This book grew out of a concern we have had that very many theoretical and descriptive work on the Kwa languages were not accessible to the general linguistic community. As a result, these languages were only referred to in the context of very specific discussions such as serial verb constructions. But as the reader of this book will notice, syntactic topics discussed in the context of Kwa range from bare nouns, relative clauses, negation, discourse markers and the interaction with the clausal periphery, to argument structure. Many issues remain that need to be brought to the fore of the community and we hope that this book will trigger the curiosity of the reader to get to know more about these languages. Much of the work presented here could not have been possible without the help of many colleagues and the contri- tors whom we thank warmly for joining this enterprise. We are also grateful to the editors of the series, Marcel den Dikken, Joan Maling, Liliane Haegeman to have offered us this platform to initiate the debate about Kwa. We will also like to thank Helen van der Stelt and Jolanda Voogd from Springer for their kind collaboration and patience. We are also very grateful to Joscelyn Essegbey and Leston Buell for helping with editing the manuscript. Enoch, O. Aboh James Essegbey v Contents 1 The Phonology Syntax Interface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Enoch, O. Aboh and James Essegbey 2 The Morphosyntax of the Noun Phrase . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Enoch, O.

This collection of essays grew out of the workshop 'Existence: Semantics and Syntax', which was held at the University of Nancy 2 in September 2002. The workshop, organized by Ileana Comorovski and Claire Gardent, was supported by a grant from the Reseau de Sciences Cognitives du Grand Est ('Cognitive Science Network of the Greater East'), which is gratefully acknowledged. The ?rst e- tor wishes to thank Claire Gardent, Fred Landman, and Georges Rebuschi for encouraging her to pursue the publication of a volume based on papers presented at the workshop. Among those who participated in the workshop was Klaus von Heusinger, who joined Ileana Comorovski in editing this volume. Besides papers that developed out of presentations at the workshop, the volume contains invited contributions. We are grateful to Wayles Browne, Fred Landman, Paul Portner, and Georges Rebuschi for their help with reviewing some of the papers. Our thanks go also to a Springer reviewer for the careful reading of the book manuscript. We wish to thank all the participants in the workshop, not only those whose contributions appear in this volume, for making the workshop an int- active and constructive event. Ileana Comorovski Klaus von Heusinger vii ILEANA COMOROVSKI AND KLAUS VON HEUSINGER INTRODUCTION The notion of 'existence', which we take to have solid intuitive grounding, plays a central role in the interpretation of at least three types of linguistic constructions: copular clauses, existential sentences, and (in)de?nite noun phrases."

This book constitutes the first full-length diachronic treatment of the English progressive from Old English to Present-day English, focusing on the crucial phase of its grammaticalization between the 17th and 20th centuries. It uses data from the British component of ARCHER-2 (A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers, version 2) to uncover the details of this long-term grammaticalization process, tracing the development of the construction from a stylistic device to a fully-fledged aspect marker. Illustrated by a wealth of examples, the work offers new results concerning the preferred linguistic environments and the development of the functions of the progressive. In contrast to previous studies, the author shows that there are certain restrictions to context expansion in grammaticalization. She argues convincingly that the persistent reluctance of the progressive to occur in certain contexts does not point to incomplete grammaticalization, but can instead be explained as a product of its particular functions. The author also challenges the tenet that grammaticalization is generally accompanied by subjectification.

These lectures deal with the role of cognitive modelling in language-based meaning construction. To make meaning people use a small set of principles which they apply to different types of conceptual characterizations. This yields predictable meaning effects, which, when stably associated with specific grammatical patterns, result in constructions or fixed form-meaning parings. This means that constructional meaning can be described on the basis of the same principles that people use to make inferences. This way of looking at pragmatics and grammar through cognition allows us to relate a broad range of pragmatic and grammatical phenomena, among them argument-structure characterizations, implicational, illocutionary, and discourse structure, and such figures of speech as metaphor, metonymy, hyperbole, and irony.

