Linguists, applied linguists and language teachers all appeal to the native speaker as an important reference point. But what exactly (who exactly?) is the native speaker? This book examines the native speaker from different points of view, arguing that the native speaker is both myth and reality.

This text examines the influence of cultural values and communication styles on intercultural communication and demonstrates how training can develop intercultural communication competencies. A large number of interactions between well-educated immigrants from all continents and from more than a hundred countries, together with some including native speakers, are examined and participants' answers to questionnaires compared with their actual communicative behaviour. The author raises questions of interest to many groups: linguists, educators, business people and sociologists. Which values are most salient and enduring, and which cause clashes between cultural groups? To what extent do people retain the communication style identified with their first language and how do these different styles impact on others?

Jean-Louis Dessalles explores the co-evolutionary paths of biology, culture, and the great human edifice of language, linking the evolution of the language to the general evolutionary history of humankind. He provides searchingly original answers to such fundamental paradoxes as to whether we acquired our greatest gift in order to talk or so as to be able to think, and as to why human beings should, as experience constantly confirms, contribute information for the well-being of others at their own expense and for no apparent gain: which if this is one of language's main functions appears to make its possession, in Darwinian terms, a disadvantage. Dr Dessalles looks for solutions in the early history of human species and considers the degree to which language evolved as a means of choosing profitable coalition partners and maximizing individual success within a competitive social environment. The author opens with a discussion of the differences between animal and human communication and the biological foundations of language. He looks at the physiological preconditions for language evolution and the early evolution of meaning and communication. He then embarks on an important and original account of the natural history of conversation. Here he considers the roles of language in supporting social cohesion and information exchange. This challenging and original account will appeal to all those interested in the origins of language and the evolution of human behaviour.

Focus on Writing is an academic writing program that provides students with essential tools to master not only the key steps in the writing process, but also the grammatical structures, lexical knowledge, and rhetorical modes essential for academic writing. This five-level series progresses with students as they grow in confidence and ability from sentence level (Book 1) through paragraphs (Books 1-3) and essays (Books 3-5). Each unit leads writers step-by-step through the process of prewriting, writing a first draft, revising, and editing before producing a final draft. Not only do students write an entire paragraph or essay in each unit, they are also given plenty of practice at the sentence and word levels. Features: Each unit teaches students how to use one or more common organizational structures: narrative, description, opinion, persuasion, compare-contrast, problem-solution, and cause-effect. High-interest readings and a choice of writing assignments provide a springboard for students' writing. Grammar presentation and practice correlated to Focus on Grammar make the connection between grammar and writing clear. Building Word Knowledge mini-lessons and exercises teach students' how to use word forms, collocations, idioms, compounds, descriptive details, phrasal verbs and other types of vocabulary in their writing. Revision and Editing checklists for each writing assignment help students rewrite and polish their first drafts. Online Teacher's Manuals contain model lesson plans, unit overviews, timed writing assignments, authentic student models, and answer keys.

This book demonstrates the pivotal position of historical syntax within the larger domain of research into the nature, use, and acquisition of language. It shows how current work in historical syntax is responsive to theoretical advances in linguistic theory, language acquisition, sociolinguistics, and theories of language use, as well as to less adjacent fields such as statistical techniques and evolutionary biology.

