This book presents in a single volume a comprehensive history of the language sciences, from ancient times through to the twentieth century. While there has been a concentration on those traditions that have the greatest international relevance, a particular effort has been made to go beyond traditional Eurocentric accounts, and to cover a broad geographical spread. For the twentieth century a section has been devoted to the various trends, schools, and theoretical framework developed in Europe, North America and Australasia over the past seventy years. There has also been a concentration on those approaches in linguistic theory which can be expected to have some direct relevance to work being done at the beginning of the twenty-first century or those of which a knowledge is needed for the full understanding of the history of linguistic sciences through the last half of this century. The last section of this book reviews the applications of some of these findings. Based on the foundation provided by the award winning "Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics" this volume provides an excellent focal point of reference for anyone interested in the history of the language sciences.

In The Verbal System of the Dead Sea Scrolls Ken M. Penner determines whether Qumran Hebrew finite verbs are primarily temporal, aspectual, or modal. Standard grammars claim Hebrew was aspect-prominent in the Bible, and tense-prominent in the Mishnah. But the semantic value of the verb forms in the intervening period in which the Dead Sea Scrolls were written has remained controversial. Penner answers the question of Qumran Hebrew verb form semantics using an empirical method: a database calculating the correlation between each form and each function, establishing that the ancient author's selection of verb form is determined not by aspect, but by tense or modality. Penner then applies these findings to controversial interpretations of three Qumran texts.

One of the main cultural consequences of the contacts between Islam and the West has been the borrowing of hundreds of words, mostly of Arabic but also of other important languages of the Islamic world, such as Persian, Turkish, Berber, etc. by Western languages. Such loanwords are particularly abundant and relevant in the case of the Iberian Peninsula because of the presence of Islamic states in it for many centuries; their study is very revealing when it comes to assess the impact of those states in the emergence and shaping of Western civilization. Some famous Arabic scholars, above all R. Dozy, have tackled this task in the past, followed by other attempts at increasing and improving his pioneering work; however, the progresses achieved during the last quarter of the 20th c., in such fields as Andalusi and Andalusi Romance dialectology and lexicology made it necessary to update all the available information on this topic and to offer it in English.

It is customarily assumed that the Hebrew word BMH denotes a high place, first a topographical elevation and derivatively a cult place elevated either by location or construction.This book offers a fresh, systematic, and comprehensive examination of the word in those biblical and post-biblical passages where it supposedly carries its primary topographical sense.Although the word is used in this way in only a handful of its attestations, they are sufficiently numerous and contextually diverse to yield sound systematic, rather than ad hoc, conclusions as to its semantic content.Special attention is paid to its likely Semitic and unlikely Greek cognates, pertinent literary, compositional, and text-critical matters, and the ideological and iconographical ambiance of each occurrence.This study concludes that the non-cultic word BMH is actually *bomet, carrying primarily (if not always) an anatomical sense approximate to English back, sometimes expanded to the body itself.The phrase bmty-rs (Amos 4:13, Micah 1:3, and CAT 1.4 VII 34; also Deut. 32:13a, Isa. 58:14ab-ba, and Sir. 46:9b) derives from the international mythic imagery of the Storm-God: it refers originally to the mythological mountains, conceptualized anthropomorphically, which the god surmounts in theophany, symbolically expressing his cosmic victory and sovereignty.There is no instance where this word (even 2 Sam. 1:19a and 1:25b) is unequivocally a topographical reference. The implications of these findings for identifying the bamah-sanctuary are briefly considered.

The book presents the state-of-the-art in major aspects of text analysis and cognitive text processing by some of the most well-known European and American researchers in the field of text-linguistics and cognitive psychology. Comprehensive views and new perspectives are proposed in the following topics: cognitive and metacognitive aspects of text processing, structures and processes involved in the construction of multi-level semantic representations in relation with text and reader characteristics, achievement of local and global coherence of meaning during reading and comprehension, assessment of knowledge, knowledge acquisition of concepts and complex systems by text, and cognitive and metacognitive aspects of text production.