The scattered research history of the Old Frisian runic inscriptions dating to the early Medieval period (ca. AD 400-1000) calls for a comprehensive and systematic reprocessing of these objects within their socio-cultural context and against the backdrop of the Old English Runic tradition. This book presents an annotated edition of 24 inscriptions found in the modern-day Netherlands, England and Germany. It provides the reader with an introduction to runological methodology, a linguistic commentary on the features attested in the inscriptions, and a detailed catalogue which outlines the find history of each object and summarizes previous and new interpretations supplemented by pictures and drawings. This book additionally explores the question of Frisian identity and an independent Frisian runic writing tradition and its relation to the contemporary Anglo-Saxon runic culture. In its entirety, this work provides a rich basis for future research in the field of runic writing around the North Sea and may therefore be of interest to scholars of historical linguistics and early Medieval history and archaeology.

This book introduces readers to the principles of a fairly new branch of psychology - positive psychology - and demonstrates how they can be applied in the context of second language acquisition in a natural environment and in instructed foreign language (FL) learning. It focuses both on the well-being and success of the learner and the professional and personal well-being of the teacher. Further, the book stresses the importance of the positive emotions and character strengths of those involved in the process of language learning and teaching, as well as the significant role played by enabling institutions such as school and, at the micro-level, individual FL classes.

The Song of Songs, a lyric cycle of love scenes without a narrative plot, has often been considered as the Bible's most beautiful and enigmatic book. The present study questions the still dominant exegetical convention that merges all of the Song's voices into the dialogue of a single couple, its composite heroine Shulamit being a projection screen for norms of womanhood. An alternative socio-spatial reading, starting with the Hebrew text's strophic patterns and its references to historical realia, explores the poem's artful alternation between courtly, urban, rural, and pastoral scenes with their distinct characters. The literary construction of social difference juxtaposes class-specific patterns of consumption, mobility, emotion, power structures, and gender relations. This new image of the cycle as a detailed poetic frieze of ancient society eventually leads to a precise hypothesis concerning its literary and religious context in the Hellenistic age, as well as its geographical origins in the multiethnic borderland east of the Jordan. In a Jewish echo of anthropological skepticism, the poem emphasizes the plurality and relativity of the human condition while praising the communicative powers of pleasure, fantasy, and multifarious Eros.

The HittiteEtymological Dictionary is a comprehensive compendium of the vocabulary of Hittite, one of the great languages of the Ancient Near East, and of paramount importance for comparative Indo-European studies. Since the start of publication, as evidenced by frequency of reference and quotation, this work has become an important tool for study and research in Hittite, Ancient Anatolian, and Indo-European linguistics.

This edited collection explores the processes of second language learning and teaching from a psycholinguistic perspective. Authored by leading experts in the field, the book includes studies focusing on theoretical, empirical and practical aspects of second and foreign language education. Part One offers contributions devoted to a range of learner-related factors, dealing with affective and cognitive variables, the process of reading and the acquisition of lexis. Part Two brings together papers related to teacher awareness of second language instruction that focus on conversational styles, fostering intercultural pragmatics, teacher job satisfaction, the development of instructional materials and challenges of teacher training in different contexts. It is of interest to researchers as well as graduate and postgraduate students seeking fresh inspirations for their own empirical investigations of the ways in which second and foreign languages are taught and learned.

The relationship of language to cognition, especially in development, is an issue that has occupied philosophers, psychologists, and linguists for centuries. In recent years, the scientific study of sign languages and deaf individuals has greatly enhanced our understanding of deafness, language, and cognition. This Counterpoints volume considers the extent to which the use of sign language might affect the course and character of cognitive development, and presents a variety of viewpoints in this debate.
This volume brings the language-thought discussion into a clearer focus, both theoretically and practically, by placing it in the context of children growing up deaf and the influences of having sign language as their primary form of communication. The discussion is also sharpened by having internationally recognized contributors, such as Patricia Siple, Diane Lillo-Martin, and Ruth Campbell, with specialties in varied areas, all converging on a common interest in which each has conducted empirical research. These contributors clarify and challenge the theoretical assumptions that have driven arguments in the language-thought debate for centuries. An introduction by the editors provides a historical overview of the issues as well as a review of empirical findings that have been offered in response to questions about language-thought relations in deaf children. The final chapters are structured in the form of "live" debate, in which each contributor is given the opportunity to respond to the other perspectives presented in this volume.

