'Coffin's functional linguistics perspective provides a rigorous and comprehensive analysis of the texts of secondary school history, both those that students read and those they need to learn to write. This is an original and welcome contribution to debates about how to develop students' historical understanding' - Professor Mary Schleppegrell, University of Michigan. 'This book makes a major contribution to the study of historical discourse and while it will be of interest to teachers of history, it will in addition be of considerable interest to those who work in discourse studies generally- linguists, applied linguists and educational linguists.' - Frances Christie, Emeritus Professor, University of Melbourne and Honorary Professor, University of Sydney. "Historical Discourse" analyses the importance of the language of time, cause and evaluation in both texts which students at secondary school are required to read, and their own writing for assessment. In contrast to studies which have denied that history has a specialised language, Caroline Coffin demonstrates through a detailed study of historical texts, that writing about the past requires different genres, lexical and grammatical structures. In this analysis, language emerges as a powerful tool for making meaning in historical writing. Presupposing no prior knowledge of systemic functional linguistics, this insightful book will be of interest to researchers in applied linguistics and discourse analysis, as well as history educators.

Language is an essential part of what makes us human. Where did it come from? How did it develop into the complex system we know today? And what can an evolutionary perspective tell us about the nature of language and communication? Drawing on a range of disciplines including cognitive science, linguistics, anthropology and evolutionary biology, Speaking Our Minds explains how language evolved and why we are the only species to communicate in this way. Written by a rising star in the field, this groundbreaking book is required reading for anyone interested in understanding the origins and evolution of human communication and language.

A grammar of Kurtoep is the first descriptive grammar of Kurtoep, a threatened language of Bhutan, and the only reference grammar of any East Bodish language. The East Bodish languages are a relatively unstudied branch of the larger Tibeto-Burman family, situated in Bhutan and neighbouring regions in Tibet and Arunachal Pradesh. The chapters introduce the language and the people who speak in a historical context and then go on to detail the synchronic and diachronic phonology, discuss word classes and cause structure, morphosyntax and syntax, and illustrate rich system of evidentiality and related categories. The book will be of interest to Tibeto-Burmanists, historical linguists and those interested in the prehistory of the eastern Himalayas, and to typologists.

In an age of migration, in a world deeply divided through cultural differences and in the context of ongoing efforts to preserve national and regional traditions and identities, the issues of language and translation are becoming absolutely vital. At the heart of these complex, intercultural interactions are various types of agents, intermediaries and mediators, including translators, writers, artists, policy makers and publishers involved in the preservation or rejuvenation of literary and cultural repertoires, languages and identities. The major themes of this book include language and translation in the context of migration and diasporas, migrant experiences and identities, the translation from and into minority and lesser-used languages, but also, in a broader sense, the international circulation of texts, concepts and people. The volume offers a valuable resource for researchers in the field of translation studies, lecturers teaching translation at the university level and postgraduate students in translation studies. Further, it will benefit researchers in migration studies, linguistics, literary and cultural studies who are interested in learning how translation studies relates to other disciplines.

This volume includes the reflections of leading researchers on Arabic and Semitic languages, also understood as systems and representations. The work first deals with Biblical Hebrew, Early Aramaic, Afroasiatic and Semitic. Its core focuses on morpho-syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, rhetoric and logic matters, showing Arabic grammar's place within the system of the sciences of language. In the second part, authors deal with lexical issues, before they explore dialectology. The last stop is a reflection on how Arabic linguistics may prevent the understanding of the Arabs' own grammatical theory and the teaching and learning of Arabic.

The leading scholars in the rapidly-growing field of language evolution give readable accounts of their theories on the origins of language and reflect on the most important current issues and debates. As well as providing a guide to their own published research in this area they highlight what they see as the most relevant research of others. The authors come from a wide range of disciplines involved in language evolution including linguistics, cognitive science, computational science, primatology, and archaeology.

