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.

The Aramaic texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls are among the most important discoveries for the history of Aramaic and for the background of early Judaism and Christianity. They constitute a “missing link” between Biblical Aramaic and the later Aramaic of the targums and midrashic literature. Among them are the oldest texts we have of the Book of Enoch and Tobit, as well as the earliest Aramaic translation of a portion of Scripture, the Targum of Job. Other previously unknown texts such as the Genesis Apocryphon and the Aramaic Levi Document have opened up many new avenues of research on the literature of early Judaism, and the dialect itself is chronologically the one nearest to the origins of Christianity. Now, for the first time, there is a comprehensive dictionary of all the Aramaic texts from the 11 Qumran caves, from a noted specialist in Qumran Aramaic. It is the first dictionary in any language devoted solely to this important Aramaic corpus and contains a wealth of detail, including definitions, extensive citations of the sources, discussions of difficult passages, revised readings, and a bibliography. It will be an indispensable resource to anyone interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the literature of early Judaism and Christianity, and the Aramaic language.

This book is a general introduction to the structures of the different medieval Romance vernaculars most commonly known as Old or Medieval Spanish, as preserved in texts from Spain from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries. After discussing general methodological questions concerning the description and analysis of an earlier historical stage of a modern language, the individual chapters in the first part of the book describe the orthography, phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, and vocabulary of medieval Hispano-Romance. Steven N. Dworkin offers the first systematic description of the language in English, and compares its structures with those found in the modern variety. In the second part of the book, the features of medieval Hispano-Romance are exemplified in an anthology of selected texts, one from each of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, accompanied by linguistic commentary. The volume will be of interest to scholars and students of Romance linguistics, Spanish historical linguistics, and Spanish medieval literary and cultural studies.

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.

In a series of cross-cultural investigations of word meaning, Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka examine key expressions from different domains of the lexicon - concrete, abstract, physical, sensory, emotional, and social. They focus on complex and culturally important words in a range of languages that includes English, Russian, Polish, French, Warlpiri and Malay. Some are basic like men, women, and children or abstract nouns like trauma and violence; others describe qualities such as hot, hard, and rough, emotions like happiness and sadness, or feelings like pain. This fascinating book is for everyone interested in the relations between meaning, culture, ideas, and words. They ground their discussions in real examples from different cultures and draw on work ranging from Leibniz, Locke, and Bentham, to popular works such as autobiographies and memoirs, and the Dalai Lama on happiness. The book opens with a review of the neglected status of lexical semantics in linguistics. The authors consider a range of analytical issues including lexical polysemy, semantic change, the relationship between lexical and grammatical semantics, and the concepts of semantic molecules and templates. Their fascinating book is for everyone interested in the relations between meaning, culture, ideas, and words.

In The Genitive Case in Dutch and German: A Study of Morphosyntactic Change in Codified Languages, Alan K. Scott offers an account of the tension that exists between morphosyntactic change and codification, focusing on the effect that codification has had on the genitive case and alternative constructions in both languages. On the basis of usage data from a wide variety of registers, from the 16th century to the present day, Alan K. Scott demonstrates that codification has preserved obsolescent morphological genitive constructions in Dutch and German while suppressing their potential replacements, and shows that, despite its association with norm-conformant language, the genitive is used to a surprisingly large extent in informal early modern Dutch and modern German sources.

Approaches to Language, Culture and Cognition aims to bring cognitive linguistics and linguistic anthropology closer together, calling for further investigations of language and culture from cognitively-informed perspectives against the backdrop of the current trend of linguistic anthropology.

This volume brings together some of the most recent developments in the field of experimental pragmatics, specifically empirical approaches to theoretical issues in presupposition theory. It includes studies of the online processing of presupposed content; investigations of the interpretive properties of presuppositions in various linguistic contexts; comparative perspectives relative to other aspects of meaning, such as asserted content and implicatures; cross-linguistic comparisons of presupposition triggers; and perspectives from language acquisition. Taken together, these novel contributions provide a snapshot of state-of-the art developments in this area and will serve as a point of reference for numerous emerging avenues of future work. It makes for an ideal set of readings for advanced university courses on experimental studies of meaning and is a must-read for anyone interested in experimental research on meaning in natural language.

