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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Historical & comparative linguistics > General
The advances in neuroimaging technologies have led to substantial progress in understanding the neural mechanisms of cognitive functions. Thinking and reasoning have only recently been addressed by using neuroimaging techniques. The present book comprehensively explores current approaches and contributions to understanding the neural mechanisms of thinking in a concise and readable manner. It provides an insight into the state of the art and the potentials, but also the limitations of current neuroimaging methods for studying cognitive functions. The book will be a valuable companion for everyone interested in one of the most fascinating topics of cognitive neuroscience.
What are place names? From where do they originate? How are they structured? What do they signify? How important are they in our life? This groundbreaking book explores these compelling questions and more by providing a thorough introduction to the assumptions, theories, terminology, and methods in toponymy and toponomastics - the studies of place names and proper names respectively. It is the first comprehensive resource on the topic in a single volume, and explores the history and development of toponyms, focusing on the conceptual and methodological issues pertinent to the study of place names around the world. It presents a wide range of examples and case studies illustrating the structure, function, and importance of toponyms from ancient times to the present day. Wide ranging yet accessible, it is an indispensable source of knowledge for students and scholars in linguistics, toponymy and toponomastics, onomastics, etymology, and historical linguistics.
Learn the Essentials of Biblical Greek So You Can Study the New Testament More Deeply This newly revised third edition of Greek for the Rest of Us by Greek instructor William Mounce is crash-course on "Greek for the rest of us" that acquaints the reader with the essentials of the language so they can study the New Testament more deeply. Readers will gain a sound knowledge of the fundamentals of Greek and learn how to use tools that will add muscle to their Bible studies. In Greek for the Rest of Us readers will learn to: Read and pronounce Greek words Learn the fundamentals of the Greek noun and verb system Conduct effective Greek word studies Learn the basics of Greek exegesis for biblical interpretation Understand why translations are different Read better commentaries Be comfortable using reverse and traditional interlinears Understand the information displayed by biblical software For anyone interested in seriously studying the New Testament, Greek for the Rest of Us is your gateway to learning the skills and tools you need to accomplish your goals. You can enhance your learning experience even more with the Greek for the Rest Us Workbook (sold separately) which contains exercises to help practice and reinforce the concepts you are learning in the main book.
This highly accessible book examines linguistic diversity in Galicia, one of the devolved regions of Spain. Its principal hypotheses are: that the Galician language is an intrinsic characteristic of Galician ethnic identity: that policy and planning impact on the behavioural practices of language users, reflected in loyalty and prestige factors: that whilst a reversal in traditional perceptions and attitudes is resulting in a reaffirmation of Galician as the autochthonous language, its sociolinguistic relationship with Castilian has not been resolved: that Galicians have to negotiate multiple identities, subject to constant change and adjustment. Through its innovative and in-depth analysis of Galician linguistic, sociolinguistic, ethnic and cultural revival and revitalisation processes, it also serves to emphasise the wider relevance of such studies to the case of minoritised languages in general.
This book brings together Latinx scholars in Rhetoric and Composition to discuss keywords that have been misused or appropriated by forces working against the interests of minority students. For example, in educational and political forums, rhetorics of identity and civil rights have been used to justify ideas and policies that reaffirm the myth of a normative US culture that is white, Eurocentric, and monolinguistically English. Such attempts amount to a project of neo-colonization, if we understand colonization to mean not only the taking of land but also the taking of culture, of which language is a crucial part. The editors introduce the concept of epistemic delinking and argue for its use in conceptualizing a kind of rhetorical and discursive decolonization, and contributors offer examples of this decolonization in action through detailed work on specific terms. Specifically, they draw on their training in rhetoric and on their own experiences as people of color to help reset the field's agenda. They also theorize new keywords to shed light on the great varieties of Latinx writing, rhetoric, and literacies that continue to emerge and circulate in the culture at large, in the hope that the field will feel more urgently the need to recognize, theorize, and teach the intersections of writing, pedagogy, and politics.
This monograph focuses on the description, use and development of the inflectional subjunctive in English and German in the eighteenth century. A close comparison between meta-linguistic comments (eighteenth-century grammars) and actual language usage (corpus study) allows the evaluation of the influence of prescriptivism on language change.
