, the comparative study of oral traditions and folklore, and linguistic approaches to literature. This volume lays the groundwork for further interdisciplinary work bridging the fields of literature and linguistics.

Addressing a rapidly growing interest in second language research, this hands-on text provides students and researchers with the means to understand and use current methods in psycholinguistics. With a focus on the actual methods, designs, and techniques used in psycholinguistics research as they are applied to second language learners, this book offers the practical guidance readers need to determine which method is the best for what they wish to investigate as well as the tools that will enhance their research. Each methods chapter is written by a leading expert who describes, discusses, and comments on how a method is used and what its strengths and limitations are for second language research. These chapters follow a specific format to ensure cohesion and a predictable structure across all chapters. The chapters also inform the novice researcher on such key issues as ease of use, costs, potential pitfalls, and other related matters, each of which impact decisions that researchers make about the paths they take. With the most reliable information available from experienced reseachers, Research Methods in Second Language Psycholinguistics is an essential resource for anyone interested in conducting second language reserach using psycholinguistic methods.

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

This book proposes a detailed picture of the continuities and ruptures between communication in primates and language in humans. It explores a diversity of perspectives on the origins of language, including a fine description of vocal communication in animals, mainly in monkeys and apes, but also in birds, the study of vocal tract anatomy and cortical control of the vocal productions in monkeys and apes, the description of combinatory structures and their social and communicative value, and the exploration of the cognitive environment in which language may have emerged from nonhuman primate vocal or gestural communication.

In The Conspiracy of the Text, first published in 1986, Jeff Adams looks at an early stage in childhood to examine the ways in which children create social organisation and moral order. Adams shows how certain narratives, such as fairy tales, serve as a foundation for this system, and does this through a fascinating linguistic analysis of a young girl's reading of her favourite fairy tale, Beauty and the Beast. This title will be of interest to students of literary theory and linguistics.

The MS 133 Digby Mary Magdalene has commonly been investigated by paying attention to literary features, while linguistic aspects have seldom been taken into consideration, with the result that any deviation from the norm has been classified as scribal inconsistency. However, what has been regarded as scribal carelessness actually seems to be a modern misunderstanding of scribal practices. Indeed, the significant combination of Southern, Midlands and Northern elements featuring in the language of Mary Magdalene is the result of the scribe's desire to faithfully reproduce the author's design, in which variants may have a marked social function. We can thus infer that the Mary Magdalene author probably created a sort of biblical koine, shared with the audience, which was realized with the linguistic varieties offered by the existing late Middle English dialects and clearly exploited not only for poetic but also, and above all, for religious purposes. At the same time, the text puts an innovative emphasis on the figure of Mary Magdalene, who simultaneously plays the role of sinner and saint, virgin and prostitute, female and male. Thanks to the methodological approach of this volume, the author shows that most unusual forms are diatopic and diastratic alternatives used in specific religious contexts to realize well-defined sociolinguistic purposes.

Cognitive Sociolinguistics is a novel and burgeoning field of research which seeks to foster investigation into the socio-cognitive dimensions of language at a usage-based level. Advances in Cognitive Sociolinguistics brings together ten studies into the social and conceptual aspects of language-internal variation. All ten contributions rely on a firm empirical basis in the form of advanced corpus-based techniques, experimental methods and survey-based research, or a combination of these. The search for methods that may adequately unravel the complex and multivariate dimensions intervening in the interplay between conceptual meaning and variationist factors is thus another characteristic of the volume. In terms of its descriptive scope, the volume covers three main areas: lexical and lexical-semantic variation, constructional variation, and research on lectal attitudes and acquisition. It thus illustrates how Cognitive Sociolinguistics studies both the variation of meaning, and the meaning of variation.

Schizophrenia is one of the most enigmatic mental disorders, and language is one of its most essential and distinctive traits. Language and Schizophrenia provides a complete overview of schizophrenic language, utilising both psychological and philosophical perspectives to explore the unique way language impacts on this mental disorder. Language and Schizophrenia investigates specific features of schizophrenic language using cognitive psychology alongside the opposing field of phenomenological psychiatry, concluding that neither of these approaches fully succeeds in explaining the linguistic features unique to Schizophrenia. Cardella's innovative approach of combining psychological perspectives with philosophy offers a direct alternative to traditional cognitive perspectives, emphasising the fundamental role that language plays in the disorder. This book provides a thorough analysis of the deep link between language and schizophrenia and will be of great value to researchers and postgraduates studying schizophrenia, phenomenology, neuropsychology and philosophy of language.

