A volume in Advances in Cultural PsychologySeries Editor: Jaan Valsiner, Clark University"This is a remarkable and highly original work on dialogism, dialogical theories and dialogue. With his erudite and broadly based scholarship PerLinell makes a path-breaking contribution to the study of the human mind, presenting a novel alternative to traditional monologism and exploring thedynamics of sense-making in different forms of interaction and communicative projects. Although Per Linell discusses complex dialogical concepts, the text is written with exceptional clarity, taking the reader through critique as well as appreciation of great intellectual traditions of our time."(Professor Ivana Markov, University of Stirling, U.K.)"Per Linells Rethinking Language, Mind And World Dialogically represents a landmark in the development ofa transdisciplinary dialogically basedparadigm for the human sciences. The author?'s lucid analysis and constructive rethinking ranges all the way from integrating explanations ofsignificant empirical contributions across the entire range of human sciences dealing with language, thought and communication to foundational, epistemological and ontological issues."(Professor Ragnar Rommetveit, University of Oslo, Norway)Per Linell took his degree in linguistics and is currently professor of language and culture, with a specialisation on communication and spokeninteraction, at the University of Link ping, Sweden. He has been instrumental in building up an internationally renowned interdisciplinary graduateschool in communication studies in Link ping. He has worked for many years on developing a dialogical alternative to mainstream theories inlinguistics, psychology and social sciences. His production comprises more than 100 articles on dialogue, talk-in-interaction and institutionaldiscourse. His more recent books include Approaching Dialogue (1998), The Written Language Bias in Linguistics (2005) and Dialogue in FocusGroups (2007, with I. Markov, M. Grossen and A. Salazar Orvig).

This book sets out a new reconstruction for the Semitic case system. It is based on a detailed analysis of the expression of grammatical roles and relations in the attested Semitic languages and, for the first time, brings typological methods to bear in the study of these features in Semitic languages and their reconstruction for proto-Semitic. Professor Hasselbach supports her argument with detailed analyses of a wide range of data and presents it in a way that will be accessible to both Semitists and typologists. The volume is divided into seven chapters: the first discusses basic methodologies used in Semitic linguistics and the limitations thereof. The second presents the evidence for morphological case-marking in the individual Semitic languages, the conventional reconstruction of Proto-Semitic, and the evidence which conflicts with it. The third introduces typological concepts and methods and their deployment in Semitic. Chapter 4 considers the case alignment of early Semitic. Chapter 5 presents a detailed study of marking structures and patterns and considers what these reveal about the nature of the original case system. Chapter 6 looks at the functions of case markers, considers the light they cast on the nominal system, and shows that the reconstruction of early Semitic as ergative is implausible. In the final chapter the author argues that early Semitic had a different nominal system from that of the later Semitic languages. She shows that the course of its development has parallels in other Afroasiatic languages, including Berber and Cushitic. Her book sheds important new light on the history of the Semitic languages and on the early development of the Afro-Asiatic language family as a whole.

This dictionary provides a full and authoritative guide to the meanings of the terms, concepts, and theories employed in pragmatics, the study of language in use.
Pragmatics is a central subject in linguistics and philosophy and an increasingly important topic in fields such as cognitive science, informatics, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and pathology. Its rapid development has produced new theories, methods, approaches, and schools of thought. These in turn have resulted in a vast vocabulary of new terms and in modified meanings for existing terms. Such terms help advance research and facilitate discussion, but they can also cause confusion and act as barriers to understanding and communication. Yan Huang defines and explains them all, from the most traditional to the most recent. Covering every branch of research and all theoretical approaches and with the needs of students and researchers firmly in mind he writes each entry in the simplest possible terms for the subject in question, gives references to relevant seminal and recent work, provides numerous cross-references to related entries, and shows how each term and concept is applied and used in different contexts.
Written by one of the leading experts in the field, Professor Huang's dictionary, the first of its kind ever published, will be a much valued resource for students and researchers in every aspect of the field.

Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar advances our understanding of mind style: the experience of other minds, or worldviews, through language in literature. This book is the first to set out a detailed, unified framework for the analysis of mind style using the account of language and cognition set out in cognitive grammar. Drawing on insights from cognitive linguistics, Louise Nuttall aims to explain how character and narrator minds are created linguistically, with a focus on the strange minds encountered in the genre of speculative fiction. Previous analyses of mind style are reconsidered using cognitive grammar, alongside original analyses of four novels by Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Richard Matheson and J.G. Ballard. Responses to the texts in online forums and literary critical studies ground the analyses in the experiences of readers, and support an investigation of this effect as an embodied experience cued by the language of a text. Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar advances both stylistics and cognitive linguistics, whilst offering new insights for research in speculative fiction.

