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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Historical & comparative linguistics > General
This book brings together papers on various aspects of prosodic development from a generative linguistic perspective. It addresses issues such as the relationship between tone, stress and quantity, the evidence for prosodic change from metrics and discusses the role of analogy, language contact, and language acquisition in change. The unique combination of different methodologies and perspectives investigating development in prosodic systems provides a new and broader scope on historical linguistics.
This volume comprises contributions from different disciplines (cognitive psychology, linguistics, computer science, neuroscience) concerned with the generation of natural speech. It summarizes the outcome of a six-year long priority program funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) that aimed at bringing together colleagues with different viewpoints but sharing a principal interest in the cognitive processes underlying language production. The result is a state-of-the-art discussion of one of the most fascinating branches of human behavior taking into account a particularly rich multidisciplinary empirical data base.
TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.
This text is an introduction to the enigma of the Baltic origins and self-identification of the Baltic people. It is divided into three parts. The first part recounts the history of the Baltic people relying on archaeological sources. The second part provides an objective linguistic history and a description of the Baltic languages. The third part offers an insight into mythology in the ancient history of the Baltic peoples.
This collection of essays gives an insight into the problems that we encounter when we try to (re)construct events from Israel's past. On the one hand, the Hebrew Bible is a biased source, on the other hand, the data provided by archaeology and extra-biblical texts are constrained and sometimes contradictory. Discussing a set of examples, the author applies fundamental insight from the philosophy of history to clarify Israel's past.
The "one-nation-one-language" assumption is as unrealistic as the well-known Chomskyan ideal of a homogeneous speech community. Linguistic pluricentricity is a common and widespread phenomenon; it can be understood as either differing national standards or differing local norms. The nine studies collected in this volume explore the sociocultural, conceptual and structural dimensions of variation and change within pluricentric languages, with specific emphasis on the relationship between national varieties. They include research undertaken in both the Cognitive Linguistic and socolinguistic tradition, with particular emphasis upon the emerging framework of Cognitive Sociolinguistics. Six languages, all more or less pluricentric, are analyzed: four Germanic languages (English, German, Dutch and Swedish) and two Romance languages (Portuguese and French). The volume describes patterns of phonetic, lexical and morphosyntactic variation, and perception and attitudes in relation to these pluricentric languages. It makes use of advanced empirical methods able to account for the complex interplay between conceptual and social aspects of pluricentric variation and other forms of language-internal variation.
The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781351049139, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. This volume offers an exhaustive look at the latest research on metacognition in language learning and teaching. While other works have explored certain notions of metacognition in language learning and teaching, this book, divided into theoretical and empirical chapters, looks at metacognition from a variety of perspectives, including metalinguistic and multilingual awareness, and language learning and teaching in L2 and L3 settings, and explores a range of studies from around the world. This allows the volume to highlight a diverse set of methodological approaches, including blogging, screen recording software, automatic translation programs, language corpora, classroom interventions, and interviews, and subsequently, to demonstrate the value of metacognition research and how insights from such findings can contribute to a greater understanding of language learning and language teaching processes more generally. This innovative collection is an essential resource for students and scholars in language teaching pedagogy, and applied linguistics.
The chapters in this volume are the result of a series of Cognitive Sciences Workshops held at McGill University. Each workshop was organized around a different theme and each of these topics is represented in the volume: language acquisition and development; text and text processing; computer chess; grammars, parsers, and language comprehension; scientific reasoning and problem solving; language and the brain; and semantics. The topics are approached from the perspectives of linguistics, psychology, philosophy, computer science, and neurology.
In South Korea, English is a language of utmost importance, sought with an unprecedented zeal as an indispensable commodity in education, business, popular culture, and national policy. This book investigates how the status of English as a hegemonic language in South Korea is constructed through the mediation of language ideologies in local discourse. Adopting the framework of language ideology and its current developments, it is argued that English in Korean society is a subject of deep-rooted ambiguities, with multiple and sometimes conflicting ideologies coexisting within a tension-ridden discursive space. The complex ways in which these ideologies are reproduced, contested, and negotiated through specific metalinguistic practices across diverse sites ultimately contribute to a local realization of the global hegemony of English as an international language. Through its insightful analysis of metalinguistic discourse in language policy debates, cross-linguistic humor, television shows, and face-to-face interaction, The Local Construction of a Global Language makes an original contribution to the study of language and globalization, proposing an innovative analytic approach that bridges the gap between the investigation of large-scale global forces and the study of micro-level discourse practices.
