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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Historical & comparative linguistics > General
In this volume, Ray Jackendoff and Jenny Audring embark on a major
reconceptualization of linguistic theory as seen through the lens
of morphology. Their approach, Relational Morphology, extends the
Parallel Architecture developed by Jackendoff in Foundations of
Language (2002), Simpler Syntax (2005), and Meaning and the Lexicon
(2010). The framework integrates morphology into the overall
architecture of language, enabling it to interact insightfully with
phonology, syntax, semantics, and above all, the lexicon. The first
part of the book situates morphology in the language faculty, and
introduces a novel formalism that unifies the treatment of all
morphological patterns, inflectional or derivational, systematic or
marginal. Central to the theory is the lexicon, which both
incorporates the rules of grammar and explicitly encodes
relationships among words and among grammatical patterns. Part II
puts the theory to the test, applying it to a wide range of
familiar and less familiar morphological phenomena. Part III
connects Relational Morphology with issues of language processing
and language acquisition, and shows how its formal tools can be
extended to a variety of linguistic and nonlinguistic phenomena
outside morphology. The value of Relational Morphology thus lies
not only in the fact that it can account for a range of
morphological phenomena, but also in how it integrates linguistic
theory, psycholinguistics, and human cognition.
This is the first full account of the making of John Jamieson's
Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language. The dictionary
was published in two volumes in 1808, with a two-volume Supplement
following in 1825. Lists of Scots words had been compiled before,
but Jamieson's was the first complete dictionary of the language.
It was a landmark in the development of historical lexicography and
was an inspiration for later lexicographers, including Sir James
Murray, founding editor of the OED. Susan Rennie's account of
Jamieson's work and the methods he developed interweaves biography,
lexicography, and linguistic, social, and book history to present a
rounded account of the man, his work, and his times. It is the
first study to draw on Jamieson's correspondence and the surviving
manuscript materials for the Dictionary and Supplement to reveal
Jamieson's working methods and the important contributions made by
Sir Walter Scott and others to his work.
Ever since Chomsky's Barriers, functional heads have been the
privileged object of research in generative linguistics. But over
the last two decades, two rival approaches have developed. The
cartographic project, as represented by the collections in this
Oxford series, considers evidence for a functional head in one
language as evidence for it in universal grammar. On the other
hand, minimalist accounts tend to consider structural economy as
literally involving as few heads as possible. In the present
volume, some of the most influential linguists who have
participated in this long-lasting debate offer their recent work in
short, self contained case studies. The contributions cover all the
main layers of recently studied syntactic structure, including such
major areas of empirical research such as grammaticalization and
language change, standard and non-standard varieties, interface
issues, and morphosyntax. Functional Heads attempts to map aspects
of syntactic structure following the cartographic approach, and in
doing so demonstrate that the differences between the cartographic
approach and the minimalist approach are more apparent than
substantial.
As the first volume of a two-volume set that reexamines nouns and
verbs in Chinese, this book proposes the verbs-as-nouns theory,
corroborated by discussions of the nature and relationship between
nouns and verbs in Chinese. Seeking to break free from the shackles
of Western linguistic paradigms largely based on Indo-European
languages and to a great extent inappropriate for Chinese, this
two-volume study revisits the nature of nouns and verbs and
relevant linguistic categories in Chinese to unravel the different
relationships between nouns and verbs in Chinese, English, and
other languages. It argues that Chinese nouns and verbs are related
inclusively rather than in the oppositional pattern found in
Indo-European languages, with verbs included in nouns as a
subcategory. Preliminary to the core discussion on the
verbs-as-nouns framework, the author critically engages with the
issues of word classes and nominalization, as well as problems with
the analysis of Chinese grammar due to the noun-verb distinction.
Through linguistic comparisons, following chapters look into
noticeable differences between Chinese and English, the referential
and predicative natures of nouns and verbs, the asymmetry of the
two, and the referentiality of predicates in Chinese. The volume
will be a must-read for linguists and students studying Chinese
linguistics, Chinese grammar, and contrastive linguistics.
Oxford Textual Perspectives is a new series of informative and
provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in
the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures and
communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides
fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and
challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By
engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production,
and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the
boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series
question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations
of both canonical and less well-known works.
