A History of the Spanish Language through Texts examines the evolution of the Spanish language from the Middle Ages to the present day. Pountain explores a wide range of texts from poetry, through newspaper articles and political documents, to a Bunuel film script and a love letter. With keypoints and a careful indexing and cross-referencing system this book can be used as a freestanding history of the language independently of the illustrative texts themselves.

Built on twenty years of fieldwork in rural Jiangyong of Hunan Province in south China, this book explores the world's only gender-defined and now disappearing "women's script" known as nushu. What drove peasant women to create a script of their own and write, and how do those writings throw new light on how gender is addressed in epistemology and historiography and how the unprivileged social class uses marginalized forms of expression to negotiate with the dominant social structure. Further, how have the politics of salvaging this disappearing centuries-old cultural heritage molded a new poetics in contemporary society? This book explores nushu in conjunction with the local women's singing tradition (nuge), tied into the life narratives of four women born in the 1910s, 1930s, and 1960s respectively, each representative in her own way: a nuge singer (majority of Jiangyong women), a child bride (enjoying not much nushu/nuge), the last living traditionally-trained nushu writer, and a new-generation nushu transmitter. Altogether, their stories unfold peasant women's lifeworlds and forefronts various aspects of China's changing social milieu over the past century. They show how nushu/nuge-registering women's sense and sensibilities and providing agency to subjects who have been silenced by history-constitute a reflexive social field whereby women share life stories to expand the horizon of their personal worldviews and probe beneath the surface of their existence for new inspiration in their process of becoming. With the concept of "expressive depths, " this book opens a new vista on how women express themselves through multiple forms that simultaneously echo and critique the mainstream social system and urges a rethinking of how forms of expression define and confine the voice carried. Examining the multiple efforts undertaken by scholars, local officials, and cultural entrepreneurs to revive nushu which have ironically threatened to disfigure its true face, this book poses a question of whither nushu? Should it be transformed, or has it reached a perfect end point from which to fade into history?

Essays on the complexity of multilingualism in medieval England. Professor Jocelyn Wogan-Browne's scholarship on the French of England - a term she indeed coined for the mix of linguistic, cultural, and political elements unique to the pluri-lingual situation of medieval England - is of immenseimportance to the field. The essays in this volume extend, honour and complement her path-breaking work. They consider exchanges between England and other parts of Britain, analysing how communication was effected where languagesdiffered, and probe cross-Channel relations from a new perspective. They also examine the play of features within single manuscripts, and with manuscripts in conversation with each other. And they discuss the continuing reach ofthe French of England beyond the Middle Ages: in particular, how it became newly relevant to discussions of language and nationalism in later centuries. Whether looking at primary sources such as letters and official documents, orat creative literature, both religious and secular, the contributions here offer fruitful and exciting approaches to understanding what the French of England can tell us about medieval Britain and the European world beyond. Thelma Fenster is Professor Emerita of French and Medieval Studies, Fordham University; Carolyn Collette is Professor of English Language and Literature at Mount Holyoke College. Contributors: Christopher Baswell,Emma Campbell, Paul Cohen, Carolyn Collette, Thelma Fenster, Robert Hanning, Richard Ingham, Maryanne Kowaleski, Serge Lusignan, Thomas O'Donnell, W. Mark Ormrod, Monika Otter, Felicity Riddy, Delbert Russell, Fiona Somerset, +Robert M. Stein, Andrew Taylor, Nicholas Watson, R.F. Yeager

What makes us laugh? Why is comedy so important? How does comedy affect our behaviour? The Psychology of Comedy provides a unique insight into the role of laughter and humour in our lives. From the mechanics of comedy and what makes a good joke, to the health benefits of laughter, the book delves into different types of comedy, from slapstick to complex puns, and the physiological response it provokes. The dark side of comedy is also considered, confronting the idea that what is funny to some can be offensive to others, making this universal experience also highly subjective. In a time when comedy continues to be one of the most popular and enduring forms of art, The Psychology of Comedy reminds us that laughter really is good for the soul.

What did eighth century Japanese sound like? How does one decode its complex script? This book provides the definitive answers to these questions using an unprecedented range of data from the past and the present, including Chinese, Vietnamese, Sanskrit and Tibetan sources, and enables the reader to approximate the original pronunciation of Old Japanese literature.