This book explores the interconnections between linguistics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) research, their mutually influential theories and developments, and the areas where these two groups can still learn from each other. It begins with a brief history of artificial intelligence theories focusing on figures including Alan Turing and M. Ross Quillian and the key concepts of priming, spread-activation and the semantic web. The author details the origins of the theory of lexical priming in early AI research and how it can be used to explain structures of language that corpus linguists have uncovered. He explores how the idea of mirroring the mind's language processing has been adopted to create machines that can be taught to listen and understand human speech in a way that goes beyond a fixed set of commands. In doing so, he reveals how the latest research into the semantic web and Natural Language Processing has developed from its early roots. The book moves on to describe how the technology has evolved with the adoption of inference concepts, probabilistic grammar models, and deep neural networks in order to fine-tune the latest language-processing and translation tools. This engaging book offers thought-provoking insights to corpus linguists, computational linguists and those working in AI and NLP.
This book is an advanced debate on the nature of scalar implicatures, one of the most popular topics in philosophical linguistics in the last 20 years. Leading theorists in the field offer an up-to-date presentation of the subject in a way that will help readers to orient themselves in the vast literature on the topic.
The papers in this volume are intended to exemplify the state of experimental psycho linguistics in the middle to later 1980s. Our over riding impression is that the field has come a long way since the earlier work of the 1950s and 1960s, and that the field has emerged with a renewed strength from a difficult period in the 1970s. Not only are the theoretical issues more sharply defined and integrated with existing issues from other domains ("modularity" being one such example), but the experimental techniques employed are much more sophisticated, thanks to the work of numerous psychologists not necessarily interested in psycholinguistics, and thanks to improving technologies unavailable a few years ago (for instance, eye-trackers). We selected papers that provide a coherent, overall picture of existing techniques and issues. The volume is organized much as one might organize an introductory linguistics course - beginning with sound and working "up" to mean ing. Indeed, the first paper, Rebecca Treiman's, begins with considera tion of syllable structure, a phonological consideration, and the last, Alan Garnham's, exemplifies some work on the interpretation of pro nouns, a semantic matter. In between are found works concentrating on morphemes, lexical structures, and syntax. The cross-section represented in this volume is by necessity incom plete, since we focus only on experimental work directed at under standing how adults comprehend and produce language. We do not include any works on language acquisition, first or second."
A Linguistic Investigation of Aphasic Chinese Speech is the first detailed linguistic analysis of a large body of aphasic Chinese natural speech data. This work describes how the major aphasia syndromes are manifest in Chinese, a language which differs significantly from languages upon which traditional aphasia theory is based. Following the Chinese data, a new explanation for the major aphasia syndromes is offered based on the cognitive science modularity hypothesis. The theory posits that Broca's aphasia is the result of computational deficits that occur within linguistic components, while Wernicke's aphasia is the result of deficits that occur in the transfer of information between components. It is demonstrated how the fluent and non-fluent characteristics of the major aphasia syndromes follow directly from the properties of cognitive modules. Detailed linguistic descriptions of Broca's and Wernicke's aphasia in Chinese are provided, including a summary of diagnostics of aphasia type. The complete corpora of four aphasic Chinese speakers, including interlinear and free translations, are presented in an Appendix.
This book examines language contact and shift in Nepal, a multilingual context where language attitudes and policies often reflect the complex socio-cultural and socio-political relationship between minority, majority and endangered languages and peoples. Presenting the results of a 15-year study and making use of both quantitative and qualitative data, the author presents evidence relating to speakers' opinions and perceptions of mother tongues including English, Hindi, Nepali, Sherpa, Dotyali, Jumli and Tharu. This book explores an under-studied part of the world, and the findings will be relevant to scholars working in other multilingual contexts in fields including language policy and planning, language contact and change, and language attitudes and ideologies.
Intellectual History and the Identity of John Dee In April 1995, at Birkbeck College, University of London, an interdisciplinary colloquium was held so that scholars from diverse fields and areas of expertise could 1 exchange views on the life and work of John Dee. Working in a variety of fields - intellectual history, history of navigation, history of medicine, history of science, history of mathematics, bibliography and manuscript studies - we had all been drawn to Dee by particular aspects of his work, and participating in the colloquium was to c- front other narratives about Dee's career: an experience which was both bewildering and instructive. Perhaps more than any other intellectual figure of the English Renaissance Dee has been fragmented and dispersed across numerous disciplines, and the various attempts to re-integrate his multiplied image by reference to a particular world-view or philosophical outlook have failed to bring him into focus. This volume records the diversity of scholarly approaches to John Dee which have emerged since the synthetic accounts of I. R. F. Calder, Frances Yates and Peter French. If these approaches have not succeeded in resolving the problematic multiplicity of Dee's activities, they will at least deepen our understanding of specific and local areas of his intellectual life, and render them more historiographically legible.