Recent studies in psycho linguistics have ranged through a variety of languages. In this trend, which has no precedent, studies in language processing have followed studies in language acquisition and theoretical linguistics in considering language universals in a broader scope than only in English. Since the beginning of the century, studies in language acquisition have produced a vast body of data from a number of Indoeuropean languages, and the emphasis on the universal has preceded the emphasis on the particular (see (Slobin 1985) for a review). Nowadays, the research in the field advances by means of a continuous linking between the cross-linguistic uniformities and the individual language influences on development. The level of language universals is continuously refined as the data from a number of languages contribute to the elaboration of a more distinctive picture of the language of children. The first cross-linguistic studies in theoretical linguistics appeared at the end of the seventies. Within the Chomskian paradigm, the reference to the Romance languages caused a shift from a rule-based toward a principle-based formalism (Chomsky 1981, 1995); within alternative theories, the reduced prominence of the pure phrase structure component in favor of the lexicon and/or the functional relations (see, e.g., Lexical Functional Grammar (Bresnan 1982), Relational Grammar (Perlmutter 1983)) sought empirical support in languages exhibiting deep structural differences with respect to English (e.g. Bantu, Malayalam, Romance and Slavic languages Warlpiri). The M. De Vincenzi and V. Lombardo (eds.), Cross-linguistic Perspectives on Language Processing, 1-19.

This volume covers the language situation in Hong Kong, Timor-Leste and Sri Lanka explaining the linguistic diversity, the historical and political contexts and the current language situation, including language-in-education planning, the role of the media, the role of religion and the roles of non-indigenous languages. Two of the authors are indigenous to the situations described while the other has undertaken extensive field work and consulting there. The three monographs contained in this volume draw together the literature on each of the polities to present an overview of the research available about each of them, while providing new research-based information. The purpose of the volume is to provide an up-to-date overview of the language situation in each polity based on a series of key questions in the hope that this might facilitate the development of a richer theory to guide language policy and planning in other polities where similar issues may arise. This book was published as special issues of Current Issues in Language Planning.

This book takes a fresh look at phonology in a range of real-world contexts that go beyond traditional concerns and challenge existing assumptions and practices. It brings together research and theory from first and second language acquisition, sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, evolutionary linguistics, contact linguistics, clinical linguistics, cognitive psychology, literacy, and language teaching to suggest new directions for the field.

This book systematically investigates what follows about meaning in language if current views on the limited, or even redundant, role of linguistic semantics are taken to their radical conclusion. Focusing on conditionals, the book defends a wholly pragmatic, wholly inferential account of meaning - one which foregrounds a reasoning subject's individual state of mind. The topics discussed in the book include conceptual content, internalism and externalism, the semantics-pragmatics distinction, meaning holism and explicit versus implicit communication. These topics and the author's analysis of conditionals will allow the reader to engage with some traditional and current research in linguistics, philosophy and psychology.

When originally published in 1873 one of the aims was to protest against an idea that the Japanese language was very imperfect, and therefore it should be exterminated! The second was to give a general idea of the Japanese language as it is spoken.

This basic introduction to Old English is an essential guide for students with little or no linguistic knowledge. Unlike other textbooks on the subject, Beginning Old English focuses on the explanation and demonstration of how the language works, using accessible illustrations from simplified Old English texts and showing how many features of present-day English have their roots in this stage of the language. Beginning Old English - builds up reading skills by using simple texts to support the acquisition of key vocabulary and to develop awareness of language structure - offers an introduction to the conventions of Old English poetry and how they are realised across different genres: religious verse, riddles, elegies and heroic poetry - explores issues in the translation of Old English verse - guides the reader through four major texts: Cynewulf and Cyneheard, Beowulf (extract), The Battle of Maldon and The Dream of the Rood - features activities, glossaries, illustrations and a Further Reading section. Concise and approachable, this invaluable text will appeal to anyone with an interest in the early history of English language and literature. This is a simple introduction to Old English for students with little linguistic knowledge. Unlike other textbooks, Beginning Old English focuses on the explanation of how the language works, using accessible illustrations from Old English texts and showing how features of present-day English have their roots in this stage of the language. Assumes no previous linguistic knowledge Second edition updated and revised to take advantage of the availability of digital and online resources, such as the Electronic Beowulf and Learning with the Online Thesaurus of Old English A new chapter, Introducing Old English Prose, added to Part I, complements the existing chapter on Introducing Old English Poetry, by analysing the extent to which different prose genres draw on the techniques of poetry Two new texts, The Ruin and AElfric's Life of St AEthelthryth, have been added to Part II, which provides graded readings from simplified texts to canonical works in Old English (contains long extracts from Beowulf, Cynewulf and Cyneheard, The Battle of Maldon and The Dream of the Rood)