Living through Conquest is the first ever investigation of the
political clout of English from the reign of Cnut to the earliest
decades of the thirteenth century. It focuses on why and how the
English language was used by kings and their courts and by leading
churchmen and monastic institutions at key moments from 1020 to
1220. English became the language of choice of a usurper king; the
language of collective endeavour for preachers and prelates; and
the language of resistance and negotiation in the post-Conquest
period. Analysing texts that are not widely known, such as Cnut's
two Letters to the English of 1020 and 1027, Worcester's
Confraternity Agreement, and the Eadwine Psalter, alongside
canonical writers like AElfric and Wulfstan, Elaine Treharne
demonstrates the ideological significance of the native vernacular
and its social and cultural relevance alongside Latin, and later,
French.
While many scholars to date have seen the period from 1060 to 1220
as a literary lacuna as far as English is concerned, this book
demonstrates unequivocally that the hundreds of vernacular works
surviving from this period attest to a lively and rich textual
tradition. Living Through Conquest addresses the political concerns
of English writers and their constructed audiences, and
investigates the agenda of manuscript producers, from those whose
books were very much in the vein of earlier English codices to
those innovators who employed English precisely to demonstrate its
contemporaneity in a multitude of contexts and for a variety of
different audiences.
This book examines the grammatical changes that took place in the
transition from Latin to the Romance languages. The emerging
language underwent changes in three fundamental areas involving the
noun phrase, verb phrase, and the sentence. The impact of the
changes can be seen in the reduction of the Latin case system; the
appearance of auxiliary verb structures to mark such categories
tense, mood, and voice; and a shift towards greater rigidification
of word order. The author considers how far these changes are
interrelated and compares their various manifestations and pace of
change across the different standard and non-standard varieties of
Romance. He describes the historical background to the emergence of
the Romance varieties and their Latin ancestry, considering in
detail the richly documented diachronic variation exhibited by the
Romance family.
Adam Ledgeway reviews the accounts and explanations that have been
proposed within competing theoretical frameworks, and considers how
far traditional ideas should be reinterpreted in light of recent
theoretical developments. His wide-ranging account shows that the
transition from Latin to Romance is not only of great intrinsic
interest, but both provides a means of challenging linguistic
orthodoxies and presents opportunities to shape new perspectives on
language change, structure, and variation. His fascinating book
will appeal equally to Romance linguists, Latinists, philologists,
historical linguists, and syntacticians of all theoretical
persuasions.
This volume studies the ways in which modernity has been conceived,
practiced, and performed in Indian literatures from the 18th to
20th century. It brings together essays on writings in Hindi, Urdu,
Punjabi, Bengali, Odia, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada,
Malayalam, and languages from Northeast India, which form a
dialogical relationship with each other in this volume. The
concurrence and contradictions emerging through these studies
problematize the idea of modernity afresh. The book challenges the
dominance of colonial modernity through socio-historical and
cultural analysis of how modernity surfaces as a multifaceted
phenomenon when contextualized in the multilingual ethos of India.
It further tracks the complex ways in which modernism in India is
tied to the harvests of modernity. It argues for the need to shift
focus on the specific conditions that gave shape to multiple
modernities within literatures produced from India. A versatile
collection, the book incorporates engagements with not just long
prose fiction but also lesser-known essays, research works, and
short stories published in popular magazines. This unique work will
be of interest to students and teachers of Indian writing in
English, Indian literatures, and comparative literatures. It will
be indispensable to scholars of South Asian studies, literary
historians, linguists, and scholars of cultural studies across the
globe.
This book is the first comparative study of English, German,
French, Russian and Hungarian anti-proverbs based on well-known
proverbs. Proverbs are by no means fossilized texts but are
adaptable to different times and changed values. While
anti-proverbs can be considered as variants of older proverbs, they
can also become new proverbs reflecting a more modern worldview.
Anti-proverbs are therefore a lingo-cultural phenomenon that
deserves the attention of cultural and literary historians,
folklorists, linguists, and general readers interested in language
and wordplay.
