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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Historical & comparative linguistics > General
This volume offers several empirical, methodological, and
theoretical approaches to the study of observable variation within
individuals on various linguistic levels. With a focus on German
varieties, the chapters provide answers on the following questions
(inter alia): Which linguistic and extra-linguistic factors explain
intra-individual variation? Is there observable intra-individual
variation that cannot be explained by linguistic and
extra-linguistic factors? Can group-level results be generalised to
individual language usage and vice versa? Is intra-individual
variation indicative of actual patterns of language change? How can
intra-individual variation be examined in historical data?
Consequently, the various theoretical, methodological and empirical
approaches in this volume offer a better understanding of the
meaning of intra-individual variation for patterns of language
development, language variation and change. The inter- and
transdisciplinary nature of the volume is an exciting new frontier,
and the results of the studies in this book provide a wealth of new
findings as well as challenges to some of the existing findings and
assumptions regarding the nature of intra-individual variation.
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.
Drawing on usage-based theory, neurocognition, and complex systems,
Languaging Beyond Languages elaborates an elegant model
accommodating accumulated insights into human language even as it
frees linguistics from its two-thousand-year-old, ideological
attachment to reified grammatical systems. Idiolects are redefined
as continually emergent collections of context specific,
probabilistic memories entrenched as a result of domain-general
cognitive processes that create and consolidate linguistic
experience. Also continually emergent, conventionalization and
vernacularization operate across individuals producing the illusion
of shared grammatical systems. Conventionalization results from the
emergence of parallel expectations for the use of linguistic
elements organized into syntagmatic and paradigmatic relationships.
In parallel, vernacularization indexes linguistic forms to
sociocultural identities and stances. Evidence implying
entrenchment and conventionalization is provided in asymmetrical
frequency distributions.
In The Dutch Language in Japan (1600-1900) Christopher Joby offers
the first book-length account of the knowledge and use of the Dutch
language in Tokugawa and Meiji Japan. For most of this period, the
Dutch were the only Europeans permitted to trade with Japan. Using
the analytical tool of language process, this book explores the
nature and consequences of contact between Dutch and Japanese and
other language varieties. The processes analysed include language
learning, contact and competition, code switching, translation,
lexical, syntactic and graphic interference, and language shift.
The picture that emerges is that the multifarious uses of Dutch,
especially the translation of Dutch books, would have a profound
effect on the language, society, culture and intellectual life of
Japan.
This volume gathers nine contributions dealing with Aorists and
Perfects. Drinka challenges the notion of Aoristic Drift in Romance
languages. Walker considers two emergent uses of the Perfect in
British English. Jara seeks to determine the constraints on tense
choice within narrative discourse in Peruvian Spanish. Henderson
argues for a theory based on Langacker's 'sequential scanning' in
Chilean and Uruguayan Spanish. Delmas looks at 'Ua in Tahitian, a
polysemic particle with a range of aspectual and modal meanings.
Bourdin addresses the expression of anteriority with just in
English. Yerastov examines the distribution of the transitive be
Perfect in Canadian English. Fryd offers a panchronic study of
have-less perfect constructions in English. Eide investigates
counterfactual present perfects in Mainland Scandinavian dialects.
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.
According to UNESCO, it is believed that at least half of the
nearly 7,000 languages spoken around the world will cease to be
used within the next 100 years. If this issue is neglected, people
will lose not only their cultural heritage but also invaluable
understandings about the history of all humankind. Endangered
Languages of the Caucasus and Beyond includes the manuscripts of 19
papers that were presented at the 1st International CUA Conference
on Endangered Languages, organized by the Caucasus University
Association (CUA), at Ardahan, Turkey, on 13 to 16 October 2014.
The articles address issues such as the state of the field of
documentation, conservation and revitalization of endangered
languages with special reference to the endangered languages in the
Caucasus region and beyond.
Knowledge can be expressed in language using a plethora of
grammatical means. Four major groups of meanings related to
knowledge are Evidentiality: grammatical expression of information
source; Egophoricity: grammatical expression of access to
knowledge; Mirativity: grammatical expression of expectation of
knowledge; and Epistemic modality: grammatical expression of
attitude to knowledge. The four groups of categories interact. Some
develop overtones of the others. Evidentials stand apart from other
means in many ways, including their correlations with speech genres
and social environment. This essay presents a framework which
connects the expression of knowledge across the world's languages
in a coherent way, showing their dependencies and complexities, and
pathways of historical development in various scenarios, including
language obsolescence.
