CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.

The central theme of this collection is the epistemological status of constraints and preferences in linguistics. The contributions focus mainly on phonology; one article deals explicitly with morphology. The approaches to phonology represented in the volume are those of Natural Phonology, Government Phonology, Optimality Theory, autosegemental phonology, and computational phonology. Constraints are juxtaposed either to rules or to preferences in the discussion of constraint-based vs. preference-based theories.

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.

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.

The Skills of Document Use: From Text Comprehension to Web-Based Learning examines functional literacy from a psychological standpoint. It offers a comprehensive discussion of the cognitive skills involved in reading, comprehending, and making use of complex documents. Understanding such skills is important at times when printed and online information systems are being used more and more extensively for work, education, and personal development. It is also very important to understand how the Internet transforms the way we search, read, and comprehend documents. The core purpose of the book is to inform research scientists, students, and instructional designers about recent advances in the psychology of document comprehension. Whereas reading research has mostly focused on basic cognitive processes involved in simple comprehension tasks, this book extends the psychology of reading to more complex, real-life comprehension activities. The book draws a link between research areas usually separated: language psychology, on the one hand, and Web design, on the other hand. The work also attempts to bridge a gap between research in cognitive psychology and practical issues in the design and use of information systems. It invites the reader to a guided journey from theoretical models of text comprehension to concrete issues in the design and use of instructional technology. The book will be of interest to students specializing in psychology, language, communication, and publishing. It will also be useful to all those who are involved in the training of literacy skills, or in the design of information systems accessible to a wide audience.

Taking off from the apt epigram that "... language, after all, is a purely historical phenomenon", these sociolinguistic analyses present debates over how language ideologies are formed, articulated, and entextualized. The editor's opening and final essays entitled "the debate is open" and "the debate is closed" bookend ten debates relating to language, identity, and political power: French-into-Corsican translations, dialect in Switzerland, Catalan vs. Spanish in Barcelona since the 1992 Olympics, Canada's linguistic cultures, bilingual education in the US, Ebonics, Singapore's "Speak Mandarin' campaign, the revival status of Israeli Hebrew, and European tongues and literary genres in postcolonial Africa.

This collection of essays focuses on current approaches to variation and change in historical English grammar and lexicon. Of the twelve papers in the collection, half are based on grammar and syntax, half on lexical developments. The volume highlights the contributions that strong empirical research can make to our knowledge of the development of English grammar, especially as realized in lexical development. In illustration of contemporary research trends, the articles in the collection make strong use of extralinguistic factors to discuss language change as well as argue for internal and structural development. The authors are drawn from nine different countries, and each article is followed by a commentary and response that provide actual dialogue about the issues in the field, thus representing world-wide discussion of issues in the history of English. The essays recognize the different audiences for historical variation and change - formal linguists, sociolinguists, and lexicographers - and specifically address the interests and discourse in those areas. The volume shows how historical studies of English are increasingly engaged with contemporary trends in linguistics, at the same time as demonstrating how empirical and other methods can bring classical philology fully into the sphere of contemporary linguistics without abandoning its traditional concerns.

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.

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.

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?

This volume makes accessible a substantial range of recent research in Cognitive Grammar. From disparate sources, it brings together a dozen innovative papers, revised and integrated to form a coherent whole. This work continues the ongoing program of progressively articulating the theoretical framework and showing its descriptive application to varied grammatical phenomena. A number of major topics are examined in depth through multiple chapters viewing them from different perspectives: grammatical constructions (their general nature, their metonymic basis, their role in grammaticization), nominal grounding (quantifiers, possessives, impersonal it), clausal grounding (its relation to nominal grounding, an epistemic account of tense, a systemic view of the English auxiliary), the "control cycle" (an abstract cognitive model with many linguistic manifestations), finite clauses (their internal structure and external grammar), and complex sentences (complementation, subordination, coordination). In each case the presentation builds from fundamentals and introduces the background needed for comprehension. At the same time, by bringing fresh approaches and new descriptive insights to classic problems, it represents a significant advance in understanding grammar and indicates future directions of theory and research in the Cognitive Grammar framework. The book is of great interest to students and practitioners of cognitive linguistics and to scholars in related areas.

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.

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.

In A Phonological Reconstruction of Proto-Hlai, Norquest presents a reconstruction of Proto-Hlai based on data from twelve Hlai languages spoken on Hainan, China. This reconstruction includes chapters on both the Proto-Hlai initials and rimes, and original sesquisyllabic forms are shown to be necessary to account for the reflexes between the daughter languages. A comparison is made between Proto-Hlai and Proto-Tai, and a preliminary reconstruction of Proto Southern Kra-Dai (the immediate ancestor of Proto-Hlai) is performed. When this is compared with Proto-Hlai, it is shown that several important sound changes occurred between Pre-Hlai and Proto-Hlai. The aberrant Jiamao language is also examined, focusing on its complex contact relationships with other Hlai languages.

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.

Research in Colonial and Postcolonial Linguistics has experienced a significant increase in contributions from varying fields of language studies, gaining the attention of scholars from all over the world. This volume aims to showcase the variety of topics relevant to the study of language(s) in colonial, postcolonial and decolonial contexts. A main reason of this variety is that the new paradigm invites and necessitates research on different subject matters such as language typology, grammar and cross-linguistics, meta-linguistics and research on language ideology, discourse analysis and pragmatics. The contributions of this volume are selected, peer-reviewed papers which were partly invited and partly given at the First Bremen Conference on Colonial and Postcolonial Linguistics, held in September 2013.

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 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.

The book is the first of its kind to establish Cognitive Linguistics as a research paradigm within the field of world Englishes. The authors survey the main tenets of both areas of linguistic enquiry and suggest that the theoretical and methodological apparatus developed both within Cognitive Linguistics generally and within its novel sub-discipline Cognitive Sociolinguistics can overcome certain limitations inherent in traditional approaches to cultural variation in language. They present a case study of the linguistic realization of the cultural model of community in African English as an exemplar for the investigation of cultural models in other varieties of English. Corpus-linguistic methods are combined with conceptual metaphor analysis and blending theory to elucidate a vast network of conceptualizations salient to speakers of African English. The findings, based on computer corpora and a range of additional sources, are discussed against the background of work in anthropology, religious studies, and political science. The book also reflects on the role of English in intercultural communication and concludes with a comparison of Cognitive Linguistics and pragmatic functionalism, placing the former in the wider framework of a hermeneutic philosophy that stresses dialogic understanding.

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 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.