The book investigates historical patterns of vowel
diphthongization, assimilation and dissimilation induced by
consonants - mostly (alveolo)palatals - in Romance. Compiling data
from dialectal descriptions, old documentary sources and
experimental phonetic studies, it explains why certain vowels
undergo raising assimilation before (alveolo)palatal consonants
more than others. It also suggests that in French, Francoprovencal,
Occitan, Rhaetoromance and dialects from northern Italy, mid low
vowel diphthongization before (alveolo)palatal consonants started
out with the formation of non-canonical falling diphthongs through
off-glide insertion, from which rising diphthongs could emerge at a
later date (e.g., Upper Engadinian OCTO 'eight' > [oc] > [o(a
)c] > [wac]). Both diphthongal types, rather than canonical
falling diphthongs with a palatal off-glide, could also give rise
to high vowels (dialectal French [li] < LECTU, [fuj] <
FOLIA). This same Gallo-Romance diphthongization process operated
in Catalan ([yit], [ fuya]). In Spanish, on the other hand, mid low
vowels followed by highly constrained (alveolo)palatals became too
close to undergo the diphthongization process ([ let o], [ oxa]).
At the end of the Republic, religious, legal, and literary
knowledge began to take the form of a 'Roman heritage', as broadly
defined as it was indefinite. Caesar, like Cicero, thought that
language, along with political institutions and laws, constituted
the fundamental feature which defined the identity of a people. So,
as with statutes, libraries, and the calendar, he intended to fix
general laws in the sphere of language with his treatise De
analogia in order to establish a solid foundation for Latina
language whose evolution was driven by the need to preserve
heritage and by confrontations with the linguistic habits of the
allies of Rome. In this volume Garcea brings together for the first
time the fragments of Caesar's De analogia with a complete
translation and commentary. Contextualising the text and its
quotation by Pliny in his Dubius sermo, Charisius, Priscian, and
other Latin grammarians Garcea, presents the issues raised by means
of comparison with the texts of Caesar's interlocutors-principally
Cicero, Varro, Nigidius Figulus, and Philodemus of Gadara. The
study of all these sources, most of which have never been
translated into a modern language, fills a gap in the
representation of the history of linguistic development in the
classical period-ultimately portraying how in republican Rome,
there was still no clear distinction between the different
subdivisions of learning.
National and transnational debates in Britain and Germany
surrounding the meaning of the word "conservative" continue to have
far-reaching political consequences. After 1945, even while the
term was an accepted part of the political vocabulary of Great
Britain, in the Federal Republic of Germany their young democracy
was conflicted due to anti-democratic instability. The Guardians of
Concepts analyzes the historical changes in the political languages
of conservatism in the United Kingdom and the Federal Republic of
Germany between 1945 and the early 1980s which plagued
intellectuals, politicians, and entire parties. As one of the most
difficult concepts in both the political and historiographical
vocabulary of the German language, conservatism's analysis takes a
linguistically focused path through comprehensive and transnational
connection of intellectual history with the history of politics,
which are subjects that are otherwise commonly addressed separately
from each other.
This is the first full study of how people refer to entities in
natural discourse. It contributes to the understanding of both
linguistic diversity and the cognitive underpinnings of language
and it provides a framework for further research in both fields.
Andrej Kibrik focuses on the way specific entities are mentioned in
natural discourse, during which about every third word usually
depends on referential choice. He considers reference as an overt
representation of underlying cognitive processes and combines a
theoretically-oriented cognitive approach with empirically-based
cross-linguistic analysis. He begins by introducing the cognitive
approach to discourse analysis and by examining the relationship
between discourse studies and linguistic typology. He discusses
reference as a linguistic phenomenon, in connection with the
traditional notions of deixis, anaphora, givenness, and topicality,
and describes the way his theoretical approach is centered on
notions of referent activation in working memory. He argues that
the speaker is responsible for the shape of discourse and that
referential expressions should be understood as choices made by
speakers rather than as puzzles to be solved by addressees.