As its title suggests, this book is a selection of papers that use
English corpora to study language variation along three dimensions
- time, place and genre. In broad terms, the book aims to bridge
the gap between corpus linguistics and sociolinguistics and to
increase our knowledge of the characteristics of English language.
It includes eleven papers which address a variety of research
questions but with the commonality of a corpus-based methodology.
Some of the contributions deal with language variation in time,
either by looking into historical corpora of English or by adopting
the method known as diachronic comparable corpus linguistics, thus
illustrating how corpora can be used to illuminate either
historical or recent developments of English. Other studies
investigate variation in space by comparing different varieties of
English, including some of the "New Englishes" such as the South
Asian varieties of English. Finally, some of the papers deal with
variation in genre, by looking into the use of language for
specific purposes through the inspection of medical articles,
social reports and academic writing.
"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.
Despite its centrality in mainstream linguistics, cognitive
semantics has only recently begun to establish a foothold in
biblical studies, largely due to the challenges inherent in
applying such a methodology to ancient languages. The Semantics of
Glory addresses these challenges by offering a new, practical model
for a cognitive semantic approach to Classical Hebrew, demonstrated
through an exploration of the Hebrew semantic domain of glory. The
concept of 'glory' is one of the most significant themes in the
Hebrew Bible, lying at the heart of God's self-disclosure in
biblical revelation. This study provides the most comprehensive
examination of the domain to date, mapping out its intricacies and
providing a framework for its exegesis.
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.
Throughout our Cherokee history,"" writes Joyce Dugan, former
principal chief of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, ""our
ancient stories have been the essence of who we are."" These
traditional stories embody the Cherokee concepts of Gadugi, working
together for the good of all, and Duyvkta, walking the right path,
and teach listeners how to understand and live in the world with
reverence for all living things. In Eastern Cherokee Stories,
Sandra Muse Isaacs uses the concepts of Gadugi and Duyvkta to
explore the Eastern Cherokee oral tradition, and to explain how
storytelling in this tradition - as both an ancient and a
contemporary literary form - is instrumental in the perpetuation of
Cherokee identity and culture. Muse Isaacs worked among the Eastern
Cherokees of North Carolina, recording stories and documenting
storytelling practices and examining the Eastern Cherokee oral
tradition as both an ancient and contemporary literary form. For
the descendants of those Cherokees who evaded forced removal by the
U.S. government in the 1830s, storytelling has been a vital tool of
survival and resistance - and as Muse Isaacs shows us, this remains
true today, as storytelling plays a powerful role in motivating and
educating tribal members and others about contemporary issues such
as land reclamation, cultural regeneration, and language
revitalization. The stories collected and analyzed in this volume
range from tales of creation and origins that tell about the
natural world around the homeland, to post-Removal stories that
often employ Native humor to present the Cherokee side of history
to Cherokee and non-Cherokee alike. The persistence of this living
oral tradition as a means to promote nationhood and tribal
sovereignty, to revitalize culture and language, and to present the
Indigenous view of history and the land bears testimony to the
tenacity and resilience of the Cherokee people, the Ani-Giduwah.
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.
The papers in this volume study the relationship between language
use and the concept of the "tourist gaze" through a range of
communicative practices from different cultures and languages. From
a pragmatic perspective, the authors investigate how language
constantly adapts to contextual constraints which affect tourism
discourse as a strategic meaning-making process that turns
insignificant places into desirable tourist destinations. The case
studies draw on both, in situ interactions with visitors, such as
guided tours and counter information, old and new mediatized
genres, i.e. guide books, travelogues, print advertising as well as
TV-commercials, service web-sites and apps. Despite the diversity
of data, one of the common findings in the volume is that staging
the sensory 'lived' tourist experience is the lynchpin of all
communicative practices. Hence, the use of tourism language reveals
itself as the mirror of how 'people on the move' continuously enact
as 'tourists' and 'places' are constructed as must-see 'sights'.
In Srinagar Burushaski: A Descriptive and Comparative Account with
Analyzed Texts Sadaf Munshi offers the structural description of a
lesser-known regional variety of Burushaski spoken in Srinagar, the
summer capital of the Indian-administered state of Jammu &
Kashmir. The description includes a comprehensive and comparative
account of the structural features of Srinagar Burushaski in terms
of phonology, morphology, lexicon and syntax. The grammar is
supported by an extensive digital corpus housed at the University
of North Texas Digital Library. Using contemporary spoken language
samples from Srinagar, Nagar, Hunza and Yasin varieties of
Burushaski as well as data from the available literature, Munshi
provides a thorough understanding of the historical development of
Srinagar Burushaski, complementing the existing studies on
Burushaski dialectology.
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