"Letter writing is a pivotal yet neglected medium of historical Chinese communication. The epistolary format is key to sinological research. As historical letters have a specific vocabulary and rhetorical structure it is difficult to read them without the supporting apparatus of specialised study. The aim of this compendium is to fill the gap in Chinese studies by providing a bilingual Chinese-English edition of a corpus of Chinese letters, prepared for advanced students of Classical Chinese as well as academics with an interest in historical Chinese epistolary art. The book has a broad and general introduction, systematically constructed vocabulary sections as well as detailed grammatical and philological explanations. It focuses on Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) letter writing, a high point of pre-1911 epistolary activity in Chinese, and will appeal to Chinese scholars and Sinologists at a broad range of academic levels."

Language, Cognition, and Human Nature collects together for the first time Steven Pinker's most influential scholarly work on language and cognition. Pinker is a highly eminent cognitive scientist, and his research emphasizes the importance of language and its connections to cognition, social relationships, child development, human evolution, and theories of human nature. The thirteen essays in this eclectic collection span Pinker's thirty-year career, ranging over topics such as language acquisitions, visual cognition, the meaning and syntax of verbs, regular and irregular phenomena in language and their implications for the mechanisms of cognition, and the social psychology of direct and indirect speech. Each outlines a major theory - such as evolution, or nature vs. nurture - or takes up an argument with other prominent scholars such as Stephen Jay Gould, Noam Chomsky, or Richard Dawkins. Featuring a new introduction by Pinker that discusses his books and scholarly work, this book represents a major contribution to the field of cognitive science, by one of the field's leading thinkers.

Spanish is spoken as a first language by almost 400 million people in approximately 60 countries, and has been the subject of numerous political processes and debates since it began to spread globally from Iberia in the thirteenth century. A Political History of Spanish brings together a team of experts to analyze the metalinguistic origins of Spanish and evaluate it as a discursively constructed artefact; that is to say, as a language which contains traces of the society in which it is produced, and of the discursive traditions that are often involved and invoked in its creation. This is a comprehensive and provocative new work which takes a fresh look at Spanish from specific political and historical perspectives, combining the traditional chronological organization of linguistic history and spatial categories such as Iberia, Latin America and the US, whilst simultaneously identifying the limits of these organizational principles.

This is the most comprehensive history of the Greek prepositional system ever published. It is set within a broad typological context and examines interrelated syntactic, morphological, and semantic change over three millennia. By including, for the first time, Medieval and Modern Greek, Dr Bortone is able to show how the changes in meaning of Greek prepositions follow a clear and recurring pattern of immense theoretical interest. The author opens the book by discussing the relevant background issues concerning the function, meaning, and genesis of adpositions and cases. He then traces the development of prepositions and case markers in ancient Greek (Homeric and classical, with insights from Linear B and reconstructed Indo-European); Hellenistic Greek, which he examines mainly on the basis of Biblical Greek; Medieval Greek, the least studied but most revealing phase; and Modern Greek, in which he also considers the influence of the learned tradition and neighbouring languages. Written in an accessible and non-specialist style, this book will interest classical philologists, as well as historical linguists and theoretical linguists.

Spreading Change: Diffusional Change in the English System of Complementation examines the emergence and spread of three types of complements from the Middle English period to the present day. The three types of complements are subject-controlled gerund complements (1), for...to-infinitives (2), and subject-controlled participial compelements (3). (1) The cat loves being stroked, absolutely loves it! (2) We couldn't afford for it to go wrong. (3) The receptionist is busy filling a fifth box. In the first half of the book De Smet addresses the theoretical issues by summarizing a number of major approaches to the study of complementation, and by focusing on how and why a particular change spreads (a process that he calls "diffusion"). In the second half, which is descriptive and largely corpus-based, De Smet tests these mechanisms on the three complement types. His work demonstrates: a) how diffusion interacts with the grammatical system of complementation; b) how diffusion proceeds, step-by-step; and c) why diffusion is directional.

'When, why, and how did language evolve?' 'Why do only humans have language?' This book looks at these and other questions about the origins and evolution of language. It does so via a rich diversity of perspectives, including social, cultural, archaeological, palaeoanthropological, musicological, anatomical, neurobiological, primatological, and linguistic. Among the subjects it considers are: how far sociality is a prerequisite for language; the evolutionary links between language and music; the relation between natural selection and niche construction; the origins of the lexicon; the role of social play in language development; the use of signs by great apes; the evolution of syntax; the evolutionary biology of language; the insights offered by Chomsky's biolinguistic approach to mind and language; the emergence of recursive language; the selectional advantages of the human vocal tract; and why women speak better than men.
The authors, drawn from all over the world, are prominent linguists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, archaeologists, primatologists, social anthropologists, and specialists in artificial intelligence. As well as explaining what is understood about the evolution of language, they look squarely at the formidable obstacles to knowing more - the absence of direct evidence, for example; the problems of using indirect evidence; the lack of a common conception of language; confusion about the operation of natural selection and other processes of change; the scope for misunderstanding in a multi-disciplinary field, and many more. Despite these difficulties, the authors in their stylish and readable contributions to this book are able to show just how much has been achieved in this most fruitful and fascinating area of research in the social, natural, and cognitive sciences.

