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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Historical & comparative linguistics > General
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.
'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.
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.
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.
Observing writing: Insights from Keystroke Logging and Handwriting
is a timely volume appearing twelve years after the Studies in
Writing volume Computer Keystroke Logging and Writing (Sullivan
& Lindgren, 2006). The 2006 volume provided the reader with a
fundamental account of keystroke logging, a methodology in which a
piece of software records every keystroke, cursor and mouse
movement a writer undertakes during a writing session. This new
volume highlights current theoretical and applied research
questions in keystroke logging and handwriting research that
observes writing. In this volume, contributors from a range of
disciplines, including linguistics, psychology, neuroscience,
modern languages, and education, present their research that
considers the cognitive and socio-cultural complexities of writing
texts in academic and professional settings.
With Psycholinguistics in its fifth decade of existence, the second
edition of the Handbook of Psycholinguistics represents a
comprehensive survey of psycholinguistic theory, research and
methodology, with special emphasis on the very best empirical
research conducted in the past decade. Thirty leading experts have
been brought together to present the reader with both broad and
detailed current issues in Language Production, Comprehension and
Development.
The handbook is an indispensible single-source guide for
professional researchers, graduate students, advanced
undergraduates, university and college teachers, and other
professionals in the fields of psycholinguistics, language
comprehension, reading, neuropsychology of language, linguistics,
language development, and computational modeling of language. It
will also be a general reference for those in neighboring fields
such as cognitive and developmental psychology and education.
*Provides a complete account of psycholinguistic theory, research,
and methodology
*30 of the field's foremost experts have contributed to this
edition
*An invaluable single-source reference
The publication Audias fabulas veteres. Anatolian Studies in Honor
of Jana Souckova-Siegelova contains 31 contributions on current
research topics in the fields of Ancient Anatolian and Near Eastern
Languages, History, Religion, and Literature. The topics cover not
only the main languages of this geographical area, such as Hittite,
Luwian, Hattian, Hurrian, Akkadian, and Sumerian but also
comparative linguistics and the latest methods of digitalising
cuneiform texts, as well as religion, mythology and divinities,
rituals, proverbs and analysis of geographical and historical
documentation. Finally, it offers new analyses of some of the most
remarkable texts and text passages of the ancient Anatolian
literary tradition.
The disappearance of the French simple past has been hotly debated
since the early 20th century. This volume offers an overview of its
fortunes since French emerged as a language, provides a description
of its distinctive features, and discusses the potential impact of
its supposed demise on the whole French verb system. These
assumptions are tested against a large corpus of contemporary
texts. The study concludes that, despite the erosion of its meaning
and its increasingly infrequent use, the simple past tense is still
used by native speakers in various contexts, and no single
substitute has yet emerged. Nevertheless, the simple past may be
evolving into a stylistic marker, making it fertile ground for
future cross-linguistic studies.
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.
In The Dura Language: Grammar & Phylogeny Nicolas Schorer
provides the definite descriptive account of this hitherto poorly
documented language of Lamjung, Nepal. The Dura language is
effectively extinct, although attempts at revival may be undertaken
by well-intentioned members of Dura ethnicity. On the basis of a
comprehensive study and analysis of all of the extant Dura language
material, the book outlines the phonology, nominal and verbal
morphology, lexical and syntactic properties as well as the
phylogenetic position of the language in unprecedented detail. The
result of the phylogenetic inquiry will help explain some of the
sociocultural realities associated with the Dura community in Nepal
and is a significant contribution to our understanding of the
linguistic landscape of the Himalayas.
Prompted by the 'linguistic turn' of the late 20th century,
intellectual and conceptual historians continue to devote a great
deal of attention to the study of concepts in history. This
innovative and interdisciplinary volume builds on such scholarship
by providing a new history of the term 'economy'. Starting from the
Greek idea of the law of the household, Luigi Alonzi traces the
different meanings assumed by the word 'economy' during the middle
ages and early modern era, highlighting the semantic richness of
the word and its uses in various political and cultural contexts.
Notably, there is a particular focus on the so-called Oeconomica
literature, tracking the reception of works by Plato, Aristotle,
the 'pseudo' Aristotle and Xenophon in the Italian and France
Renaissance. This tradition was incredibly influential in civic
humanism and in texts devoted to power and command and thus
affected later debates on Natural Law and the development of new
scientific disciplines in the 17th and 18th centuries. In exploring
this, the analysis of the function of translations in the
transmission and transformation of meanings becomes central.
'Economy' in European History shines much-needed light on an
important challenge that many historians repeatedly face: the fact
that words can, and do, change over time. It will thus be a vital
resource for all scholars of early modern and European economic
history.
Akkadian, a Semitic language attested in writing from 2600 BCE
until the first century CE, was the language of Mesopotamia for
nearly three millennia. This volume examines the language from a
comparative and historical linguistic perspective. Inspired by the
work of renowned linguist John Huehnergard and featuring
contributions from top scholars in the field, Be l Lisa ni
showcases the latest research on Akkadian linguistics. Chapters
focus on a wide range of topics, including lexicon, morphology,
word order, syntax, verbal semantics, and subgrouping. Building
upon Huehnergard's pioneering studies focused on the identification
of Proto-Akkadian features, the contributors explore linguistic
innovations in the language from historical and comparative
perspectives. In doing so, they open the way for further
etymological, dialectical, and lexical research into Akkadian. An
important update on and synthesis of the research in Akkadian
linguistics, this volume will be welcomed by Semitists, Akkadian
language specialists, and scholars and students interested in
historical linguistics. In addition to the editors, the
contributors to this volume include Paul-Alain Beaulieu, Oyvind
Bjoru, Maksim Kalinin, N. J. C. Kouwenberg, Sergey Loesov, Jacob J.
de Ridder, Ambjoern Sjoers, Michael P. Streck, and Juan-Pablo Vita.
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 book suggests a new perspective on the essence of human
language. This enormous achievement of our species is best
characterized as a communication technology - not unlike the social
media on the Net today - that was collectively invented by ancient
humans for a very particular communicative function: the
instruction of imagination. All other systems of communication in
the biological world target the interlocutors' senses; language
allows speakers to systematically instruct their interlocutors in
the process of imagining the intended meaning - instead of directly
experiencing it. This revolutionary function has changed human life
forever, and in the book it operates as a unifying concept around
which a new general theory of language gradually emerges. Dor
identifies a set of fundamental problems in the linguistic sciences
- the nature of words, the complexities of syntax, the interface
between semantics and pragmatics, the causal relationship between
language and thought, language processing, the dialectics of
universality and variability, the intricacies of language and
power, knowledge of language and its acquisition, the fragility of
linguistic communication and the origins and evolution of language
- and shows with respect to all of them how the theory provides
fresh answers to the problems, resolves persistent difficulties in
existing accounts, enhances the significance of empirical and
theoretical achievements in the field, and identifies new
directions for empirical research. The theory thus opens a new way
towards the unification of the linguistic sciences, on both sides
of the cognitive-social divide.
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.
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