Impersonal constructions in the history of English form a puzzling category, in that there has been uncertainty as to why some verbs are attested in such constructions while others are not, even though they look almost synonymous. In this book, Ayumi Miura tackles this under-discussed question with special reference to verbs of emotion in Middle English. Through a careful study of the behaviour of impersonal and near-synonymous non-impersonal verbs, she identifies the factors that determined the presence, absence, and spread of impersonal usage with the verbs concerned. Miura utilizes modern linguistic approaches, including theories and methodologies adopted in the study of psych-verbs in modern languages, which bear close relevance to impersonal verbs of emotion but have traditionally been researched separately. She also draws on categorizations in the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary and harnesses the online Middle English Dictionary in a novel way, demonstrating that dictionary materials are in fact a valuable tool in the study of early English syntax and semantics. Miura concludes that a range of factors - such as causation, transitivity, animacy of the target of emotion, and duration of the emotion - influenced the choice of impersonal constructions with Middle English verbs of emotion. We can therefore make reasonable generalizations about when impersonal usage was licensed in these verbs. This careful analysis of the correlation between Middle English verbs of emotion and use or non-use in impersonal constructions represents a new empirical and theoretical contribution to the busy research area of impersonal constructions in the history of English.

One of the controversial philosophical issues of recent years has been the question of the nature of logical and mathematical entities. Platonist or linguistic modes of explanation have become fashionable, whilst abstrac tionist and constructionist theories have ceased to be so. Beth and Piaget approach this problem in their book from two somewhat different points of view. Beth's approach is largely historico-critical, although he discusses the nature of heuristic thinking in mathematics, whilst that of Piaget is psycho-genetic. The major purpose of this introduction is to summarise some of the main points of their respective arguments. In the first part of this book Beth makes a detailed study of the history of philosophical thinking about mathematics, and draws our attention to the important role played by the Aristotelian methodology of the demon strative sciences. This, he tells us, is characterised by three postulates: (a) deductivity, (b) self-evidence, and (c) reality. The last postulate asserts that the primitive notions of a demonstrative science must have reference to a domain of real entities in order to have significance. On the Aristote lian view discursive reasoning plays a major role in mathematics, whilst pure intuition plays a somewhat subordinate one."

This book provides a snapshot of the field of language acquisition at the beginning of the 21st Century. It represents the multiplicity of approaches that characterize the field and provides a review of current topics and debates, as well as addressing some of the connections between sub-fields and possible future directions for research.

"Genre, Relevance and Global Coherence" seeks to explain how discourse types or genre may influence the addressee's inferential processes in identifying the communicator's intention. It examines global coherence-based accounts as well as proposals based on Gricean pragmatics, arguing that the key to a solution lies in the interplay of the cognitive and communicative principles of relevance proposed by Sperber & Wilson. It unravels intricate relations between cognitive mechanisms, communicative principles and expectations of relevance in complex ostensive stimuli such as texts.

Many of the world's languages permit or require clause-initial positioning of the primary predicate, potentially alongside some or all of its dependents. While such predicate fronting (where "fronting" may or may not involve movement) is a widespread phenomenon, it is also subject to intricate and largely unexplained variation. In Parameters of Predicate Fronting, Vera Lee-Schoenfeld and Dennis Ott bring together leaders in the field of comparative syntax to explore the empirical manifestations and theoretical modelling of predicate fronting across languages. There exists by now a rich literature on predicate fronting, but few attempts have been made at synthesizing the resulting empirical observations and theoretical implementations. While individual phenomena have been described in some detail, we are currently far from a complete understanding of the uniformity and variation underlying the wider cross-linguistic picture. This volume takes steps towards this goal by showcasing the state of the art in research on predicate fronting and the parameters governing its realization in a range of diverse languages. Covering topics like prosody, VP-fronting, and predicate doubling across a wide arrange of languages, including English, German, Malagasy, Niuean, Ch'ol, Asante, Twi, Limbum, Krachi, Hebrew, and multiple sign languages, this collection enriches our understanding of the predicate fronting phenomenon.