Kibrik examines the cross-linguistic aspects of reference and the
typology of referential devices, including referring expressions
per se, such as free and bound pronouns, and referential aids that
help to tell apart the concurrently activated entities. This
discussion is based on the data from about 200 languages from
around the world. He then proposes a comprehensive model of
referential choice, in which he draws on concepts from cognitive
linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, and cognitive
neuroscience, and applies this to Russian and English. He also
draws together his empirical analyses in order to examine what
light his analysis of discourse can shed on the way information is
processed in working memory. In the final part of the book Andrej
Kibrik offers a wider perspective, including deixis, referential
aspects of gesticulation and signed languages.
This pioneering work will interest linguists and cognitive
scientists interested in discourse, reference, typology, and the
operations of working memory in linguistic communication.
This book presents empirical research of grammatical collocations
of the type: verb and the prepositions "of" and "to". It is based
on comparisons of English and Czech sentences containing verbs and
prepositions that are followed by the object. The author creates
English-Czech verbal prepositional counterparts and groups on the
grounds of the similar semantic, syntactic features. She identifies
the features that are the same for each verb group and generalizes
them. The book determines trends and tendencies for verbs when they
collocate with a certain preposition.
This book addresses the changing contemporary language worlds in
three major contexts. It first discusses how the language landscape
maps of cities are changing as a result of increased migration,
globalization and global media. These features are evident in place
names and place name changes as well as the densities and
frequencies of language spoken and used in texts. The second
section discusses how the state itself is responding to both
indigenous and heritage groups desiring to be included and
represented in the state's political landscapes and also
expressions of art and culture. In the third section, the authors
address a number of cutting-edge theses that are emerging in the
linguistic geography and political words. These include the
importance of gender, anthropogenetic discourse, the preservation
of endangered languages and challenges to a state's official
language policy. Through including authors from nine different
countries, who are writing about issues in twelve countries and
their overlapping interests in language mapping, language usage and
policy and visual representations, this book provides inspiring
research into future topics at local, national, regional and
international scales.
Existing accounts of Australian Aboriginal English do not
investigate the significant degree of variation found across the
continent. This book presents the first description of English
spoken on Croker Island, Northern Territory, Australia, in terms of
its history, linguistic features and connections to local
Aboriginal languages. It demonstrates that English on Croker Island
shows an extremely high degree of intra- and inter-speaker
variation and embedding in a longstanding multilingual contact
situation, both of which challenge existing models of variation and
language contact. These results have significant ramifications for
how variation is modelled, for our understanding of how
postcolonial Englishes develop, as well as for the dynamics of
complex contact situations. The book also puts English on Croker
Island into a typological context of World Englishes by
establishing a profile according to the parameters of the World
Atlas of Varieties of English (WAVE). It is of interest to
academics interested in Australian Aboriginal English, language
contact, World Englishes and Australian Aboriginal languages.
Accented America is a sweeping study of U.S. literature between
1890-1950 that reveals a long history of English-Only nationalism:
the political claim that U.S. citizens must speak a nationally
distinctive form of English. This perspective presents U.S.
literary works written between the 1890s and 1940s as playfully,
painfully, and ambivalently engaged with language politics, thereby
rewiring both narrative form and national identity. The United
States has always been a densely polyglot nation, but efforts to
prove the existence of a nationally specific form of English turn
out to be a development of particular importance to interwar
modernism. If the concept of a singular, coherent, and autonomous
'American language' seemed merely provocative or ironic in 1919
when H.L. Mencken emblazoned the phrase on his philological study,
within a short period of time it would come to seem simultaneously
obvious and impossible. Considering the continuing presence of
fierce public debates over U.S. English and domestic
multilingualisms demonstrates the symbolic and material
implications of such debates in naturalization and citizenship law,
presidential rhetoric, academic language studies, and the artistic
renderings of novelists. Against the backdrop of the period's
massive demographic changes, Accented America brings a broadly
multi-ethnic set of writers into conversation, including Gertrude
Stein, Jean Toomer, Henry Roth, Nella Larsen, John Dos Passos,
Lionel Trilling, Americo Paredes, and Carlos Bulosan. These authors
shared an acute sense of linguistic standardization during the
interwar era and contend with the defamiliarizing sway of radical
experimentation with invented and improper literary vernaculars.