This innovative study on the phenomenon of 'grammaticalization' and its manifestation in Chinese provides new insights into language change in Chinese and a large number of grammatical topics. Grammaticalization occurs in all of the world's languages. Xiu-Zhi Zoe Wu demonstrates general linguistic principles present and active in the phenomenon of grammaticalization whilst also describing the modelling of language in formal theoretical approaches to syntax; so this book fills two major gaps in the current study of linguistics. Grammaticalization and Language Change in Chinese illuminates how studies of language development and change provide special insights into the understanding of current, synchronic systems of language. Using patters from Chinese, the author establishes cross-linguistic generalizations about language change and grammaticalization. This book should be of great interest to Chinese linguists and readers interested in language change in different languages.

First published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book presents the first detailed analysis of the mechanism of translating the Polish past tense into French. Grounded in the field of aspectual research, this study bridges the gap between theory and practice by presenting a set of equivalency rules for Polish past imperfective verb forms and French past tenses. Drawing on a wide selection of Polish literary texts and their translations into French, the author analyses the translation of Polish past imperfective verbs in factual contexts and their actual uses in narration. Using the semantic theory of aspect developed by Stanislaw Karolak, the author establishes rules of equivalency for imperfective uses in both languages as well as rules of equivalency between Polish past imperfective verbs and perfect tenses in French (passe compose, passe simple and plus-que-parfait). The translation rules developed in this study can be applied directly in translation practice as well as providing a resource for scholars of the French and Polish languages. Additionally, this book lays the foundation for future contrastive studies on aspect in languages from different language families.

This study focuses on the devices implemented in Classical Indian texts on ritual and language in order to develop a structure of rules in an economic and systematic way. These devices presuppose a spatial approach to ritual and language, one which deals for instance with absences as substitutions within a pre-existing grid, and not as temporal disappearances. In this way, the study reveals a key feature of some among the most influential schools of Indian thought. The sources are Kalpasutra, Vyakarana and Mimamsa, three textual traditions which developed alongside each other, sharing - as the volume shows - common presuppositions and methodologies. The book will be of interest for Sanskritists, scholars of ritual exegesis and of the history of linguistics.

This volume commemorates the 20th anniversary of Michael Clyne's seminal volume "Pluricentric languages. Differing norms in different countries" published in 1992. The main focus of this volume is the exploration of linguistic standards in non-dominant varieties and the discovery of the ways in which different language communities of non-dominant varieties reconcile their wish to express their national, social and personal identity via language with their desire to adhere to a common language. Another central focus is the way in which the norms of languages, and in particular those of non-dominant varieties of pluricentric languages, can be standardized or how given standards can be changed. The papers show that the state of standardization in pluricentric languages may differ strongly from language to language and also differ between varieties of the same language. El libro conmemora el vigesimo aniversario del influyente volumen publicado por Michael Clyne en 1992, "Pluricentric languages. Differing norms in different countries". El objetivo principal consiste en "explorar estandares linguisticos en variedades no dominantes" e indagar como las diferentes comunidades linguisticas reconcilian la pretension de expresar su propia identidad nacional, social y personal a traves del lenguaje con su mismo deseo de adherencia a una lengua comun. Otra cuestion central atiende a la manera en que las normas linguisticas y, en particular, las normas de las variedades linguisticas de lenguas pluricentricas pueden convertirse en estandares o como los estandares establecidos pueden ser modificados. Los diversos articulos muestran que la situacion y el grado de estandarizacion en las diversas lenguas pluricentricas pueden diferir en gran manera entre las distintas lenguas y entre variedades diferentes de una misma lengua.

Masked priming has a short and somewhat controversial history. When used as a tool to study whether semantic processing can occur in the absence of conscious awareness, considerable debate followed, mainly about whether masked priming truly tapped unconscious processes. For research into other components of visual word processing, however - in particular, orthographic, phonological, and morphological - a general consensus about the evidence provided by masked priming results has emerged. This book contains thirteen original chapters in which these three components of visual word processing are examined using the masked priming procedure. The chapters showcase the advantages of masked priming as an alternative to more standard methods of studying language processing that require comparisons of matched items. Based on a recent conference, this book offers up-to-date research findings, and would be valuable to researchers and students of word recognition, psycholinguistics, or reading.

This book was first published in 1947.

This book was first published in 1963.