Ten years ago, a group of researchers investigating the processing of morphological information met in the south of France to discuss how morphology affects word recognition, perception and production from a cross-linguistic perspective. This special issue is the fourth volume to expose the results of this on-going research effort.

The volume begins with a comprehensive review of the nature of morphological priming, followed by a series of experimental papers that examine morphological processing in a variety of languages such as English, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Chinese, and Spanish. The parallel monitoring of morphological processing in reading, speech perception and production, using a wide array of experimental methods such as masked priming, long-term priming, the monitoring of eye movements, and the recording of electrophysiological activity, provides converging evidence regarding the nature of morphemic representations in the various languages.

The cross-linguistic perspective that characterizes the research effort of the present volume, as well as the previous ones, is used to investigate whether there are qualitative differences in the principles of lexical organization and lexical processing in different alphabetic orthographies that arise from qualitative differences in morphological structure.

This book describes the current psycholinguistic research being conducted internationally on better understanding second language (L2) writing. It is based on an experimental research tradition arising from recent progress made in methodology, technology and theory in both native and second language writing. It is unique in that it is specifically geared to better understanding L2 writing and how it relates to L1 writing research in the psycholinguistic tradition.

Brivic argues that James Joyce's fiction anticipated Jacques Lacan's idea that the perceivable world is made of language and that Joyce, Lacan, and Zižek all carry forward a psychological and linguistic groundwork for social reform.

This book explores and assesses the multiple levels at which linguistic policies can be challenged, devised and enacted, i.e. sub-national, national and supranational, and the variety of state and non-state actors involved. Moving beyond descriptive and normative approaches, it provides an empirical comparative assessment of the policy responses and strategies deployed to deal with linguistic diversity and conflicts in Spain, a country where almost one third of the population is at least bilingual in their own languages. The Spanish case is then assessed within the European context, both from the perspective of multilevel influence and mutual interaction, and from the learning experiences it may entail for similar or equivalent problems and disputes occurring at the European level or beyond. This text will be of key interest to scholars and students of Spanish politics, linguistics, identity politics and more broadly of European politics and governance, public policy, education and communication policy and comparative politics.

Ever since Darwin, the world has been struggling with the mystery of human diversity. As the historian Peter Bowler has written, an evolutionary interpretation of the history of life on the earth must inevitably extend itself to include the origins of the human race. But this has proved to be a difficult and controversial task. Understanding human origins means accounting not only for the obvious differences between people and cultures around the world, but also for the unity of "Homo sapiens" as a single biological species. As Stephen Jay Gould has said, flexibility is the hallmark of human evolution. Because so much of who we are is learned rather than genetically predetermined, a satisfactory understanding of human evolution--to use old parlance--must account both for the human body and the human soul.

At any single moment of time, it is always possible to find instances where people seem to live in their own world, speak in their own distinctive ways, and have their own exclusive cultural traits and practices. Over the course of time, however, it is not so easy to find places where these dimensions of our diversity stay together. The essays in this collection show why we must stop thinking that race, language, and culture go together, and why we should be wary of the commonsense beliefs that human races exist and that people who speak different languages come from fundamentally different biological lineages.

Most treatments of speech deal with descriptions of sounds and how they are made. This book goes further: the idea is to develop a framework for a fully explanatory theory of speech production integrating with speech perception. Emphasis is placed on the difference between static models (primarily descriptive) and dynamic models that attempt to show how the basic linguistics and phonetics are related in an actual human speaker/listener.