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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Historical & comparative linguistics > General
The basic accomplishment of sentence processing research in the
1960s and 70s was to establish that perceivers assign structural
representa- tions to sentences (Fodor et al., 1974) and they do so
systematically using the formation rules of the grammar (Forster,
1979). This may sound like a singularly unimpressive accomplishment
to a contem- porary linguist - mere proof of the obvious. But one
must recall the extremely impoverished view of language and
language processing prevalent in the U.S. in the 1950s. Processing
mechanisms were thought to consist of slightly elaborated
stimulus-response associations, and sentences were viewed as mere
strings of concatenated words. On this view, understanding language
comprehension was naturally equated with knowing how words and
associations between them were learned. Consequently, language pro-
cessing was investigated by performing a seemingly endless series
of tedious paired associate learning studies. The shift in the
1960s to a view of sentences emphasizing hierarchically organized
structures con- taining grammatical depencies between widely
separated items was thus dramatic.
Among the most prominent scholars of language and law is Peter
Tiersma, a law professor at Loyola Law School with a doctorate in
linguistics (co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Language and Law).
Tiersma's significant body of work traverses a variety of legal and
linguistic fields. This book offers a selection of twelve of
Tiersma's most influential publications, divided into five thematic
areas that are critical to both law and linguistics: Language and
Law as a Field of Inquiry, Legal Language and its History, Language
and Civil Liability, Language and Criminal Justice, and Jury
Instructions. Each paper is accompanied by a brief commentary from
a leading scholar in the field, offering a substantive conversation
about the ramifications of Tiersma's work and the disagreements
that have often surrounded it.
This set reissues 29 books on the English language, originally
published between 1932 and 2003. Together, the volumes cover key
topics within the larger subject of the English Language, including
grammar, dialect and the history of English. Written and edited by
an international set of scholars, particular volumes employ
comparisons with other languages such as French and German, whilst
other volumes are devoted to specific English dialects such as
Cockney and Canadian English, or English in general. This
collection provides insight and perspective on various elements of
the English language over a period of 70 years and demonstrates its
enduring importance as a field of research.
How does our knowledge of the language on the one hand, and of the
context on the other, permit us to understand what we are told, to
resolve ambiguities, to grasp both explicit and implicit content,
to appreciate metaphor and irony? These issues have been studied in
two disciplines: linguistic pragmatics and psycholinguistics, with
only limited interactions between the two. This volume lays down
the foundation for a new field: "Experimental Pragmatics."
Contributions review pioneering work and present novel ways of
articulating theories and experimental methods in the area.
This book brings together researchers in linguistics, computer
science, psychology and cognitive science to investigate how motion
is encoded in language. The book is divided into two parts. Part I
considers the parameters at play in motion encoding (including
directed motion) by presenting new research on Estonian, English,
Norwegian, Bulgarian, Italian, German, Russian, Persian, and Tamil.
Part II investigates the way in which different levels of spatial
resolution or granularity play a role in the encoding of motion in
language.
Possession and Ownership brings together linguists and
anthropologists in a series of cross-linguistic explorations of
expressions used to denote possession and ownership, concepts
central to most if not all the varied cultures and ideologies of
humankind. Possessive noun phrases can be broadly divided into
three categories - ownership of property, whole-part relations
(such as body and plant parts), and blood and affinal kinship
relations. As Professor Aikhenvald shows in her extensive opening
essay, the same possessive noun or pronoun phrase is used in
English and in many other Indo-European languages to express
possession of all three kinds - as in "Ann and her husband Henry
live in the castle Henry's father built with his own hands" - but
that this is by no means the case in all languages. In some, for
example, the grammar expresses the inalienability of consanguineal
kinship and sometimes also of sacred or treasured objects.
Furthermore the degree to which possession and ownership are
conceived as the same (when possession is 100% of the law) differs
from one society to another, and this may be reflected in their
linguistic expression. Like others in the series this pioneering
book will be welcomed equally by linguists and anthropologists.
There is still widespread disagreement among historical linguists
about how, or whether, syntactic reconstruction can be done. This
book presents a comprehensive methodology for syntactic
reconstruction, grounded in a constructional understanding of
language. The author then uses that methodology to reconstruct
Proto-Sogeram, the ancestor to ten languages in Papua New Guinea.
Chapters are devoted to phonology, lexicon, verbal morphosyntax,
nominal morphosyntax, and syntactic constructions. The work
culminates in a sketch of Proto-Sogeram grammar. Based largely on
the author's original fieldwork, this is an innovative application
of a novel methodology to new data, and the most complete
reconstruction of a Papuan proto-language to date. It will be of
interest to scholars of language change, language reconstruction,
typology, and Papuan languages.