This book offers a new perspective on the role played by colonial descriptions and translation of Caribbean plants in representations of Caribbean culture. Through thorough examination of Caribbean phytonyms in lexicography, colonization, history, songs and translation studies, the authors argue that the Westernisation of vernacular phytonyms, while systematizing the nomenclature, blurred and erased the cultural tradition of Caribbean plants and medicinal herbs. Means of transmission and preservation of this oral culture was in the plantation songs and herb vendor songs. Musical creativity is a powerful form of resistance, as in the case of Reggae music and the rise of Rastafarians, and Bob Marley's 'untranslatable' lyrics. This book will be of interest to scholars of Caribbean studies and to linguists interested in pushing the current Eurocentric boundaries of translation studies.
This book focuses attention on a relatively neglected component of communication-silence-in order to present current research from a number of disciplines and also to stimulate further research on the subject. Silence is often viewed as an out-of-awareness phenomenon against which talk is perceived. By reversing polarities and treating silence as a figure to be examined against talk, we are given a heightened awareness of the universal aspects of human behavior while emphasizing its complex nature as a cultural phenomenon.
This work is a psycho linguistic investigation of the processing of tense (more specifically, the English past tense): When it is interpreted, how it is interpreted, and what it is interpreted with respect to. While there has been a great deal of attention paid to tense in the syntax and semantics literature, little work has been done on the details of the psychological processing of this category. The chief value and contribution of this book is to present a richly detailed in-depth study of the processing of tense in adult comprehension tasks, providing an excellent model of how to conceive of detailed experimental work against a background of sophisticated, deep, and broad linguistic theory. The discussion of the representational issues is deep and informative, and is directly brought to bear on experimental issues. The experiments aim to evaluate whether a hypothesis called "Parsimony," a highly plausible notion that has received tentative experimental support in other domains, is the chief controlling feature of the interpretation of tense. The experimental results presented quite consistently do not confirm the apparent predictions made by Parsimony, but rather tend to be more consistent with another view (which Parsimony is aimed at opposing) which holds that actual structural factors in the syntax of a sentence are a decisive factor. Along the way, the author considers a number of other plausible hypotheses as the experimental results are presented, but evaluating Parsimony remains the chief organizing principle of the line of research presented here.
This description of the structure of Old Church Slavonic is intended to present fully the important data about the language, without citing all the minutiae of attested variant spellings. The facts have been treated from the point of view of structural linguistics, but pedagogical clarity has taken precedence over the conciseness required for elegant formal description.
This volume focuses on the present state of English historical linguistics as a unitary discipline. In particular, the selection of papers challenges the idea that the community of linguists working on the history of English stands united merely by subject matter, but divided by method and theoretical outlook. The volume emphasizes the way in which scholars in our community are lead to refine and further articulate their empirical proposals by challenges from different research paradigms. Thus, a running thematic thread of the volume is the dialogue between generative grammatical theory and corpus studies, including those in sociolinguistic tradition. The volume is divided in four main sections: syntax, phonology, text types, sociolinguistics and dialectology.
The present study describes German and English personal nouns taking account of historical linguistic aspects and using features in such a way that lexicalized derivatives can be analysed, and at the same time the conditions can be established for new formations, and an explicit description of the commonalties and differences between the two languages can be provided.
This book is about machine translation (MT) and the classic problems associated with this language technology. It examines the causes of these problems and, for linguistic, rule-based systems, attributes the cause to language's ambiguity and complexity and their interplay in logic-driven processes. For non-linguistic, data-driven systems, the book attributes translation shortcomings to the very lack of linguistics. It then proposes a demonstrable way to relieve these drawbacks in the shape of a working translation model (Logos Model) that has taken its inspiration from key assumptions about psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic function. The book suggests that this brain-based mechanism is effective precisely because it bridges both linguistically driven and data-driven methodologies. It shows how simulation of this cerebral mechanism has freed this one MT model from the all-important, classic problem of complexity when coping with the ambiguities of language. Logos Model accomplishes this by a data-driven process that does not sacrifice linguistic knowledge, but that, like the brain, integrates linguistics within a data-driven process. As a consequence, the book suggests that the brain-like mechanism embedded in this model has the potential to contribute to further advances in machine translation in all its technological instantiations.