This book compares the historical development of ideas about language in two major traditions of linguistic scholarship from either end of Eurasia - the Graeco-Roman and the Sinitic - as well as their interaction in the modern era. It locates the emergence of language analysis in the development of writing systems, and examines the cultural and political functions fulfilled by traditional language scholarship. Moving into the modern period and focusing specifically on the study of "grammar" in the sense of morph syntax/ lexico grammar, it traces the transformation of "traditional" Latin grammar from the viewpoint of its adaptation to Chinese, and discusses the development of key concepts used to characterize and analyze grammatical patterns.

Winner of the Tianjin Social Science Outstanding Achievement Award. This book reports on the contrastive-semantic investigation of sadness expressions between English and Chinese, based on two monolingual general corpora and a parallel corpus. The exploration adopts a unique theoretical approach which integrates corpus-linguistic theories on meaning (as a social construct, usage and paraphrase) with a corpus-linguistic lexical model. It employs a new complex but workable methodology which combines computational tools with manual examination to tease meaning out of corpus evidence, to compare and contrast lexical items that do not match up neatly between languages. It looks at sadness expressions both within and across languages in terms of three corpus-linguistic structural categories, i.e. colligation, collocation and semantic association/preference, and paraphrase (both explicit and implicit) to capture their subtle nuances of meaning, disclose the culture-specific conceptualisations encoded in them, and highlight their respective cultural distinctiveness of emotion. By presenting multidisciplinary original work, Sadness Expressions in English and Chinese will be of interest to researchers in corpus linguistics, contrastive lexical semantics, psychology, bilingual lexicography and language pedagogy.

The future has exercised students of Modern Greek language developments for many years, and no satisfactory set of arguments for the development of the modern form from the ancient usages has ever been produced. Theodore Markopoulos elucidates the stages that led up to the appearance of the modern future in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He does so by focussing on the three main modes of future referencing ('mello', 'echo', and 'thelo'). He discusses these patterns in the classical and Hellenistic-Roman periods, the early medieval period (fifth to tenth centuries), and the late medieval period (eleventh to fifteenth centuries). The argument is supported by reference to a large and representative corpus of texts (all translated into English) from which the author draws many examples. In his conclusion Dr Markopoulos considers the implications of his findings and methodology for syntactic and semantic history of Greek.

Ezekiel's Visionary Temple in Babylonian Context examines evidence from Babylonian sources to better understand Ezekiel's vision of the future temple as it appears in chapters 40-48. Tova Ganzel argues that Neo-Babylonian temples provide a meaningful backdrop against which many unique features of Ezekiel's vision can and should be interpreted. In pointing to the similarities between Neo-Babylonian temples and the description in the book of Ezekiel, Ganzel demonstrates how these temples served as a context for the prophet's visions and describes the extent to which these similarities provide a further basis for broader research of the connections between Babylonia and the Bible. Ultimately, she argues the extent to which the book of Ezekiel models its temple on those of the Babylonians. Thus, this book suggests a comprehensive picture of the book of Ezekiel's worldview and to contextualize its visionary temple by comparing its vision to the actual temples surrounding the Judeans in exile.

The last decade has seen a rise in popularity in construction-based approaches to grammar. Put simply, the various approaches within the rubric 'construction grammar' all see grammar (morphemes, words, idioms, etc.) as fundamentally constructions - pairings of form and meaning. This is distinct from formal syntax which sees grammar as a system of atomized units governed by formal rules. Construction Grammar is connected to cognitive linguistics and shares many of its philosophical and methodological assumptions. Advocates of Construction Grammar see it as a psychologically-plausible, generative theory of human language that can also account for all kinds of linguistic data. The research programs it has spawned range from theoretical morphological and syntactic studies to multidisciplinary cognitive studies in psycho-, neuro-, and computational linguistics. This Handbook is the first authoritative reference work solely dedicated to the theory, method, and applications of Construction Grammar, and will be a resource that students and scholars alike can turn to for a representative overview of its many sub-theories and applications. It has 24 chapters divided into 7 sections, with an introduction covering the theory's basic principles and its relationship with other theories including Chomskyan syntax. The book's readership lies in a variety of diverse fields, including corpus linguistics, thoeretical syntax, psycho and neurolinguistics, language variation, acquisition, and computational linguistics.