This book brings together experts from the fields of linguistics, psychology and neuroscience to explore how a multidisciplinary approach can impact on research into the neurocognition of language. International contributors present cutting-edge research from cognitive and developmental psychology, neuropsychology, psycholinguistics and computer science, and discuss how this contributes to neuropsycholinguistics, a term coined by Jean-Luc Nespoulous, to whom this book is dedicated. Chapters illustrate how researchers with different methods and theoretical backgrounds can contribute to a unified vision of the study of language cognition. Reinterpreting neuropsycholinguistics through the lens of each research field, the book demonstrates important attempts to adopt a comprehensive view of speech and language pathology. Divided into three sections the book covers: linguistic mechanisms and the architecture of language the relationship between language and other cognitive processes the assessment of speech and language disabilities and compensatory mechanisms. Neuropsycholinguistic Perspectives on Language Cognition presents a unique contribution to cognitive science and language science, from linguistics to neuroscience. It will interest academics and scholars in the field, as well as medical researchers, psychologists, and speech and language therapists.

Schizophrenia is one of the most enigmatic mental disorders, and language is one of its most essential and distinctive traits. Language and Schizophrenia provides a complete overview of schizophrenic language, utilising both psychological and philosophical perspectives to explore the unique way language impacts on this mental disorder. Language and Schizophrenia investigates specific features of schizophrenic language using cognitive psychology alongside the opposing field of phenomenological psychiatry, concluding that neither of these approaches fully succeeds in explaining the linguistic features unique to Schizophrenia. Cardella's innovative approach of combining psychological perspectives with philosophy offers a direct alternative to traditional cognitive perspectives, emphasising the fundamental role that language plays in the disorder. This book provides a thorough analysis of the deep link between language and schizophrenia and will be of great value to researchers and postgraduates studying schizophrenia, phenomenology, neuropsychology and philosophy of language.

The Language of Branding: Theory, Strategies and Tactics shows marketers how to use language successfully to improve brand value and influence consumer behavior. Luna and Lerman are among only a few researchers who take a multidisciplinary perspective on the ways language influences how consumers act. Together with Morais, an anthropologist engaged in market research, they show how understanding the power of language can impact the essence - and sales - of a brand. The book covers the fundamentals of brand language and applications for an array of marketing initiatives. Readers will learn why brand language matters, how language is used in marketing, and how to build a brand strategy that capitalizes on the richness and complexity of language. This book includes real-world case histories that demonstrate vividly how brand language is created and exercises that enable both students of marketing and marketing professionals to apply the book's concepts and stimulate class discussion. The Language of Branding: Theory, Strategies and Tactics can be used in a number of courses, including consumer behavior, branding, advertising, linguistics, and communications.

This text offers an interdisciplinary account of reference and categorization within the framework of cognitive linguistics. Central issues are the distinction between lexical vagueness and polysemy as well as the creation of new meanings in English and German. Polysemy is resolved by a computational implementation in a machine-translation system.

The classification of words in terms of parts of speech is frequently problematic. This book examines the classification of conjunctions and similar words of other classes. It reviews work done from the 19th century to the present on a wide range of languages, including English, German, French, Latin, Ancient Greek, Welsh, Persian, Chinese, Japanese, Ute, and Abun. Most chapters treat conjunctions as opposed to one of the other traditionally recognized parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, adpositions, and interjections. The book's major focus is on the terminology used to describe words on or near the borders between conjunctions and other parts of speech, such as "deverbal conjunctions", "conjunctional adverbs", "prepositional conjunctions", and "so-called conjunctions".

This book is an interdisciplinary study of English binominal quantitative constructions based on English-Chinese comparison. Taking three perspectives, i.e. a functional-typological perspective, a cognitive approach, and a corpus-based method, it aims to unveil the hidden categorisation process behind the usage of English binominal quantitative constructions and to reveal the language universal in cognising the concepts of 'Quantity' and 'Quality'. It argues against treating Chinese and English as members of two opposing typological camps concerning quantification modes ('classifier languages' versus 'non-classifier languages') and advocates to view the two languages as lying within a more extended and inclusive system, viz. a system of quantification and categorisation modes, or a Quantity-Quality continuum.