- Topic has had a huge surge of interest since 2000 due to the greatly increased incidence of social communication disorders - Covers theory and evidence-based practice, making it a rounded and solid resource for students and professionals
With about 1400 entries, this dictionary presents an etymological analysis of Karvelian vocabulary. The analysis presented draws a clear distinction between two important stages, earlier Common Karvela on the one hand and later Georgia-Zan on the other. In addition to systematically registering Indo-Euroean analogues, this volume also contributes to the largely neglected question of Kartvelian-Armenian lexical interpretation.
This book examines the coding of the three coordination relations of combination, contrast and alternative between states of affairs on the basis of a 74 language sample, with special focus on the languages spoken in Europe. It constitutes the first systematic inquiry so far conducted on the cross-linguistic coding of coordination, as defined in cognitive and pragmatic terms. This research shows that the 'and-but-or' coding system which is typical of Central-Western Europe appears to be extremely rare outside Europe, where a great variation in the coding of coordination is attested. This cross-linguistic variation, however, is not random, but is crucially constrained by the interaction of economic principles with the semantic properties of the individual relations expressed. A fine-grained functional systematization of coordination is proposed and described by means of implicational patterns and semantic maps. This work brings together a broad cross-linguistic perspective and a detailed semantic analysis, largely based on new and comparable data collected by means of questionnaires, all accessible in the appendix of the book. It represents the first systematic attempt towards a unified typology of coordination relations.
The multilingual situation in Cameroon and the status of English as a co-official language constitute a unique and fascinating case for sociolinguistic investigation. Drawing from first-hand material, the author investigates several aspects of this complex configuration, including the historical development of English in Cameroon, the various languages and lingua franca areas, the linguistic policy, the de facto status of English and the situation in the anglophone provinces. The speech community of the Anglophones is highlighted as a rare example of an ethnicity tied to the second language. Apart from important sociolinguistic findings, the work includes a novel, corpus-based analysis of Cameroon English. Certain lexical phenomena are explained by the cognitive coding of culture - particularly the African cultural model of community, which also underlies the self-perception of the Anglophones - a perspective hitherto neglected in the study of the New Englishes.
When linguistics was first established as an academic discipline in the nineteenth century, it was envisaged as an essentially historical study. Languages were to be treated as historical objects, evolving through gradual but constant processes of change over long periods of time. In recent years, however, there has been much discussion by historians of a 'linguistic turn' in their own discipline, and, in linguistics, integrationist theory has mounted a radical challenge to the traditional notion of 'languages' as possible objects of inquiry. Language and History develops the integrationist critique of orthodox linguistics, while at the same time extending its implications to the field of history. By doing so, it throws light on what is now recognized by many historians to be a 'crisis' in their own discipline. Underlying the post-modernist scepticism about traditional forms of historiography, the integrationist approach reveals a more deep-seated problem concerning the interface between philosophy of history and philosophy of language. With chapters from a range of leading international contributors, Language and History represents a significant contribution to the developing work of the integrationists.
This book presents original, empirical data from quantitative and qualitative research studies in the field of language learning aptitude, ability, and individual differences. It does so from the perspectives of Second Language Acquisition, psychology, neuroscience and sociolinguistics. All studies included in the book use a similar and uniform layout and methodology. Each chapter contains a study examining factors such as memory, personality, self-concept, bilingualism and multilingualism, education, musicality or gender. The chapters investigate the influence of these concepts on language learning aptitude and ability. Several of these chapters analyse hypotheses which have never been tested before and therefore provide novel research results. The book contributes to the field both by verifying and contesting existent findings and by exploring novel approaches to devising research in the subject area.
The developments in linguistic theory over the last three decades have given us a better understanding of the formal properties of language. However, as the truism goes, language does not exist in a vacuum. It in teracts with a cognitive system that involves much more than language and functions as the primary instrument of human communication. A theory of language must, therefore, be based on an integration of its for mal properties with its cognitive and communicative dimensions. The present work is offered as the modest contribution to this research paradigm. This book is a revised and slightly enlarged version of my doctoral thesis submitted to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In writing the original version, I had the privilege of working with Professor Charles E. Osgood, who is widely recognized as the founder and one of the leading figures of modern psycholinguistics. I have benefited from ex tensive and stimulating discussions with him, not only on this topic but in the development of his theory of language performance in general (see his Lectures on Language Performance, 1980, in this series). However, the re sponsibility for the particular formulations of the theory, hypotheses, in terpretations, and conclusions found in this work-which have been in fluenced, no doubt, by my training as a linguist, rather than as a psychologist-are my own." |
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