What do English-speaking Canadians sound like and why? Can you tell the difference between a Canadian and an American? A Canadian and an Englishman? If so, how? Linguistically speaking is Canada a colony of Britain or a satellite of the United States? Is there a Canadian language? Speaking Canadian English, first published in 1971, in a non-technical way, describes English as it is spoken in Canada - its vocabulary, pronunciation, syntax, grammar, spelling, slang. This title comments on the history of Canadian English - how it came to sound the way it does - and attempts to predict what will happen to it in the future. This book will be of interest to students of linguistics.

First published in 1986, this book focuses on Anaphoric relations in the English and French languages, a phenomenon that involves a complex interaction between grammar and discourse. Studies of anaphora taking a largely 'textual' approach to the subject have tended to underestimate the effect upon its formation of referential and discourse factors, while studies framed within a psycholinguistic and computational perspective have been inclined to minimise the importance of the purely linguistic features connected with anaphora. This volume places the study of anaphora upon a firmer foundation by examining both its nature and functions in discourse, by pinpointing the range of factors relevant to its operation in the two languages under study, and by attempting to relate the textual and interactional perspectives within a more comprehensive framework.

First published in 1988, this book provides an easily accessible handbook of knowledge about the languages of Ghana; their geographical distribution, their relationships with each other, the social patterns of their use, and their structures. Besides the general introduction, it contains chapters on each of the individually recognised families of languages spoken in Ghana: Gur, Volta-Comoe, Gbe, Ga-Dangme, Central-Tongo and Mande. An additional chapter outlines the use of non-indigenous languages in the country.

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in the lexicon. The demand for a fuller and more adequate understanding of lexical meaning required by developments in computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science has stimulated a refocused interest in linguistics, psychology, and philosophy. Different disciplines have studied lexical structure from their own vantage points, and because scholars have only intermittently communicated across disciplines, there has been little recognition that there is a common subject matter. The conference on which this volume is based brought together interested thinkers across the disciplines of linguistics, philosophy, psychology, and computer science to exchange ideas, discuss a range of questions and approaches to the topic, consider alternative research strategies and methodologies, and formulate interdisciplinary hypotheses concerning lexical organization. The essay subjects discussed include: * alternative and complementary conceptions of the structure of the lexicon, * the nature of semantic relations and of polysemy, * the relation between meanings, concepts, and lexical organization, * critiques of truth-semantics and referential theories of meaning, * computational accounts of lexical information and structure, and * the advantages of thinking of the lexicon as ordered.

History and Development of the Arabic Language is a general introduction for students to the history of the Arabic language. It is divided into two parts; the pre-Islamic language up to the emergence of the first well-known works of Classical Arabic. Secondly, the transition from the pre-Islamic situation to the complex Arabic language forms after the emergence of Islam and the Arab conquests, both in Arabia and in the diaspora. The book focuses on the pre-Islamic linguistic situation, where the linguistic geography and relevant demographic aspects of pre-Islamic Arabia will be introduced. In addition, the book will also discuss the communicative contexts and varieties of Modern Arabic. The book includes readings, discussion questions and data sets to provide a complete textbook and resource for teachers and students of the history of Arabic.

Frank Smith is internationally acclaimed as an essential contributor to research on the nature of reading and as an originator of the modern psycholinguistic approach to reading instruction. In his publications his aim has always been to support teachers, to encourage them to make teaching decisions based on knowledge and understanding, to analyze what their students are trying to do and why what the students are doing doesn't always correspond with what they are expected to do. Now the major topics addressed in his work are available in one volume, Landmarks in Literacy, a thoughtfully crafted selection of 16 of his key writings. In the World Library of Educationalists, international scholars themselves compile career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest works so the world can read them in a single manageable volume. Readers thus are able to follow the themes and strands of their work and see their contribution to the development of a field, as well as the development of the field itself.