This book examines how a new dialect emerges. It is based on empirical research carried out in Waumandee, Wisconsin, a small community set in a linguistically uncharted territory in North America. Waumandee English is influenced by the native languages of settlers who arrived from different parts of Switzerland, Germany, Norway, Poland, Austria and Ireland. Traditional dialectology augmented by sociolinguistic and psychological parameters enables the reader to follow the path of current dialect emergence in Waumandee English.

These are exciting times to be living in. It is just before Jesus Christ returns to be the King of kings and Lord of lords. There are many signs that point to this, and I discuss a few of them in this book.

I'm not going to tell you when this happens, because Jesus didn't know when he was here on earth. He said it was not for us to know. But I'm sure He knows now, as He sits at the right hand of God the Father.

One of the ways we know that the time is near is that knowledge has increased dramatically in the last fifty years. Ultimately it all points to God as the creator of the universe. We have the internet to dispense our knowledge, and it is pretty much worldwide. This is one of the ways that an imposter known as the Anti-Christ will take over a worldwide government that has been established and set up his own regime. Everyone will know this is their leader, because it will be broadcast by satellite.

My advice is to read this book to decipher what the Bible says about these exciting times we are living in. As one of my favorite contemporary Christian music groups, Whiteheart, said in the title of one of their albums, "Read the book, don't wait for the movie."

This is a history of the great language controversy that has occupied and empassioned Greeks - sometimes with fatal results - for over two hundred years. It begins in the late eighteenth-century when a group of Greek intellectuals sought to develop a new, Hellenic, national identity alongside the traditional identity supplied by Orthodox Christianity. The ensuing controversy focused on the language, fuelled on the one hand by a desire to develop a form of Greek that expressed the Greeks' relationship to the ancients, and on the other by the different groups' contrasting notions of what the national image so embodied should be. The purists wanted a writing system close to the ancient. The vernacularists - later known as demoticists - sought to match written language to spoken, claiming the latter to be the product of the unbroken development of Greek since the time of Homer. Peter Mackridge explores the political, social, and linguistic causes and effects of the controversy in its many and passionate manifestations. Drawing on a wide range of evidence from literature, language, history, and anthropology, he traces its effects on spoken and written varieties of Greek and shows its impact on those in use today. He describes successive language-planning policies of the state and the efforts by linguistic elites to achieve language standardization and independence from languages, such as Turkish, Albanian, Vlach, and Slavonic, spoken where once Greek was dominant.
This is a timely book. The sense of national and linguistic identity that has been inculcated into generations of Greeks since the start of the War of Independence in 1821 has, in the last 25 years, received blows from whichit may not recover. Immigration from Eastern Europe and elsewhere has introduced new populations whose religions, languages, and cultures are transforming Greece into a country quite different from what it has been and to what it once aspired to be.

In this volume, the author investigates and argues for, a particular answer to the question: What is the right way to logically analyze modalities from natural language within formal languages? The answer is: by formalizing modal expressions in terms of predicates. But, as in the case of truth, the most intuitive modal principles lead to paradox once the modal notions are conceived as predicates. The book discusses the philosophical interpretation of these modal paradoxes and argues that any satisfactory approach to modality will have to face the paradoxes independently of the grammatical category of the modal notion. By systematizing modal principles with respect to their joint consistency and inconsistency, Stern provides an overview of the options and limitations of the predicate approach to modality that may serve as a useful starting point for future work on predicate approaches to modality. Stern also develops a general strategy for constructing philosophically attractive theories of modal notions conceived as predicates. The idea is to characterize the modal predicate by appeal to its interaction with the truth predicate. This strategy is put to use by developing the modal theories Modal Friedman-Sheard and Modal Kripke-Feferman.