In Basic Linguistic Theory R. M. W. Dixon provides a new and fundamental characterization of the nature of human languages and a comprehensive guide to their description and analysis. In three clearly written and accessible volumes, he describes how best to go about doing linguistics, the most satisfactory and profitable ways to work, and the pitfalls to avoid. In the first volume he addresses the methodology for recording, analysing, and comparing languages. He argues that grammatical structures and rules should be worked out inductively on the basis of evidence, explaining in detail the steps by which an attested grammar and lexicon can built up from observed utterances. He shows how the grammars and words of one language may be compared to others of the same or different families, explains the methods involved in cross-linguistic parametric analyses, and describes how to interpret the results. Volume 2 and volume 3 (to be published in 2011) offer in-depth tours of underlying principles of grammatical organization, as well as many of the facts of grammatical variation. 'The task of the linguist, ' Professor Dixon writes, 'is to explain the nature of human languages - each viewed as an integrated system - together with an explanation of why each language is the way it is, allied to the further scientific pursuits of prediction and evaluation.'
Basic Linguistic Theory is the triumphant outcome of a lifetime's thinking about every aspect and manifestation of language and immersion in linguistic fieldwork. It is a one-stop text for undergraduate and graduate students of linguistics, as well as for those in neighbouring disciplines, such as psychology and anthropology.

In Subjectivity, Language and the Postcolonial, Hannah Botsis draws on theoretical work that exists at the intersection of critical social psychology, sociolinguistics and the political economy of language, to examine the relationships between language, subjectivity, materiality and political context. The book foregrounds the ways in which the work of Bourdieu could be read in conjunction with 'poststructural' theorists such as Butler and Derrida to offer a critical understanding of subjectivity, language and power in postcolonial contexts. This critical engagement with theorists traditionally from outside of psychology allows for a situated approach to understanding the embodied and symbolic possibilities and constraints for the postcolonial subject. This exploration opens up how micro-politics of power are refracted through ideological categories such as language, race and class in post-apartheid South Africa. Also drawing on the empirical findings of original research undertaken in the South African context on students' linguistic biographies, the book offers a unique perspective - critical social theory is brought to bear on the empirical linguistic biographies of postcolonial subjects, offering insight into how power is negotiated in the postcolonial symbolic economy. Ideal for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students on courses including social psychology, sociolinguistics, sociology, politics, and education, this is an invaluable resource for students and researchers alike.

This volume illustrates how language revival movements in Russia and elsewhere have often followed a specific pattern of literacy bias in the promotion of a minority's heritage language, partly neglecting the social and relational aspects of orality. Using the Vepsian Renaissance as an example, this volume brings to the surface a literacy-orality dualism new to the discussion around revival movements. In addition to the more-theoretically oriented scopes, this book addresses all the actors involved in revival movements including activists, scholars and policy-makers, and opens a discussion on literacy and orality, and power and agency in the multiple relational aspects of written and oral practices. This study addresses issues common to language revival movements worldwide and will appeal to researchers of linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, education and language policy, and culture studies.

The volume explores the ways in which language change is studied within the framework of Cognitive Linguistics, a semantics-based theory of language production and perception. The eleven chapters explore two kinds of changes: firstly, those which involve mental prototypes or 'best instances' of particular concepts and extensions of these prototypes, and secondly, those which relate to conceptual networks, for example via metaphor or metonymy. More specifically, the papers address syntactic and lexical change, as well as the evolution of language and changes in the expression - usually metaphoric - of emotions. In presenting a wide range of current work of this kind, the volume demonstrates the value of cross-fertilization between historical and cognitive linguistics, and is intended to open the way for further related research. The included papers are of particular relevance to those working in metaphor theory and syntactic / semantic change within Cognitive Linguistics, but will also be of interest to other historical linguists and those studying cognitive semantics and metaphor from a synchronic viewpoint.

Corpus Linguistics for Vocabulary provides a practical introduction to using corpus linguistics in vocabulary studies. Using freely available corpus tools, the author provides a step-by-step guide on how corpora can be used to explore key vocabulary-related research questions and topics such as: The frequency of English words and how to choose which ones should be taught to learners; How spoken vocabulary differs from written vocabulary, and how academic vocabulary differs from general vocabulary; How vocabulary contributes to the structure of discourse, and the pragmatic functions it fulfils. Featuring case studies and tasks throughout, Corpus Linguistics for Vocabulary provides a clear and accessible guide and is essential reading for students and teachers wanting to understand, appreciate and conduct corpus-based research in vocabulary studies.