Historical Sociolinguistics: Language Change in Tudor and Stuart England is the seminal text in the field of historical sociolinguistics. Demonstrating the real-world application of sociolinguistic research methodologies, this book examines the social factors which promoted linguistic changes in English, laying the foundation for Modern Standard English. This revised edition of Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg's ground-breaking work: discusses the grammatical developments that shaped English in the early modern period; presents the sociolinguistic factors affecting linguistic change in Tudor and Stuart English, including gender, social status, and regional variation; showcases the authors' research into personal letters from the people who were the driving force behind these changes; and demonstrates how historical linguists can make use of social and demographic history to analyse linguistic variation over an extended period of time. With brand new chapters on language change and the individual, and on newly developed sociolinguistic research methods, Historical Sociolinguistics is essential reading for all students and researchers in this area.

The Understanding Language series provides approachable, yet authoritative, introductions to all the major topics in linguistics. Ideal for students with little or no prior knowledge of linguistics, each book carefully explains the basics, emphasising understanding of the essential notions rather than arguing for a particular theoretical position. Understanding Language Change offers a complete introduction to historical linguistics and language change. The book takes a step-by-step approach, first by introducing concepts through English examples and building on this with illustrations from other languages. Key features of this introductory text include: up to date and recent case studies at the end of each chapter chapter summaries and exercises that feature a wide range of languages coverage of application of historical linguistics in each chapter glossary of terms This book is essential reading for any students studying Historical Linguistics for the first time.

One we've learned it as children few of us think much of the alphabet and its familiar sing-song order. And yet the order if the alphabet, that simple knowledge that we take for granted, plays a major role in our adult lives. From the school register to the telephone book, from dictionaries and encyclopaedias to library shelves, our lives are ordered from A to Z. Long before Google searches, this magical system of organization gave us the ability to sift through centuries of thought, knowledge and literature, allowing us to sort, to file, and to find the information we have, and to locate the information we need.

In A Place for Everything, acclaimed historian Judith Flanders draws our attention to both the neglected ubiquity of the alphabet and the long, complex history of its rise to prominence. For, while the order of the alphabet itself became fixed very soon after letters were first invented, their ability to sort and store and organize proved far less obvious. To many of our forebears, the idea of of organizing things by the random chance of the alphabet rather than by established systems of hierarchy or typology lay somewhere between unthinkable and disrespectful.

A Place for Everything fascinatingly lays out the gradual triumph of alphabetical order, from its possible earliest days as a sorting tool in the Great Library of Alexandria in the third century BCE, to its current decline in prominence in our digital age of Wikipedia and Google. Along the way, the reader is enlightened and entertained with a wonderful cast of unknown facts, characters and stories from the great collector Robert Cotton, who denominated his manuscripts with the names of the busts of the Roman emperors surmounting his book cases, to the unassuming sixteenth- century London bookseller who ushered in a revolution by listing his authors by 'sirname' first.

This book collects Joseph Greenberg's most important writings on the genetic classification of the world's languages. Fifty years ago Joseph Greenberg put forward the now widely accepted classification of African languages. This book charts the progress of his subsequent work on language classification in Oceania, the Americas, and Eurasia, in which he proposed the language families Indo-Pacific, Amerind and Eurasiatic. It shows how he established and deployed three fundamental principles: that the most reliable evidence for genetic classification is the pairing of sound and meaning; that nonlinguistic evidence, such as skin colour or cultural traits, should be excluded from the analysis; and that the vocabulary and inflections of a very large number of languages should be simultaneously compared.The volume includes Joseph Greenberg's substantive contributions to the debate his work provoked and concludes with his writings on the links between genetic linguistics and human history. William Croft's introduction focuses on the substance and the development of Professor Greenberg's thought and research within the context of the discussion they stimulated. He also includes a bibliography of scholarly reactions to and developments of Joseph Greenberg's work and a comprehensive bibliography of his publications in books and journals.

This book is about a single morpheme - the possessive morpheme - in English. Often realized as 's , it occurs in a variety of constructions ( the man's hat, a friend of mine, without my saying so, a girls' school ). What does the morpheme actually mean? What category does it belong to? What is its contribution to the meaning of the expression in which it occurs? And how can we account for the various restrictions on its use? Dr Taylor proposes a unitary account of the morpheme, within the theoretical framework of Cognitive Grammar. In the earlier chapters he introduces and explains the conceptual apparatus of the theory, and in the later chapters he develops a coherent account of the full range of possessive constructions. A special feature of this book is that it also provides a wide-ranging critique of alternative, and especially Government and Binding accounts of possessive expression, highlighting the profound conceptual differences between the contrasting approaches as well as some of the points of convergence. This book is intended for linguists, especially those with an interest in Cognitive Grammar; postgraduate and advanced undergraduate students in linguistics.