What are the psychological processes involved in comprehending sentences? How do we process the structure of sentences and how do we understand their meaning? Do children, bilinguals and people with language impairments process sentences in the same way as healthy monolingual adults? These are just some of the many questions that sentence processing researchers have tried to answer by conducting ever more sophisticated experiments, making this one of the most productive and exciting areas in experimental language research in recent years.

This book is the first to provide a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of this important field. It contains 10 chapters written by world-leading experts, which discuss influential theories of sentence processing and important experimental evidence, with a focus on recent developments in the area. The chapters also analyse research that has investigated how people process the structure and meaning of sentences, and how sentences are understood within their context.

This comprehensive and authoritative work will appeal to students and researchers in the field of sentence processing, as well anyone with an interest in psychology and linguistics.

This corpus-based study examines the orthographic systems in thirteen editions of the Kalender of Shepherdes (1506-1656), a comprehensive compendium of prose and verse texts of different length and on a variety of subjects, for example, astronomy, agriculture, medicine, and religion. It focuses on the variation and consistency levels in the early-modern printers' spelling practice, and evaluates the potential importance of extra-linguistic motivation for the identified regularising changes from the language authorities of the time, including lexicographers, spelling reformers, orthoepists, grammarians, and schoolmasters. Additionally, the book provides the reader with a brief overview of the printers' punctuation, capitalisation, and word-division conventions, as well as with selected bibliographical and textual information concerning the publication history of the Kalender of Shepherdes.

What are the psychological processes involved in comprehending sentences? How do we process the structure of sentences and how do we understand their meaning? Do children, bilinguals and people with language impairments process sentences in the same way as healthy monolingual adults? These are just some of the many questions that sentence processing researchers have tried to answer by conducting ever more sophisticated experiments, making this one of the most productive and exciting areas in experimental language research in recent years. This book is the first to provide a comprehensive, state-of-the-art overview of this important field. It contains 10 chapters written by world-leading experts, which discuss influential theories of sentence processing and important experimental evidence, with a focus on recent developments in the area. The chapters also analyse research that has investigated how people process the structure and meaning of sentences, and how sentences are understood within their context. This comprehensive and authoritative work will appeal to students and researchers in the field of sentence processing, as well anyone with an interest in psychology and linguistics.

This volume is an attempt to expound the current state of research into the past of the Basque language. This research has experienced two kinds of advance in recent years. First, more written records have been discovered, and the ones that we already knew have been more deeply studied. Second, since the 70s cross-linguistic typology has made huge progress in our knowledge of linguistic universals and grammaticalization paths. The purpose of this volume is precisely to provide an outline, comprehensible for Bascologists and diachronic typologists alike, of how these two aspects can help us to reconstruct, within the limits permitted by the principles of diachronic research, the main linguistic features of Common Basque (ca. 5th-6th cc. AD), Proto-Basque (ca. 3rd-1st cc. BC), and Pre-Proto-Basque.

In a series of cross-cultural investigations of word meaning, Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka examine key expressions from different domains of the lexicon - concrete, abstract, physical, sensory, emotional, and social. They focus on complex and culturally important words in a range of languages that includes English, Russian, Polish, French, Warlpiri and Malay. Some are basic like men, women, and children or abstract nouns like trauma and violence; others describe qualities such as hot, hard, and rough, emotions like happiness and sadness, or feelings like pain. This fascinating book is for everyone interested in the relations between meaning, culture, ideas, and words. They ground their discussions in real examples from different cultures and draw on work ranging from Leibniz, Locke, and Bentham, to popular works such as autobiographies and memoirs, and the Dalai Lama on happiness. The book opens with a review of the neglected status of lexical semantics in linguistics. The authors consider a range of analytical issues including lexical polysemy, semantic change, the relationship between lexical and grammatical semantics, and the concepts of semantic molecules and templates. Their fascinating book is for everyone interested in the relations between meaning, culture, ideas, and words.

First published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Psycholinguistics is an interdisciplinary field, and hence relationships are at its heart. First and foremost is the relationship between its two parent disciplines, psychology and linguistics, a relationship which has changed and advanced over the half century of the field's independent existence. At the beginning of the 21st Century, psycholinguistics forms part of the rapidly developing enterprise known as cognitive neuroscience, in which the relationship between biology and behavior plays a central role. Psycholinguistics is about language in communication, so that the relationship between language production and comprehension has always been important, and as psycholinguistics is an experimental discipline, it is likewise essential to find the right relationship between model and experiment. This book focuses in turn on each of these four cornerstone relationships: Psychology and Linguistics, Biology and Behavior, Production and Comprehension, and Model and Experiment. The authors are from different disciplinary backgrounds, but share a commitment to clarify the ways that their research illuminates the essential nature of the psycholinguistic enterprise.