This volume advances our understanding of how word structure in terms of affix ordering is organized in the languages of the world. A central issue in linguistic theory, affix ordering receives much attention amongst the research community, though most studies deal with only one language. By contrast, the majority of the chapters in this volume consider more than one language and provide data from typologically diverse languages, some of which are examined for the first time. Many chapters focus on cases of affix ordering that challenge linguistic theory with such phenomena as affix repetition and variable ordering, both of which are shown to be neither rare nor typical only of lesser-studied languages with unstable grammatical organization, as previously assumed. The book also offers an explicit discussion on the non-existence of phonological affix ordering, with a focus on mobile affixation, and one on the emergence of affix ordering in child language, the first of its kind in the literature. Repetitive operations, undesirable in many theories, are frequent in early child language and seem to serve as trainings for morphological decomposition and affix stacking. Thus, the volume also raises important questions regarding the general architecture of grammar and the nature and side effects of our theoretical assumptions.

Historical sociolinguistics has now established itself as a separate independent field of linguistic inquiry, and the impact of its theoretical and empirical advances are reflected in a thriving body of publications of various types. This volume adds to this flourishing array by presenting nine original studies by highly accomplished scholars holding a prominent reputation in the field. The overarching objective of the volume is to call attention to contemporary trends and innovative developments in the discipline and, more generally, to highlight current research on the relationship between sociolinguistics and historical linguistics, social motivations of language variation and change, and corpus-based studies. The overall interdisciplinary nature of the contributions, the variety of languages they examine and the range of themes they address are distinguishing features of the book, which also make it appealing to a wider readership. The general themes covered by the volume include how to define the historical and social dimensions in historical sociolinguistics research, historical second-language use and multilingualism, the role and relevance played by linguistic ideologies and attitudes in language choices, usage, policy (standardization and preservation), and language death. More specific topics addressed are the linguistic strategies employed to convey and defend religious ideology or to heighten the overall persuasiveness of the information provided. Controversial and/or under-researched issues are tackled, such as authorship and gender in the study of private documents, the regularization and standardization of English orthography, and the issue of speakers' awareness of the dissociation between spoken and written language. In addition, several contributions are methodologically linked by employing data from epistolary correspondence.

This volume examines two main questions: What is linguistics about? And how do the results of linguistic theorizing bear on inquiry in related fields, particularly in psychology? The book develops views that depart from received wisdom in both philosophy and linguistics. With regard to questions concerning the subject matter, methodological goals, and ontological commitments of formal syntactic theorizing, it argues that the cognitive conception adopted by most linguists and philosophers is not the only acceptable view, and that the arguments in its favor collapse under scrutiny. Nevertheless, as the book shows, a detailed examination of the relevant psycholinguistic results and computational models does support the claim that the theoretical constructs of formal linguistics are operative in real-time language comprehension. These constructs fall into two categories: mental phrase markers and mental syntactic principles. Both are indeed psychologically real, but in importantly different ways. The book concludes by drawing attention to the importance of the often-elided distinction between personal and subpersonal psychological states and processes, as well as the logical character of dispositional and occurrent states. By clarifying these concepts, particularly by reference to up-and-running psychological and computational models, the book yields a richer and more satisfying perspective on the psychological reality of language.

Sakishima comprises a group of islands situated between Okinawa and Taiwan, forming a culturally important bridge between Japan and Taiwan. Studies of the languages of the Ryukyuan islands are valuable for an accurate understanding of the linguistic history of Japan as a whole. This monograph is the first attempt in any language at a large-scale reconstruction of the three languages of the southern Ryukyus (Sakishima), viz., Miyako, Yaeyama andYonaguni. An introduction outlines a brief history of the area, with a concise linguistic history, followed by an explanation of the languages studied. Succeeding chapters are devoted to the reconstruction of each of the three proto-languages. The three proto-languages are then compared and proto-Sakishima is reconstructed. This monograph provides data illustrating the importance of the language of Sakishima in understanding the linguistic history of the larger language family of Japonic.

This book puts cognition back at the heart of the language learning process and challenges the idea that language acquisition can be meaningfully understood as a purely linguistic phenomenon. For each domain placed under the spotlight - memory, attention, inhibition, categorisation, analogy and social cognition - the book examines how they shape the development of sounds, words and grammar. The unfolding cognitive and social world of the child interacts with, constrains, and predicts language use at its deepest levels. The conclusion is that language is special, not because it is an encapsulated module separate from the rest of cognition, but because of the forms it can take rather than the parts it is made of, and because it could be nature's finest example of cognitive recycling and reuse.