This work presents Sapir's most comprehensive statement on the concepts of culture, on method and theory in anthropology and other social sciences, on personality organization, and on the individual's place in culture and society. Extensive discussions on the role of language and other symbolic systems in culture, ethnographic method, and social interaction are also included. Ethnographic and linguistic examples are drawn from Sapir's fieldwork among native North Americans and from European and American society as well. Edward Sapir (1884-1939), one of this century's leading figures in American anthropology and linguistics, planned to publish a major theoretical state - ment on culture and psychology. He developed his ideas in a course of lectures presented at Yale University in the 1930s, which attracted a wide audience from many social science disciplines. Unfortunately, he died before the book he had contracted to publish could be realized. Like de Saussure's Cours de Linguistique Generale before it, this work has been reconstructed from student notes, in this case twentytwo sets, as well as from Sapir's manuscript materials. Judith Irvine's meticulous reconstruction makes Sapir's compelling ideas - of surprisingly contemporary resonance - available for the first time.
The book collects contributions from well-established researchers at the interface between language and cognition. It provides an overview of the latest insights into this interdisciplinary field from the perspectives of natural language processing, computer science, psycholinguistics and cognitive science. One of the pioneers in cognitive natural language processing is Michael Zock, to whom this volume is dedicated. The structure of the book reflects his main research interests: lexicon and lexical analysis, semantics, language and speech generation, reading and writing technologies, language resources and language engineering. The book is a valuable reference work and authoritative information source, giving an overview on the field and describing the state of the art as well as future developments. It is intended for researchers and advanced students interested in the subject. One of the pioneers in cognitive natural language processing is Michael Zock, to whom this volume is dedicated. The structure of the book reflects his main research interests: Lexicon and lexical analysis, semantics, language and speech generation, reading and writing technologies, language resources and language engineering. The book is a valuable reference work and authoritative information source, giving an overview on the field and describing the state of the art as well as future developments. It is intended for researchers and advanced students interested in the subject. One of the pioneers in cognitive natural language processing is Michael Zock, to whom this volume is dedicated. The structure of the book reflects his main research interests: Lexicon and lexical analysis, semantics, language and speech generation, reading and writing technologies, language resources and language engineering. The book is a valuable reference work and authoritative information source, giving an overview on the field and describing the state of the art as well as future developments. It is intended for researchers and advanced students interested in the subject.
This volume provides an up-to-date and evaluative review of theoretical and empirical stances on emotion and its close interaction with language and cognition in monolingual and bilingual individuals. Importantly, it presents a novel methodological approach that takes into account contextual information and hence goes beyond the reductionist approach to affective language that has dominated contemporary research. Owing to this pragmatic approach, the book presents brand new findings in the field of bilingualism and affect and offers the first neurocognitive interpretation of findings reported in clinical and introspective studies in bilingualism. This not only represents an invaluable contribution to the literature, but may also constitute a breakthrough in the investigation of the worldwide phenomenon of bilingualism. Beginning with a thorough review of the history and current state of affective research and its relation to language, spanning philosophical, psychological, neuroscientific, and linguistic perspectives, the volume then proceeds to explore affect manifestation using neuropragmatic methods in monolingual and bilingual individuals. In doing so, it brings together findings from clinical and introspective studies in bilingualism with cognitive, psychophysiological and neuroimaging paradigms. By combining conceptual understanding and methodological expertise from many disciplines, this volume provides a comprehensive picture of the dynamic interactions between contextual and affective information in the language domain. Thus, Affect-Language Interactions in Native and Non-Native English Speakers: A Neuropragmatic Perspective fosters a pragmatic approach to research on affective language processing in monolingual and bilingual population, one that builds bridges across disciplines and sparks important new questions in the cognitive neuroscience of bi- and multilingualism.