Language and Identity in Englishes examines the core issues and debates surrounding the relationship between English, language and identity. Drawing on a range of international examples from the UK, US, China and India, Clark uses both cutting-edge fieldwork and her own original research to give a comprehensive account of the study of language and identity.

Key features include:

• Discussion of language in relation to various aspects of identity, such as those connected with nation and region, as well as in relation to social aspects such as social class and race.
• A chapter on undertaking research that will equip students with appropriate research methods for their own projects
• An analysis of language and identity within the context of written as well as spoken texts

With its accessible structure, international scope and the inclusion of leading research in the area, this book is ideal for any student taking modules in language and identity or sociolinguistics.

Archaeology and Language I represents groundbreaking work in synthesizing two disciplines that are now seen as interlinked: linguistics and archaeology. This volume is the first of a three-part survey of innovative results emerging from their combination. Archaeology and historical linguistics have largely pursued separate tracks until recently, although their goals can be very similar. While there is a new awareness that these disciplines can be used to complement one another, both rigorous methodological awareness and detailed case-studies are still lacking in literature. Archaeology and Language I aims to fill this lacuna. Exploring a wide range of techniques developed by specialists in each discipline, this first volume deals with broad theoretical and methodological issues and provides an indispensable background to the detail of the studies presented in volumes II and III. This collection deals with the controversial question of the origin of language, the validity of deep-level reconstruction, the sociolinguistic modelling of prehistory and the use and value of oral tradition.

The Routledge Companion to the Hispanic Enlightenment is an interdisciplinary volume that brings together an international team of contributors to provide a unique transnational overview of the Hispanic Enlightenment, integrating both Spain and Latin America. Challenging the usual conceptions of the Enlightenment in Spain and Latin America as mere stepsisters to Enlightenments in other countries, the Companion explores the existence of a distinctive Hispanic Enlightenment. The interdisciplinary approach makes it an invaluable resource for students of Hispanic studies and researchers unfamiliar with the Hispanic Enlightenment, introducing them to the varied aspects of this rich cultural period including the literature, visual art, and social and cultural history.

This book presents a comprehensive and critical overview of historical phonology as it stands today. Scholars from around the world consider and advance research in every aspect of the field. In doing so they demonstrate the continuing vitality of one of the oldest sub-disciplines of linguistics. The book is divided into six parts. The first considers key current research questions, the early history of the field, and the structuralist context for work on sound change. The second examines evidence and methods, including phonological reconstruction, typology, and computational and quantitative approaches. Part III looks at types of phonological change, including stress, tone, and morphophonological change. Part IV explores a series of controversial aspects within the field, including the effects of first language acquisition, the mechanisms of lexical diffusion, and the role of individuals in innovation. Part V considers the main theoretical perspectives including those of evolutionary phonology and generative historical phonology. The final part examines sociolinguistic and exogenous factors in phonological change, including the study of change in real time, the role of second language acquisition, and loanword adaptation. The authors, who represent leading proponents of every theoretical perspective, consider phonological change over a wide range of the world's language families. The handbook is, in sum, a valuable resource for phonologists and historical linguists and a stimulating guide for their students.

A Literary Map of Spain in the 21st Century is a unique scholarly publication that participates in the debates of literary researchers by exploring the linguistic and literary map of Spain in the twenty-first century. Each chapter is centered in a particular cultural and linguistic area of Spain; and there the study extrapolates to other regions of interest. This book covers all or at least most of the sociolinguistic and literary environments of Spain. It is a comprehensive study of the new trends and attitudes towards linguistic and literary coexistence in a linguistically diverse nation. By painting a panoramic retrospective view of the evolution of this coexistence during the twenty-first century, Graciela Susana Boruszko brings new light to the current global scenario. The comparative approach of the study constitutes an excellent scholar contribution to the field of comparative literature and linguistics, Spanish linguistics, and Spanish cultural studies. While being centered in literary and linguistic analysis, this book will also appeal to scholars in adjacent academic fields, such as political science, sociology, sociolinguistics, ethnolinguistics, psycholinguistics, contemporary history, social studies, cultural studies, intercultural studies, gender studies, and European studies.