This book, published in 1976, presents an entirely original approach to the subject of the mind-body problem, examining it in terms of the conceptual links between the physical sciences and the sciences of human behaviour. It is based on the cybernetic concepts of information and feedback and on the related concepts of thermodynamic and communication-theoretic entropy. The foundation of the approach is the theme of continuity between evolution, learning and human consciousness. The author defines life as a process of energy exchange between organism and environment, and evolution as a feedback process maintaining equilibrium between environment and reproductive group. He demonstrates that closely related feedback processes on the levels of the behaving organism and of the organism's nervous system constitute the phenomena of learning and consciousness respectively. He analyses language as an expedient for extending human information-processing and control capacities beyond those provided by one's own nervous system, and shows reason to be a mode of processing information in the form of concepts removed from immediate stimulus control. The last chapter touches on colour vision, pleasure and pain, intentionality, self-awareness and other subjective phenomena. Of special interest to the communication theorist and philosopher, this study is also of interest to psychologists and anyone interested in the connection between the physical and life sciences.

This book contextualises case studies across a wide variety of languages and cultures, crystallising key interrelationships between linguistic standardisation and prescriptivism, and between ideas and practices. It focuses on different traditions of standardisation and prescription throughout the world and addresses questions such as how nationalistic idealisations of 'traditional' language persist (or shift) amid language change, linguistic variation and multilingualism. The volume explores issues of standardisation and the sociolinguistic phenomenon of prescription as a formative influence on the notional standard language as well as the interconnections between these in a wide range of geographical contexts. It balances the otherwise strong emphasis on English in English language publications on prescriptivism and breaks new ground with its multilingual approach across languages and nations. The book will appeal to scholars working within different linguistic traditions interested in questions relating to all aspects of standardisation and prescriptivism.

This volume examines the ramifications of individual differences in therapy outcomes for a wide variety of communication disorders. In an era where evidence-based practice is the clinical profession's watchword, each chapter attacks this highly relevant issue from a somewhat different perspective. In some areas of communication disorders, considering the variance brought by the client into the therapeutic 'mix' has a healthy history, whereas in others the notion of how individual client profiles mesh with therapy outcomes has rarely been considered. Through the use of research results, case study descriptions and speculation, the contributors have creatively woven what we know and what we have yet to substantiate into an interesting collection of summaries useful for therapy programming and designing clinical research.

Problems and Perspectives- Studies in the Modern French Language looks at a number of interesting or problematic areas in the phonology, morphology, syntax and lexis of the French language and encourages the reader to think critically about different ways of approaching, describing and explaining these issues or data. The book is divided into two parts- the first section is a preliminary to, and contextualises, the discussion of the more specialised topics of the second part. Part two presents problematic and controversial areas in the description and analysis of the contemporary language. Where appropriate historical and sociolinguistic issues are also integrated into the discussion of modern French. Aimed primarily at advanced students and researchers in French linguistics, the introductory sections of part one also make this book accessible to undergraduates beginning their study of French linguistics, and to less specialised readers.

Language typology is the study of the structural similarities between languages regardless of their history, to establish a classification or typology of languages. It is a core topic of historical linguistics and is studied on all traditional linguistics degree courses. In recent years there has been increased interest the subject and it is an area we have been looking to commission a book in. Jae Jung Song proposes to introduce the undergraduate reader to the subject, with discussion of topics which include - what is language typology and why is it studied; word order; language sampling; relative clauses; diachronic typology; and applications of language typology. There will also be discussion of the most prominent areas of research in the subject and readers will be able to review data selected from a wide range of languages to see how languages work and how differently they behave.