The last decades have witnessed a renewed interest in near-synonymy. In particular, recent distributional corpus-based approaches used for semantic analysis have successfully uncovered subtle distinctions in meaning between near-synonyms. However, most studies have dealt with the semantic structure of sets of near-synonyms from a synchronic perspective, while their diachronic evolution generally has been neglected. Against this backdrop, the aim of this book is to examine five adjectival near-synonyms in the history of American English from the understudied semantic domain of SMELL: fragrant, perfumed, scented, sweet-scented, and sweet-smelling. Their distribution is analyzed across a wide range of contexts, including semantic, morphosyntactic, and stylistic ones, since distributional patterns of this type serve as a proxy for semantic (dis)similarity. The data is submitted to various univariate and multivariate statistical techniques, making it possible to uncover fine-grained (dis)similarities among the near-synonyms, as well as possible changes in their prototypical structures. The book sheds valuable light on the diachronic development of lexical near-synonyms, a dimension that has up to now been relatively disregarded.

How does a country find itself 'at war' over spelling? This book focuses on a crucial juncture in the post-communist history of the Czech Republic, when an orthographic commission with a moderate reformist agenda found itself the focus of enormous public controversy. Delving back into history, Bermel explores the Czech nation's long tradition of intervention and its association with the purity of the language, and how in the twentieth century an ascendant linguistic school - Prague Functionalism - developed into a progressive but centralizing ideology whose power base was inextricably linked to the communist regime. Bermel looks closely at the reforms of the 1990s and the heated public reaction to them. On the part of language regulators, he examines the ideology that underlay the reforms and the tactics employed on all sides to gain linguistic authority, while in dissecting the public reaction, he looks both at conscious arguments marshaled in favor of and against reform and at the use, conscious and subconscious, of metaphors about language. Of interest to faculty and students working in the area of language, cultural studies, and history, especially that of transitional and post-communist states, this volume is also relevant for those with a more general interest in language planning and language reform. The book is awarded with the "The George Blazyca Prize in East European Studies 2008".

The book provides strong evidence that research on the cognitive processes from arithmetic thought to algebraic thought should take into consideration the socio-cultural context. It is an important contribution to the literature on linguistic structure in comparative studies related to Chinese student mathematics learning.

This book not only makes a great contribution to research in mathematics education, the findings of this study also addressed insightful approaches and thoughts of understanding the development of algebraic thinking in cultural contexts for classroom teachers. Using written Chinese language from different theoretical references provided wonderful approaches for understanding student algebra cognitive development in a different way and calls educators for to pay special attention to an epistemological and linguistic view of algebraic development. The findings inform classroom teachers that the cultural context plays an important role in student learning mathematics. A typical analysis of the cognitive dimension involved in some in the historical and cultural contexts is a great resource for classroom teachers.

I really enjoyed reading this book and learned a lot from its compelling analysis.

Shuhua An, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Program in Mathematics Education, California State University, Long Beach

This book traces the development of hypermetric verse in Old English and compares it to the cognate traditions of Old Norse and Old Saxon. The study illustrates the inherent flexibility of the hypermetric line and shows how poets were able to manipulate this flexibility in different contexts for different practical and rhetorical purposes. This mode of analysis is therefore able to show what degree of control the poets had over the traditional alliterative line, what effects they were able to produce with various stylistic choices, and how attention to poetic style can aid in literary analysis.