This volume focuses on early modern Italy and some of its key multilingual zones: Venice, Florence, and Rome. It offers a novel insight into the interplay and dynamic exchange of languages in the Italian peninsula, from the early fifteenth to the early seventeenth centuries. In particular, it examines the flexible linguistic practices of both the social and intellectual elite, and the men and women from the street. The point of departure of this project is the realization that most of the early modern speakers and authors demonstrate strong self-awareness as multilingual communicators. From the foul-mouthed gondolier to the learned humanist, language choice and use were carefully performed, and often justified, in order to overcome (or affirm) linguistic and social differences. The urban social spaces, the princely court, and the elite centres of learning such as universities and academies all shared similar concerns about the value, effectiveness, and impact of languages. As the contributions in this book demonstrate, early modern communicators - including gondoliers, preachers, humanists, architects, doctors of medicine, translators, and teachers-made explicit and argued choices about their use of language. The textual and oral performance of languages-and self-aware discussions on languages-consolidated the identity of early modern Italian multilingual communities.

Corpus Linguistics for Vocabulary provides a practical introduction to using corpus linguistics in vocabulary studies. Using freely available corpus tools, the author provides a step-by-step guide on how corpora can be used to explore key vocabulary-related research questions and topics such as: The frequency of English words and how to choose which ones should be taught to learners; How spoken vocabulary differs from written vocabulary, and how academic vocabulary differs from general vocabulary; How vocabulary contributes to the structure of discourse, and the pragmatic functions it fulfils. Featuring case studies and tasks throughout, Corpus Linguistics for Vocabulary provides a clear and accessible guide and is essential reading for students and teachers wanting to understand, appreciate and conduct corpus-based research in vocabulary studies.

This book is a collection of eight articles by leading scholars investigating of the acquisition of English by native speakers of Japanese. It deals with a wide range of topics from the acquisiton of VP structures to functional categories and presents new empirical data. The studies all contribute to our understanding of these topics, and they are of current interest to researchers working on Second Language Acquisition.

The relationship between the individual and the community is at the core of sociolinguistic theorizing. To date, most longitudinal research has been conducted on the basis of trend studies, such as replications of cross-sectional studies, or comparisons between present-day cross-sectional data and 'legacy' data. While the past few years have seen an increasing interest in panel research, much of this work has been published in a variety of formats and languages and is thus not easily accessible. This edited volume brings together the major researchers in the field of panel research, highlighting connections and convergences across and between chapters, methods and findings with the aim of initiating a dialogue about best practices and ways forward in sociolinguistic panel studies. By providing, for the first time, a platform for key research on panel data in one coherent edition, this volume aims to shape the agenda in this increasingly vibrant field of research.

This book advocates for a new model of describing the practices of language revitalization, and decolonizing the research methods used to study them. The volume provides a comprehensive treatment of the theoretical and methodological foundations of working with communities revitalizing their languages. It lays out the conceptual framework at the heart of the project and moves into a description of the model, based on a seven-year research process working with Aboriginal communities in eastern Australia. Six case studies show the model's application in language revival practice. The book critically engages with the notion of revival languages as emergent and ever-transforming and develops a holistic approach to their description that reflects Aboriginal language practitioners' understandings of the nature of language. It seeks to demonstrate how the conceptual tools developed from this approach can support efforts to develop deeply collaborative research, highlight the diversity of language revitalisation practice and map between the realms of old and new, local and global, and the social, cultural, and textual dimensions of language, making this an ideal resource for researchers and scholars in sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, education, cultural studies, and post-colonial studies.

This book offers a novel perspective on the intersection of translation and narration in literary translation by investigating how three translations of Shuihu Zhuan present the original narrative mode to the target readership in terms of four narrative elements-voice, commentary, point of view and motif-in different periods of history. It not only validates but also quantifies the differences in strategy-making patterns between translators, as well as between different narratological categories. The established theoretical frameworks (including a narrative-descriptive model and a sociological explanatory framework) and the data collected may provide methodological and empirical support for further studies on shifts of narrative features in translation. The tendencies manifested by different translators and identified by the study may also shed new light on the teaching and learning of translation skills. The book offers a valuable reference guide for scholars, practitioners, translators and graduate students in the fields of e.g. language, translation, literature and cultural studies, and for anyone with an interest in Chinese classical literature, Chinese-English translation, narrative studies or cross-cultural studies.