This book explores the dynamics of the linguistic landscape as a
site of conflict, exclusion, and dissent. It focuses on
socio-historical, economic, political and ideological issues, such
as reflected in mass protest demonstrations, to forge links between
landscape, identity, social justice and power.
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.
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."
Up until the mid-1980s most pragmatic analysis had been done on
spoken language use, considerably less on written use, and very
little at all on literary activity. This has now radically changed.
'Pragmatics' could be informally defined as the study of
relationships between language and its users. This volume, first
published in 1991, seeks to reposition literary activity at the
centre of that study. The internationally renowned contributors
draw together two main streams. On the one hand, there are concerns
which are close to the syntax and semantics of mainstream
linguistics, and on the other, there are concerns ranging towards
anthropological linguistics, socio- and psycholinguistics. Literary
Pragmatics represents an antidote to the fragmenting specialization
so characteristic of the humanities in the twentieth century. This
book will be of lasting value to students of linguistics,
literature and society. Roger D. Sell discusses the reissue of
Literary Pragmatics here:
http://www.routledge.com/articles/roger_d._sell_discusses_the_reissue_of_literary_pragmatics/
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.
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.
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.
Information Structure and Syntactic Change in the History of
English is the first book to apply information structure as it
relates to language change to a corpus-based analysis of a wide
range of features in the evolution of English syntax and grammars
of prose in long diachrony. Its unifying topic is the role of
information structure, broadly conceived, as it interacts with the
other levels of linguistic description, syntax, morphology,
prosody, semantics and pragmatics. The volume comprises twelve
chapters by leading scholars who take a variety of theoretical and
methodological approaches. Their work affirms, among other things,
that motivations for selecting a particular syntactic option vary
from information structure in the strict sense to discourse
organization, or a particular style or register, and can also be
associated with external forces such as the development of a
literary culture.
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."
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.
In this book, Pieter Seuren argues that Ferdinand de Saussure has
been grossly overestimated over the past century, while his junior
colleague Albert Sechehaye has been undeservedly ignored. Saussure
was anything but the great innovator he is generally believed to
be. Sechehaye was a genius providing many trenchant analyses and
anticipating many modern insights. The lives and works of both men
are discussed in detail and they are placed in the cultural,
intellectual and social environment of their day. Much attention is
paid to the theoretical issues involved, in particular to the
notion and history of structuralism, to the great subject-predicate
debate that dominated linguistic theory at the time, and to
questions of methodology in the theory of language.
This book presents the work on aphasia coming out of the Institute
for Aphasia and Stroke in Norway during its 10 years of existence.
Rather than reviewing previously presented work, it was my desire
to give a unified analysis and discussion of our accumulated data.
The empirical basis for the analysis is a fairly large group (249
patients) investigated with a standard, comprehensive set of
procedures. Tests of language functions must be developed anew for
each language, but comparison of my findings with other recent
compre hensive studies of aphasia is faciliated by close parallels
in test meth ods (Chapter 2). The classification system used is
currently the most accepted neurological system, but I have
operationalized it for research purposes (Chapter 3). The analyses
presented are based on the view that aphasia is an aspect of a
multidimensional disturbance of brain function. Find ings of
associated disturbances and variations in the aphasic condition
over time have been dismissed by some as irrelevant to the study of
aphasia as a language deficit. My view is that this rich and
complex set of findings gives important clues to the organization
of brain functions in humans. I present analyses of the
relationship of aphasia to neuropsychological disorders in
conceptual organization, memory, visuospatial abilities and apraxia
(Chapters 4, 5, and 6), and I study the variations with time of the
aphasic condition (Chapter 8)."
This is the first in-depth study of the extinct Koguryo language,
which was once spoken in Manchuria and northern Korea. It covers
the ethnolinguistic history of the Koguryo nation, philological
treatment of the sources for the language, Koguryo phonology, and a
complete glossary of all Archaic Koguryo and Old Koguryo words.
Special attention has been given to the theory and practice of
lexically-based historical-comparative linguistics. The genetic
relationship of Koguryo to Japanese is shown to be secure, unlike
the non-relationship of either language to Korean or 'Altaic', and
much light is shed on the ethnolinguistic origins of Japanese. The
special phonological features of the underlying transcriptional
language, the archaic northeastern Middle Chinese dialect once
spoken in Korea, are also analyzed.
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