Empirical and Analytical Advances in the Study of English Language Change continues the project of initiating and energizing the conversations among historians of the English language fostered by the series of conferences on studying the history of the English language (SHEL), begun in 2000 at UCLA. It follows in the footsteps of three high-profile SHEL-based collections of peer-reviewed research papers and point-counterpoint commentaries. In the current volume, the editors invited contributors to reflect upon their approaches and practices in undertaking historical studies, focusing particularly on the methods deployed in selecting and analyzing data. The essays in this volume represent interests in the study of linguistic change in English that range across different periods, genres, and aspects of the language and show different approaches and use of evidence to deal with the subject. They also represent the current state of research in the field and the nature of the debates in which scholars and historians engage as regards the nature of the evidence adduced in the explanation of change and the robustness of heuristics. The editors share a strong interest in examining the evidence that informs and grounds research in their fields at the same time as interrogating the heuristics employed by their colleagues for the histories they present. The contributions to the volume give expression to these interests. Contributors are: Richard Hogg (to whose memory the volume is dedicated), William Labov, Elizabeth Traugott, Rob Fulk, Thomas Cable, Jennifer Tran-Smith, Charles Li, Christina Fitzgerald, David Denison, Christopher Palmer, Don Chapman, Graeme Trousdale, Joan Beal, Connie Eble, Stefan Dollinger and Raymond Hickey. The volume is of interest to scholars and postgraduate and research students in the history of English, English philology, and (English) historical linguistics.

Following the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, Croatian was declared to be a separate language, distinct from Serbian, and linguistic issues became highly politicized. This book examines the changing status and norms of the Croatian language and its relationship to Croatian national identity, focusing on the period after Croatian independence.

In contrast to previous approaches to phonological typology, the typology of syllable and word languages relates the patterns of syllable structure, phoneme inventory, and phonological processes to the relevance of the prosodic domains of the syllable and the phonological word. This volume proves how useful this kind of typology is for the understanding of language variation and change. By providing a synchronic and diachronic account of the syllable and the phonological word in Central Catalan (Catalan dialect group) and Swabian (Alemannic dialect group), the author shows how the evolution of Old Catalan and Old Alemannic can be explained in terms of a typological drift toward an increased relevance of the phonological word. Further, the description of Central Catalan and Swabian allows to identify common strategies for profiling the phonological word and thus makes an important contribution to research on prosodic phonology.

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

This monograph is a detailed linguistic analysis of the discourse of German nationalism, colonialism and Anti-Semitism using a methodological framework devised by Ruth Wodak et al., the Discourse Historical Approach. It pays particular attention to the discourse strategies, argumentation topoi and metaphors used by a selection of representative authors of both political propaganda and fiction. The study shows how the analysis of linguistic and social behaviour and the connection between them sheds light on the nature and effects of human behaviour, and on the motives and reasoning behind human actions. Within the context of nationalism and prejudiced behaviours, the construction in discourse of individual and group 'self-images' and the discursive means of contrasting these with 'other-images' is of major significance

This book offers an exciting new perspective on the origins of language. Language is conceptualized as a collective invention, on the model of writing or the wheel, and the book places social and cultural dynamics at the centre of its evolution: language emerged and further developed in human communities already suffused with meaning and communication, mimesis, ritual, song and dance, alloparenting, new divisions of labour and revolutionary changes in social relations. The book thus challenges assumptions about the causal relations between genes, capacities, social communication and innovation: the biological capacities are taken to evolve incrementally on the basis of cognitive plasticity, in a process that recruits previous adaptations and fine-tunes them to serve novel communicative ends. Topics include the ability brought about by language to tell lies, that must have confronted our ancestors with new problems of public trust; the dynamics of social-cognitive co-evolution; the role of gesture and mimesis in linguistic communication; studies of how monkeys and apes express their feelings or thoughts; play, laughter, dance, song, ritual and other social displays among extant hunter-gatherers; the social nature of language acquisition and innovation; normativity and the emergence of linguistic norms; the interaction of language and emotions; and novel perspectives on the time-frame for language evolution. The contributors are leading international scholars from linguistics, anthropology, palaeontology, primatology, psychology, evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, archaeology, and cognitive science.