Human leadership is a multifaceted topic in the Hebrew Bible from a synchronic as well as diachronic perspective. A large range of distributions emerges from the successive sharpening or modification of different aspects of leadership. While some of them are combined to a complex figuration of leadership, others remain reserved for certain individuals. Furthermore, it can be considered a consensus within scholarly debate, that concepts of leadership have a certain connection to the history of ancient Israel which is, though, hard to ascertain. Following a previous volume that focused on the Pentateuch and the Former Prophets (BZAW 507), this volume deals with different concepts of leadership in selected Prophetic (Hag/Zech; Jer) and Chronistic literature Ezr/Neh; Chr). They are examined in a literary, (religious-/tradition-) historical and theological perspective. Special emphasis is given to phenomena of transforming authority and leadership claims in exilic/post-exilic times. Hence, the volume contributes to biblical theology and sheds new light on the redaction/reception history of the texts. Not least, it provides valuable insights into the history of religious and/or political "authorities" in Israel and Early Judaism(s).

Signals and Systems for Speech and Hearing (2nd edition) provides the reader with a thorough introduction to the concepts of signals and systems analysis that play a role in the speech and hearing sciences. Few equations are used, and an informal, friendly and informative style is maintained throughout. Because much of the story is told through figures, the authors have gone to great lengths to provide clear and truthful figures that show what the text says they do. It is hoped the reader will come away with a strong visual understanding of the concepts involved. This book can be used at many levels, from the student who hasn't heard of a spectrum before, to the experienced worker who has only a fuzzy understanding of the notion of an impulse response. The authors have tried to keep the underlying conceptual structure of signals and systems analysis explicit, in the hope that even some readers with advanced technical training might find clarification of the basic principles. Notable features include over 300 figures integrated closely with the text, all drawn specifically. Exercises are provided at the end of most chapters.

Reflects a consensus that the investigation of words in the mind offers a unique opportunity to understand both human language ability and general human cognition. Brings together key perspectives on the fundamental nature of the representation and processing of words in the mind.
This thematic volume covers a wide range of views on the fundamental nature of representation and processing of words in the mind and a range of views on the investigative techniques that are most likely to reveal that nature.
*Provides an overview of issues and developments in the field
*Uncovers the processses of word recognition
*Develops new models of lexical processing

The volume Questions in Discourse - Vol. 1 Semantics contains a comprehensive overview of the semantic analysis of questions and their role in structuring discourse, next to a series of in-depth contributions on individual aspects of question meanings. The expert contributions offer novel accounts of semantic phenomena such as negation and biased questions, question embedding, exhaustivity, disjunction in alternative questions, and superlative quantification particles in questions. Some accounts are modelled in the framework of inquisitive semantics, whereas others employ alternative semantics, and yet others point to the discourse-structuring potential of marked questions. All contributions are easily accessible against the background of the general introduction. Together, they give an excellent overview of current trends in question semantics.

The task of reconstructing the reinforced demonstrative paradigm for early Nordic has been called "impossible" by the eminent Einar Haugen. In The History of the Reinforced Demonstrative in Nordic, Eric T. Lander aims to accomplish exactly this, by way of an exhaustive study of the pronoun's attestations in the Viking Age runic inscriptions, which are the earliest forms of this item to be recorded in Scandinavia. The detailed picture of regional variation that emerges is then used to inform reconstructions of the paradigm from Proto-Nordic to Common Nordic. The book represents the first serious attempt in historical-comparative linguistics to grapple with the morphological development of the North-West Germanic reinforced demonstrative since the work of 19th-century scholars like Sophus Bugge.

This monograph presents the first comprehensive diachronic account of copular and passive verb constructions in Old and Middle English. The mysterious loss of the high-frequency verb weorthan 'become' is explained as a casualty of changing word order in narrative during Middle English. The merger of is 'is' and bith 'shall be, is generally' into a single suppletive verb is related to the development of a general analytic future shall be. The co-occurrence of multiple changes led to become and wax crossing a threshold of similarity with existing copulas, from which they analogically adopted full productivity in one fell swoop. In explaining each of these changes, the book goes beyond the level of the verb and its complements, drawing attention to analogical networks and the importance of a verb's embeddedness in clausal and textual environments. Using a radically usage-based approach, treating syntax as emerging from (changing) frequencies, Peter Petre draws attention to general principles of constructional change, including but not limited to grammaticalization and lexicalization. He proposes novel parallelisms between linguistic and ecological evolution. Going beyond the view of language change as propagating only in social interaction, Petre explains how each individual's mental grammar can be seen as a dynamic ecosystem with hierarchical environments (clausal niches, textual habitats). In this view, the interconnectedness of seemingly unrelated changes, itself resulting from cognitive economy principles, is arguably more decisive in lexical change than is functional competition.