The Handbook of Neurolinguistics is a state-of-the-art reference and resource book; it describes current research and theory in the many subfields of neurolinguistics and its clinical application. Thorough and clearly written, the Handbook provides an excellent overview of the field of neurolinguistics and its development.
The book is organized into five parts covering the history of neurolinguistics, methods in clinical and experimental neurolinguistics, experimental neurolinguistics, clinical neurolinguistics, and resources in neurolinguistics. The first four parts contain a wide range of topics which discuss all important aspects of the many subfields of neurolinguistics. Also included are the relatively new and fast developing areas of research in discourse, pragmatics, and recent neuroimaging techniques. The resources section provides currently available resources, both traditional and modern. The Handbook is useful to the newcomer to the field, as well as the expert searching for the latest developments in neurolinguistics.
Key Features
* Clearly written and well organized
* Provides extensive resources
* Discusses both history and current research
* Covers the many subfields of neurolinguistics as well the developing areas of research

This book advances research on grammatical change and shows the breadth and liveliness of the field. Leading international scholars report and reflect on the latest research into the nature and outcomes of all aspects of syntactic change including grammaticalization, variation, complementation, syntactic movement, determiner-phrase syntax, pronominal systems, case systems, negation, and alignment. The authors deploy a variety of generative frameworks, including minimalist and optimality theoretic, and bring these to bear on a wide range of languages: among the latter are typologically distinct examples from Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Greek, Korean and Japanese, Austronesian, Celtic, and Nahuatl. They draw on sociolinguistic evidence where appropriate. Taken as a whole, the volume provides a stimulating overview of key current issues in the investigation of the origins, nature, and outcome of syntactic change.

Embodiment in Cross-Linguistic Studies: The 'Head' edited by Iwona Kraska-Szlenk adds to linguistic studies on embodied cognition and conceptualization while focusing on one body part term from a comparative perspective. The 'head' is investigated as a source domain for extending multiple concepts in various target domains accessed via metaphor or metonymy. The contributions in the volume provide comparative and case studies based on analyses of the first-hand data from languages representing all continents and diversified linguistic groups, including endangered languages of Africa, Australia and Americas. The book offers new reflections on the relationship between embodiment, cultural situatedness and universal tendencies of semantic change. The findings contribute to general research on metaphor, metonymy, and polysemy within a paradigm of cognitive linguistics.

Watkins demonstrates the continuity of poetic formulae in Indo-European languages from Old Hittite to medieval Irish. Using the comparative method, he shows how traditional poetic formulae of considerable complexity can be reconstructed as far back as the original common languages, thus revealing the antiquity and tenacity of the poetic tradition.

In fourteen thoughtful essays this book reports and reflects on the many changes that a digital workflow brings to the world of original texts and textual scholarship, and the effect on scholarly communication practices. The spread of digital technology across philology, linguistics and literary studies suggests that text scholarship is taking on a more laboratory-like image. The ability to sort, quantify, reproduce and report text through computation would seem to facilitate the exploration of text as another type of quantitative scientific data. However, developing this potential also highlights text analysis and text interpretation as two increasingly separated sub-tasks in the study of texts. The implied dual nature of interpretation as the traditional, valued mode of scholarly text comparison, combined with an increasingly widespread reliance on digital text analysis as scientific mode of inquiry raises the question as to whether the reflexive concepts that are central to interpretation - individualism, subjectivity - are affected by the anonymised, normative assumptions implied by formal categorisations of text as digital data.

This critical edition and lexicological analysis of the first of the two glossaries of Book 29 of Shem Tov ben Isaac's "Sefer ha-Shimmush" contains more than 700 entries and offfers an extensive overview of the formation of medieval medical terminology in the romance (Old Occitan and in part Old Catalan) and Hebrew languages, as well as within the Arabic and Latin tradition.

Almost all languages have some ways of categorizing nouns. Languages of South-East Asia have classifiers used with numerals, while most Indo-European languages have two or three genders. They can have a similar meaning and one can develop from the other. This book provides a comprehensive and original analysis of noun categorization devices all over the world. It will interest typologists, those working in the fields of morphosyntactic variation and lexical semantics, as well as anthropologists and all other scholars interested in the mechanisms of human cognition.

This book examines the evidence for the development of adnominal genitives (the knight's sword, the nun's priest's tale, etc.) in English. During the Middle English period the genitive inflection -es developed into the more clitic-like 's, but how, when, why, and over how long a time are unclear, and have been subject to considerable research and discussion. Cynthia L. Allen draws together her own and others' findings in areas such as case marking, the nature of syntactic and morphological change, and the role of processing and pragmatics in the construction of grammars and grammatical change.
Using evidence derived from a systematic examination of a wide range of texts, Dr Allen reviews the evidence for the nature of the possessive inflection in earlier stages of English and the relationship of the -es possessive to the 'his genitive. In doing so she shows that Middle English texts are more reliable witnesses to the grammar of Middle English than has sometimes been assumed. The texts may have been conservative, but their language, the author argues, is reasonable reflection of the spoken language, and where the written evidence runs counter to typological generalization about syntactic change it may be the latter, not the former, which is in need of qualification. While the book focuses on Middle English it also contains discussions of linguistic change before and since, and draws on comparative evidence from other languages, particularly Germanic languages such as Swedish and Dutch. This ground-breaking book will be of great interest to scholars and students of Middle English in particular and the history of English in general.