The focus of this study is upon those pidgins and creoles which are English based and which have arisen since the fifteenth century. The book examines the widespread nature of the pidgin/creole phenomenon and evaluates the current definitions of the terms and the theories which have been advanced to account for their existence. The author considers the potential of pidgins and creoles as literary media and as vehicles for education. She looks at the sociological and psychological implications of using pidgins and creoles in the classroom and examines the position of American `Black English' and `London Jamaican' in the pidgin/creole continuum.

Sardinian Syntax presents the first comprehensive synchronic description of Sardinian syntax available in English. Michael Jones combines a detailed coverage of the language with a theoretical approach that draws on contemporary linguistic theory. The book provides an extensive reference grammar and an invaluable source of information for all linguists whose interests extend beyond the world's major languages.

During the late 1920s and the 1930s, the Italian government sought various commercial and politically oriented solutions to cope with the advent of new sound technologies in cinema. The translation of foreign-language films became a recurrent topic of ongoing debates surrounding the use of the Italian language, the rebirth of the national film industry and cinema's mass popularity. Through the analysis of state records and the film trade press, The Politics of Dubbing explores the industrial, ideological and cultural factors that played a role in the government's support for dubbing. The book outlines the evolution of film censorship regulation in Italy and its interplay with film translation practices, discusses the reactions of Mussolini's administration to early Italian-language talkies produced abroad and documents the state's role in initiating and encouraging Italians' habit of watching dubbed films.

The subject of this study is the language of commerce and diplomacy during the period from 1500 BCE to 1500 CE. Based on texts of chancery provenance, its aim is the identification of a linguistic sub-system that effected and informed the major channel of international relations. The standard procedures of contact and exchange generated a format that facilitated inter-lingual transfer of concepts and terms. Lingua Franca refers to the several natural languages that served as vehicle in the transfer, but also to the format itself.

This book presents a new interpretation of the history of English. Access to large corpuses of English has allowed scholars to assess the minutiae of linguistic change with much greater precision than before, often pinpointing the beginnings of linguistic innovations in place and time. The author uses the findings from this research to relate major historical events to change in the language, in particular to areas of linguistic inquiry that have been of particular importance in recent years, such as discourse analysis, stylistics and work on pidgins and creoles. The book does not attempt to chronicle changes in syntax or pronunciation and spelling, but is designed to complement a corpus-based study of formal changes. The story of English is brought up to the late 1990s to include, amongst other things, discussions of Estuary English and the implications of the information superhighway.

First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This volume gives a theoretical account of the problem of analyzing and evaluating argumentative discourse. After placing argumentation in a communicative perspective, and then discussing the fallacies that occur when certain rules of communication are violated, the authors offer an alternative to both the linguistically-inspired descriptive and logically-inspired normative approaches to argumentation. The authors characterize argumentation as a complex speech act in a critical discussion aimed at resolving a difference of opinion. The various stages of a critical discussion are outlined, and the communicative and interactional aspects of the speech acts performed in resolving a simple or complex dispute are discussed. After dealing with crucial aspects of analysis and linking the evaluation of argumentative discourse to the analysis, the authors identify the fallacies that can occur at various stages of discussion. Their general aim is to elucidate their own pragma- dialectical perspective on the analysis and evaluation of argumentative discourse, bringing together pragmatic insight concerning speech acts and dialectical insight concerning critical discussion.

The Sensory Modes of Animal Rhetorics: A Hoot in the Light presents the latest research in animal perception and cognition in the context of rhetorical theory. Alex C. Parrish explores the science of animal signaling that shows human and nonhuman animals share similar rhetorical strategies-such as communicating to manipulate or persuade-which suggests the vast impact sensory modalities have on communication in nature. The book demonstrates new ways of seeing humans and how we have separated ourselves from, and subjectified, the animal rhetor. This type of cross-species study allows us to trace the origins of our own persuasive behaviors, providing a deeper and more inclusive history of rhetoric than ever before.

This book offers a new perspective on natural language predicates by analyzing data from the Plains Cree language. Contrary to traditional understanding, Cree verbal complexes are syntactic constructs composed of morphemes as syntactic objects that are subject to structurally defined constraints, such as c-command. Tomio Hirose illustrates this in his study of vP syntax, event semantics, morphology-syntax mappings, unaccusativity, noun incorporation, and valency-reducing phenomena.