Assertion is a term frequently used in linguistics and philosophy but rarely defined. This in-depth study surveys and synthesizes a range of philosophical, linguistic and psychological literature on the topic, and then presents a detailed account of the cognitive processes involved in the interpretation of assertions.

This book seeks to answer the questions: why do grammars change, and why is the rate of such change so variable? A principal focus is on changes in English between the Anglo-Saxon and early modern periods. The author frames his analysis in a comparative framework with extended discussions of language change in a wide range of other Indo-European languages. He deploys Chomsky's minimalist framework in a fruitful marriage of comparative and theoretical linguistics within an argument that will be accessible to practitioners in both fields.

Understanding the religious perspectives of the Mishnah starts with asking three questions. First, what is the relationship of the Mishnah to Scripture, or "oral torah" to "written torah," for understanding the religion of Judaism? Second, what is the relationship between religious ideas and the world in which those ideas emerged? Third, what is the formal religious significance of the language of the Mishnah? These questions are posed with regard to a Judaism that existed from just prior to the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E. until around 200 C.E. and assumes as well the groundwork of Neusner's earlier volume "The Mishnah: Social Perspectives. In the present volume, Neusner condenses years of research on these questions and offers a clear and thorough analysis through a single lens. He looks closely at how the Halakhah of the Mishnah relates to the events prior to the Mishnah's writing (e.g., the destruction of the Temple, ca. 70 C.E., and the Bar Kokhba War, ca. 135 C.E.), through the reconstruction following Bar Kokhba until the close of the Mishnah (ca. 200 C.E.). Readers also profit from a thorough sociolinguistic explication of the rhetorical forms of the Mishnah in the light of the social context of that time. The religious perspectives of the Mishnah do not simply record the rules and regulations of bygone times; rather, they mirror the way of life and the social and religious history of Judaism.
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Historical linguistic theory and practice consist of a large number of chronological "layers" that have been accepted in the course of time and have acquired a permanence of their own. These range from neogrammarian conceptualizations of sound change, analogy, and borrowing, to prosodic, lexical, morphological, and syntactic change, and to present-day views on rule change and the effects of language contact. To get a full grasp of the principles of historical linguistics it is therefore necessary to understand the nature of each of these "layers". This book is a major revision and reorganization of the earlier editions and adds entirely new chapters on morphological change and lexical change, as well as a detailed discussion of linguistic palaeontology and ideological responses to the findings of historical linguistics to this landmark publication.

This volume brings different perspectives to bear on the the architecture of the mind and the relationship between language and cognition. It considers how information is linked in the mind between different cognitive and expressive levels - so that people can, for example, talk about what they see and act upon what they hear - and how these linkages are and need to be constrained. It focuses in particular on the perception and representation of spatial structure. In the opening chapter, the editors address the general issues underlying current research and set each chapter in context. The book is then divided into four parts. The first two discuss the properties of the conceptual to syntactic structure interface and the conceptual to spatial structure interface. Part three examines constraints on the lexical interface and the different kinds of cognitive information in word representations. Part four considers how the neural architecture of the brain constrains mapping relations between different kinds of cognitive information. The authors are psychologists and linguists.

Temporality surveys the ways in which languages of different types refer to past, present, and future events, through an in-depth examination of four major language types: tense-based English, tense-aspect-based Polish, aspect-based Chinese, and mood-based Kalaallisut. * Cutting-edge research on directly compositional dynamic semantics of languages with and without grammatical tense * New in-depth analysis of temporal, aspectual, modal, as well as nominal discourse reference * Presents a novel logical language for representing linguistic meaning (Update with Centering) * Develops a unified theory of tense, aspect, mood, and person as different types of grammatical centering systems