A trailblazer in Native American linguistics and anthropology, Gladys Reichard (1893-1955) is one of America's least appreciated anthropologists. Her accomplishments were obscured in her lifetime by differences in intellectual approach and envy, as well as academic politics and the gender realities of her age. This biography offers the first full account of Reichard's life, her milieu, and, most importantly, her work - establishing, once and for all, her lasting significance in the history of anthropology. In her thirty-two years as the founder and head of Barnard College's groundbreaking anthropology department, Reichard taught that Native languages, written or unwritten, sacred or profane, offered Euro-Americans the least distorted views onto the inner life of North America's first peoples. This unique approach put her at odds with anthropologists such as Edward Sapir, leader of the structuralist movement in American linguistics. Similarly, Reichard's focus on Native psychology as revealed to her by Native artists and storytellers produced a dramatically different style of ethnography from that of Margaret Mead, who relied on western psychological archetypes to ""crack"" alien cultural codes, often at a distance. Despite intense pressure from her peers to conform to their theories, Reichard held firm to her humanitarian principles and methods; the result, as Nancy Mattina makes clear, was pathbreaking work in the ethnography of ritual and mythology; Wiyot, Coeur d'Alene, and Navajo linguistics; folk art, gender, and language - amplified by an exceptional career of teaching, editing, publishing, and mentoring. Drawing on Reichard's own writings and correspondence, this book provides an intimate picture of her small-town upbringing, the professional challenges she faced in male-centered institutions, and her quietly revolutionary contributions to anthropology. Gladys Reichard emerges as she lived and worked - a far-sighted, self-reliant humanist sustained in turbulent times by the generous, egalitarian spirit that called her yearly to the far corners of the American West.

Thomas Berg challenges context-free theories of linguistics; he is concerned with the way the term 'explanation' is typically used in the discipline. He argues that real explanations cannot emerge from a view which asserts the autonomy of language, but only from an approach which seeks to establish a connection between language and the contexts in which it is embedded. The author examines the psychological context in detail. He uses an interactiveactivation model of language processing to derive predictions about synchronic linguistic patterns, the course of linguistic change, and the structure of poetic rhymes. The majority of these predictions are borne out, leading the author to conclude that the structure of language is shaped by the properties of the mechanism which puts it to use, and that psycholinguistics thus qualifies as one likely approach from which to derive an explanation of linguistic structure.

This book contains a comprehensive grammatical description of Mehri, an unwritten Semitic language spoken in the Dhofar region of Oman, along with a corpus of more than one hundred texts. Topics in phonology, all aspects of morphology, and a variety of syntactic features are covered. The texts, presented with extensive commentary, were collected by the late T.M. Johnstone. Some are published here for the first time, while the rest have been newly edited and translated, based on the original manuscripts. Semitists, linguists, and anyone interested in the folklore of southern Arabia will find much valuable data and analysis in this volume, which is the most detailed grammatical study of a Modern South Arabian language yet published.

Until quite recently, the term Diaspora (usually with the capital) meant the dispersion of the Jews in many parts of the world. Now, it is recognized that many other groups have built communities distant from their homeland, such as Overseas Chinese, South Asians, Romani, Armenians, Syrian and Palestinian Arabs. To explore the effect of exile of language repertoires, the article traces the sociolinguistic development of the many Jewish Diasporas, starting with the community exiled to Babylon, and following through exiles in Muslim and Christian countries in the Middle Ages and later. It presents the changes that occurred linguistically after Jews were granted full citizenship. It then goes into details about the phenomenon and problem of the Jewish return to the homeland, the revitalization and revernacularization of the Hebrew that had been a sacred and literary language, and the rediasporization that accounts for the cases of maintenance of Diaspora varieties.

Introducing the fundamental issues in psycholinguistics, this book explores the amazing story of the unconscious processes that take place when humans use language. It is an ideal text for undergraduates taking a first course in the study of language. * Topics covered include the biological foundations of language; acquisition of first and second languages in children and adults; the mental lexicon; and speech production, perception, and processing * Structured as an engaging narrative that takes the reader from an idea in the mind of a speaker to its comprehension in the mind of the hearer * Reflects the latest empirical developments in psycholinguistics, and is illustrated throughout with examples from bilingual as well as monolingual language processing, second language acquisition, and sign languages * Student-friendly features include chapter-by-chapter study questions and discussion summaries; the appendix offers an excellent overview of experimental designs in psycholinguistics, and prepares students for their own research * Written by an internationally-regarded author team, drawing on forty years of experience in teaching psycholinguistics