Mixing languages, these authors spurn expectations for phonological
exactitude to develop multilingual literary aesthetics. Rather than
confirming the powerfully seductive subtext of monolingualism-that
those who speak alike are ethically and politically
likeminded-multilingual modernists composed interwar novels that
were characteristically American because, not in spite, of their
synthetic syntaxes and enduring strangeness.
This book constitutes another step of the linguistic community in
translating cognitive linguistics research into a set of guidelines
applicable in the foreign language classroom. The authors, language
scholars, and experienced practitioners discuss a collection of
both more theoretical and practical issues from the area of second
and foreign language pedagogy. These are matters that not only
enhance our comprehension of particular grammatical and lexical
problems, but also lead to the improvement of the efficiency of
teaching a foreign language. The topics range from learners'
emotions, teaching grammatical constructions, prepositions, and
vocabulary, to specific issues in phonology. The observations
concern the teaching of three different languages: English, French,
and Italian. As a result, the book is of interest to scholars
dealing with further developments of particular linguistic issues
and practitioners who want to learn how to improve the quality of
their classroom work.
Francis Lodwick FRS (1619-94) was a prosperous merchant,
bibliophile, writer, thinker, and member of the Royal Society. He
wrote extensively on language, religion, and experimental
philosophy, most of it too controversial to be safely published
during his lifetime. This edition includes the first publication of
his unorthodox religious works alongside groundbreaking writings on
language.
Following an extensive introduction by the editors the book is
divided into three parts. Part One includes A Common Writing
(1647), the first English attempt at an artificial language, and
the equally pioneering phonetic alphabet set out in An Essay
Towards an Universal Alphabet (1686). Part Two contains a series of
linked short treatises on the nature of religion and divine
revelation, including 'Of the Word of God' and 'Of the Use of
Reason in Religion', in which Lodwick argues for a new
understanding of the Bible, advocates a rational approach to divine
worship, and seeks to reinterpret received religion for an age of
reason. The final part of the book contains his unpublished utopian
fiction, A Country Not Named here he creates a world to express his
most firmly-held opinions on language and religion, and in which
his utopians found a church that bans the Bible. The book gives new
insights into the religious aspects of the scientific revolution
and throws fresh light on the early modern frame of mind. It is
aimed at intellectual and cultural historians, historians of
science and linguistics, and literary scholars - indeed, at all
those interested in the interplay of ideas, language, and religion
in seventeenth-century England
Language Myths and the History of English aims to deconstruct the
myths that are traditionally reproduced as factual accounts of the
historical development of English. Using concepts and interpretive
sensibilities developed in the field of sociolinguistics over the
past 40 years, Richard J. Watts unearths these myths and exposes
their ideological roots. His goal is not to construct an
alternative discourse, but to offer alternative readings of the
historical data. Watts raises the question of what we mean by a
linguistic ideology, and whether any discourse--a hegemonic
discourse, an alternative discourse, or even a deconstructive
discourse--can ever be free of it. The book argues that a
naturalized discourse is always built on a foundation of myths,
which are all too easily taken as true accounts.
Semantic Indexicality shows how a simple syntax can be combined
with a propositional language at the level of logical analysis. It
is the adoption of such a base language which has not been
attempted before, and it is this which constitutes the originality
of the book. Cresswell's simple and direct style makes this book
accessible to a wider audience than the somewhat specialized
subject matter might initially suggest.
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 written language 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
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 the efforts of
linguistic elites and the state to achieve language standardization
and independence from languages such as Turkish, Albanian, Vlach,
and Slavonic. 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 which it 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.
This book provides a state-of-the-art introduction to categorial
grammar, a type of formal grammar which analyzes expressions as
functions or according to a function-argument relationship. The
book's focus is on linguistic, computational, and psycholinguistic
aspects of logical categorial grammar, i.e. enriched Lambek
Calculus. Glyn Morrill opens with the history and notation of
Lambek Calculus and its application to syntax, semantics, and
processing. Successive chapters extend the grammar to a number of
significant syntactic and semantic properties of natural language.
The final part applies Morrill's account to several current issues
in processing and parsing, considered from both a psychological and
a computational perspective. The book offers a rigorous and
thoughtful study of one of the main lines of research in the formal
and mathematical theory of grammar, and will be suitable for
students of linguistics and cognitive science from advanced
undergraduate level upwards.
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