You are invited to join a fascinating journey of discovery, as Marcia Birken and Anne C. Coon explore the intersecting patterns of mathematics and poetry - bringing the two fields together in a new way. Setting the tone with humor and illustrating each chapter with countless examples, Birken and Coon begin with patterns we can see, hear, and feel and then move to more complex patterns. Number systems and nursery rhymes lead to the Golden Mean and sestinas. Simple patterns of shape introduce tessellations and concrete poetry. Fractal geometry makes fractal poetry possible. Ultimately, patterns for the mind lead to questions: How do mathematicians and poets conceive of proof, paradox, and infinity? What role does analogy play in mathematical discovery and poetic expression? The book will be of special interest to readers who enjoy looking for connections across traditional disciplinary boundaries. "Discovering Patterns in Mathematics and Poetry" features centuries of creative work by mathematicians, poets, and artists, including Fibonacci, Albrecht Durer, M. C. Escher, David Hilbert, Benoit Mandelbrot, William Shakespeare, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Langston Hughes, E.E. Cummings, and many contemporary experimental poets. Original illustrations include digital photographs, mathematical and poetic models, and fractal imagery. Marcia Birken and Anne C. Coon have collaborated for over twenty years, exploring the connections between mathematics and literature in their research, writing, and team-teaching. The co-authors of numerous scholarly articles and book chapters, they are faculty members at Rochester Institute of Technology, Rochester, New York. Birken is Professor Emeritus in the School of Mathematical Sciences, College of Science, and Coon is Sr. Associate Dean and Professor of English in the College of Liberal Arts.

This book provides useful strategies for language learning, researching and the understanding of social factors that influence human behavior. It offers an account of how we use human, animal and plant fixed expressions every day and the cultural aspects hidden behind them. These fixed expressions include various linguistic vehicles, such as fruit, jokes and taboos that are related to speakers' use in the real world. The linguistic research in Mandarin Chinese, Hakka, German and English furthers our understanding of the cultural value and model of cognition embedded in life-form embodiment languages.

Adopting a corpus-based methodology, this volume analyses phraseological patterns in nine European languages from a monolingual, bilingual and multilingual point of view, following a mostly Construction Grammar approach. At present, corpus-based constructional research represents an interesting and innovative field of phraseology with great relevance to translatology, foreign language didactics and lexicography.

Languages are constantly changing. New words are added to the English language every year, either borrowed or coined, and there is often railing against the decline of the language by public figures. Some languages, such as French and Finnish, have academies to protect them against foreign imports. Yet languages are species-like constructs, which evolve naturally over time. Migration, imperialism, and globalization have blurred boundaries between many of them, producing new ones (such as creoles) and driving some to extinction. This book examines the processes by which languages change, from the macroecological perspective of competition and natural selection. In a series of chapters, Salikoko Mufwene examines such themes as:natural selection in language. the actuation question and the invisible hand that drives evolution multilingualism and language contact language birth and language death. the emergence of Creoles and Pidgins the varying impacts of colonization and globalization on language vitality. This comprehensive examination of the organic evolution of language will be essential reading for graduate and senior undergraduate students, and for researchers on the social dynamics of language variation and change, language vitality and death, and even the origins of linguistic diversity.

The concept of framing has been pivotal in research on social interaction among anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and linguists. This collection shows how the discourse analysis of frames can be applied to a range of social contexts. Tannen provides a seminal theoretical framework for conceptualizing the relationship between frames and schemas as well as a methodology for the discourse analysis of framing in interaction. Each chapter makes a unique theoretical contribution to frames theory while showing how discourse analysis can elucidate the linguistic means by which framing is accomplished in a particular interactional setting. Applied to such a wide range of contexts as a medical examination, psychotic discourse, gender differences in sermon performance, boys' "sportscasting" their own play, teasing among friends, a comparison of Japanese and American discussion groups, and sociolinguistic interviews, the discourse analysis of framing emerges here as a fruitful new avenue for interaction analysis.