This book of new work by leading international scholars considers developments in the study of diachronic linguistics and linguistic theory, including those concerned with the very definition of language change in the biolinguistic framework, parametric change in a minimalist conception of grammar, the tension between the observed gradual nature of language change and the binary nature of parameters, and whether syntactic change can be triggered internally or requires the external stimuli produced by phonological or morphological change or through language contact. It then tests their value and applicability by examining syntactic change at different times and in a wide range of languages, including German, Chinese, Dutch, Sanskrit, Egyptian, Norwegian, old Italian, Portuguese, English, the Benue-Kwa languages of Niger-Congo, Catalan, Spanish, and old French. The book is divided into three parts devoted to (i) theoretical issues in historical syntax; (ii) external (such as contact and interference) and internal (grammatical) sources of morphosynactic change; and (iii) parameter setting and reanalysis.

The volume Questions in Discourse - Vol. 2 Pragmatics collects original research on the role of questions in understanding text structure and discourse pragmatics. The in-depth studies discuss the effects of focus, questions and givenness in unalternative semantics, as well as the role of scalar particles, question-answer pairs and prosody from the perspective of Questions under Discussion. Two contributions compare the discourse-structuring potential of Questions under Discussion and rhetorical relations, whereas another adds a perspective from inquisitive semantics. Some contributions also look at understudied languages. Together, the contributions allow for a better understanding of question-related pragmatic and discourse-semantic phenomena, and they offer new perspectives on the structure of texts and discourses.

Built on twenty years of fieldwork in rural Jiangyong of Hunan Province in south China, this book explores the world's only gender-defined and now disappearing "women's script" known as nushu. What drove peasant women to create a script of their own and write, and how do those writings throw new light on how gender is addressed in epistemology and historiography and how the unprivileged social class uses marginalized forms of expression to negotiate with the dominant social structure. Further, how have the politics of salvaging this disappearing centuries-old cultural heritage molded a new poetics in contemporary society? This book explores nushu in conjunction with the local women's singing tradition (nuge), tied into the life narratives of four women born in the 1910s, 1930s, and 1960s respectively, each representative in her own way: a nuge singer (majority of Jiangyong women), a child bride (enjoying not much nushu/nuge), the last living traditionally-trained nushu writer, and a new-generation nushu transmitter. Altogether, their stories unfold peasant women's lifeworlds and forefronts various aspects of China's changing social milieu over the past century. They show how nushu/nuge-registering women's sense and sensibilities and providing agency to subjects who have been silenced by history-constitute a reflexive social field whereby women share life stories to expand the horizon of their personal worldviews and probe beneath the surface of their existence for new inspiration in their process of becoming. With the concept of "expressive depths, " this book opens a new vista on how women express themselves through multiple forms that simultaneously echo and critique the mainstream social system and urges a rethinking of how forms of expression define and confine the voice carried. Examining the multiple efforts undertaken by scholars, local officials, and cultural entrepreneurs to revive nushu which have ironically threatened to disfigure its true face, this book poses a question of whither nushu? Should it be transformed, or has it reached a perfect end point from which to fade into history?

This book examines the development of Chinese translation practice in relation to the rise of ideas of modern selfhood in China from the 1890s to the 1920s. The key translations produced by late Qing and early Republican Chinese intellectuals over the three decades in question reflect a preoccupation with new personality ideals informed by foreign models and the healthy development of modern individuality, in the face of crises compounded by feelings of cultural inadequacy. The book clarifies how these translated works supplied the meanings for new terms and concepts that signify modern human experience, and sheds light on the ways in which they taught readers to internalize the idea of the modern as personal experience. Through their selection of source texts and their adoption of different translation strategies, the translators chosen as case studies championed a progressive view of the world: one that was open-minded and humanistic. The late Qing construction of modern Chinese identity, instigated under the imperative of national salvation in the aftermath of the First Sino-Japanese War, wielded a far-reaching influence on the New Culture discourse. This book argues that the New Culture translations, being largely explorations of modern self-consciousness, helped to produce an egalitarian cosmopolitan view of modern being. This was a view favoured by the majority of mainland intellectuals in the post-Maoist 1980s and which has since become an important topic in mainland scholarship.