Spanish and Portuguese Across Time highlights the range possible for scholars trained in a department of linguistics and literature, and shows that these disciplines need not be mutually exclusive. It covers a diverse range of topics, which nevertheless retain a common focus, on the dynamic nature of languages and the social forces that shape them across time, place, and borders. Themes in Part I - Linguistics and Literature: Translation, Society, and Language Variation - include the literary representation of speech, social, and regional variation, and some history on linguistic devices used in the service of social criticism. The work here demonstrates how linguistic principles can offer productive angles to the study of literature, and that literary sources can serve as data for linguistic analysis. The papers in Part II - Language Change, Language Contact, and Language Users - continue the focus on the interface between language and social factors, with both historical and present-day data on speech and speakers' behavior.
Growing out of an International Society of the Study of Behavioral Development-sponsored symposium, this book discusses the basic assumptions that led the contributors to conduct research in the field of narrative development. This collection gathers their research reflections and varying approaches to narrative and its development. It illustrates each type of approach and highlights their respective motives. The book presents some of the basic motivating assumptions of each approach and provides insight into what holds each set of assumptions together, potentially transforming them into actions. This book will serve as an excellent text for courses emphasizing multiple approaches to the study of narrative. The editor has organized this volume in accordance with the six main points of the symposium: * Specification of the Domain--how narratives are defined in terms of textual structures, knowledge thereof, interactive moves, sociocultural conventions, and the like. * The Individual's Involvement in the Developmental Process--the relationship between some internal or external forces and the organism's own active participation in the developmental process. * The Course of Development--if it is continuous or discontinuous; whether it proceeds in an additive fashion or whether regressive phases occur; and what changes at different points in the developmental process signify. * The Goal of Development--the implicit notion of a telos, a target or end-point that needs to occur in the developmental process. * Mechanisms of Development--the forces and/or conditions that both instigate the developmental process and keep it moving toward its telos. * Methodology--where and how to look in the establishment of a developmental framework. This book is an indispensable text in the fields of narrative and/or discourse, linguistics, language studies, psychology, and education in general.
Mixed Languages are speech varieties that arise in bilingual settings, often as markers of ethnic separateness. They combine structures inherited from different parent languages, often resulting in odd and unique splits that present a challenge to theories of contact-induced change as well as genetic classification. This collection of articles is devoted to the theoretical and empirical controversies that surround the study of Mixed Languages. Issues include definitions and prototypes, similarities and differences to other contact languages such as pidgins and creoles, the role of codeswitching in the emergence of Mixed Languages, the role of deliberate and conscious mixing, the question of the existence of a Mixed Language continuum, and the position of Mixed Languages in general models of language change and contact-induced change in particular. An introductory chapter surveys the current study of Mixed Languages. Contributors include leading historical linguists, contact linguists and typologists, among them Carol Myers-Scotton, Sarah Grey Thomason,William Croft, Thomas Stolz, Maarten Mous, Ad Backus, Evgeniy Golovko, Peter Bakker, Yaron Matras.
Akkadian is one of the earliest attested languages and the oldest recorded Semitic language. It exists in written record between 2500BC and 500BC, much of it in letters and reports concerned with domestic and business matters, and written in colloquial language. It provides a unique and valuable source for the study of linguistic change but which, perhaps because of the impenetrability of its writing system, has rarely been exploited by linguists. In this book, Guy Deutscher examines the historical development of subordinate structures in Akkadian. A case study comprises the first two parts of the book, presenting an historical grammar of sentential complementation. Part I traces the emergence of new structures and describes how the finite complements first emerged in Babylonian. It also explains the grammaticalization of the quotative construction. Part II is a functional history which examines the changes in the functional roles of different structures. It shows how, during the history of the language, finite complements and embedded questions became more widespread, whereas other structures (e.g. infinite complements, parataxis, etc.) receded. Part III seeks to explain the historical developments in a theoretical light, showing how the development in Akkadian is mirrored in many other languages. It goes on to suggest that the emergence of finite complementation may be seen as 'adaptive' and related to the development of more complex communication patterns. This book will be of interest to both specialists and general linguists alike. For specialists it offers a contribution towards a badly-needed historical grammar of the Akkadian language. For general linguists this book will be of interest not only for the questions which it raises about the nature of complementation, but also for the window which it provides on to this little-known language. |
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