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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Historical & comparative linguistics > General
In this brisk and accessible history, sinologist Thomas O. Hollmann explains the development of the Chinese writing system and its importance in literature, religion, art, and other aspects of culture. Spanning the earliest epigraphs and oracle bones to writing and texting on computers and mobile phones today, Chinese Script is a wide-ranging and versatile introduction to the complexity and beauty of written text and calligraphy in the Chinese world. Hollmann delves into the origins of Chinese script and its social and political meanings across millennia of history. He recounts the social history of the writing system; written and printed texts; and the use of writing materials such as paper, silk, ink, brush, and printing techniques. The book sheds light on the changing role of literacy and education; the politics of orthographic reform; and the relationship of Chinese writing to non-Han Chinese languages and cultures. Hollmann explains the inherent complexity of Chinese script, demonstrating why written Chinese expresses meaning differently than oral language and the subtleties of the relationship between spoken word and written text. He explores calligraphy as an art, the early letter press, and other ways of visually representing Chinese languages. Chinese Script also provides handy illustrations of the concepts discussed, showing how ideographs function and ways to decipher them visually.
Traditional semantic description of Ancient Greek prepositions has struggled to synthesize the varied and seemingly arbitrary uses into something other than a disparate, sometimes overlapping list of senses. The Cognitive Linguistic approach of prototype theory holds that the meanings of a preposition are better explained as a semantic network of related senses that radially extend from a primary, spatial sense. These radial extensions arise from contextual factors that affect the metaphorical representation of the spatial scene that is profiled. Building upon the Cognitive Linguistic descriptions of Bortone (2009) and Luraghi (2009), linguists, biblical scholars, and Greek lexicographers apply these developments to offer more in-depth descriptions of select postclassical Greek prepositions and consider the exegetical and lexicographical implications of these findings. This volume will be of interest to those studying or researching the Greek of the New Testament seeking more linguistically-informed description of prepositional semantics, particularly with a focus on the exegetical implications of choice among seemingly similar prepositions in Greek and the challenges of potentially mismatched translation into English.
In a systematic presentation of Johnson's views on language, Johnson on Language: An Introduction addresses the problems inherent in the formation of style, as Johnson saw them, but also contains a detailed discussion of his opinions concerning the proper responsibilities of the lexicographer. The wide-ranging discussion takes in the linguistic controversies of classical antiquity, the resumption and elaboration of various classical ideas in the Renaissance period, and the way in which Johnson's own ideas have been shaped by his reading of important documents of these eras.
A WORKBOOK to Help You Learn the Essentials of Biblical Hebrew So You Can Study the Old Testament More Deeply Hebrew for the Rest of Us Workbook by Lee M Fields is a companion workbook to Hebrew for the Rest of Us, Second Edition that includes essential exercises for improving facility with understanding the Hebrew text for deeper Bible study. Strategic questions and exercises are provided for each of the twenty-one chapters in the accompanying textbook. The exercises are designed for self-learners as well as teacher-led classes (both in-person and online) with easily gradable formats. Examples for each exercise are given to guide students in how to complete the exercises. Examples are drawn from both narrative and poetic passages. Numerous review exercises are provided. Hebrew for the Rest of Us, Second Edition by Lee M. Fields is a guide for English-only readers to understand the language of the Old Testament in order to deepen their approach and understanding of Scripture. Fields highlights essential Hebrew grammar by drawing on parallels to English grammar and then moves the reader toward developing necessary skills and knowledge of the language so as to utilize the great number of Bible study materials available. Readers using the Hebrew for the Rest of Us Workbook in conjunction with Hebrew for the Rest of Us, Second Edition will learn: Why translations differ How to do careful Hebrew word studies How to engage in the basics of Hebrew exegesis How to read more advanced Old Testament commentaries with greater understanding The Hebrew for the Rest Us Workbook will enhance your learning experience with exercises to help you practice and reinforce the concepts you are learning in Hebrew for the Rest of Us, Second Edition.
Foundations of Bilingual Memory provides a valuable update to the field of bilingual memory and offers a new psychological perspective on how the bilingual mind encodes, stores, and retrieves information. This volume emphasizes theoretical issues, such as classic memory approaches, Compound-Coordinate Bilingualism, Bilingual Dual Coding Theory, and Working Memory, about which relatively little has been written in the bilingual domain. Also covered are: * The neuropsychology of bilingual memory * Applied issues (such as false memories and bilingualism, emotion and memory) * Empirical findings in support of the uniqueness of the different memory systems of the bilingual individual * Connectionist models of bilingualism The volume represents the first book of its kind, in stressing a memory perspective with regards to bilingual speakers. It can serve as an advanced text for both undergraduate and graduate level students and it will be of great interest to the growing number of bilingual teachers and university classes interested in understanding the bilingual mind, as well as in preparing teachers to work with the bilingual individual.
A revival of interest in morphology has occurred during recent years. The Yearbook of Morphology series, published since 1988, has proven to be an eminent support for this upswing of morphological research, since it contains articles on topics which are central in the current theoretical debates which are frequently referred to. The Yearbook of Morphology 1999 focuses on diachronic morphology, and shows, in a number of articles by renowned specialists, how complicated morphological systems develop in the course of time. In addition, this volume deals with a number of hotly debated issues in theoretical morphology: its interaction with phonology (including Optimality Theory), the relation between inflection and word formation, and the formal modeling of inflectional systems. A special feature of this volume is an article on morphology in sign language, a very new and exciting area of research in linguistics. The relevant evidence comes from a wide variety of languages, amongst which Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages are prominent. Audience: Theoretical, descriptive, and historical linguists, morphologists, phonologists, and psycholinguists will find this book of interest.
Until about 60 years ago, linguistic research on the Arabic language in the West was restricted to inquiries on Classical Arabic and the Classical tradition, and spoken Arabic dialects, with historical studies embedded within the broader field of Semitic languages. This situation is changing quickly, not only through the continuation of older research traditions, but also with the integration of new research fields and perspectives. With this expansion comes the danger of specialists in Arabic losing an overview of the field, and of leaving non-specialists without basic resources for evaluating domains of research which they may be interested in for comparative purposes. The Oxford Handbook of Arabic Linguistics will confront this problem by combining state-of-the-art overviews with essays on issues of perspective, controversy, and point of view. In twenty-four chapters, leading experts from around the world will lay out their own stances on controversial issues. The book not only evaluates ways in which questions and theories established in general linguistics and its sub-fields elucidate Arabic, but also challenges approaches which might result in accommodating Arabic to "non-Arabic" interpretations, and brings out the Arabic specificity of individual problems. The Handbook, in one compact volume, gives critical expression to a language which covers large populations and geographical areas, has a long written tradition, and has been the locus of major intellectual fervor and debate.
This is the first study of the typological change of English from a synthetic towards an analytic language that focuses exclusively on the lexical domain of the language. It presents an innovative approach to linguistic typology by focusing on the different encoding techniques used in the lexicon, providing a theoretical framework for the description of structural types (synthetic, analytic) and encoding techniques (fusional, isolating, agglutinative, incorporating) found in the lexicon of a language. It is argued that, in the case of English, the change from syntheticity to analyticity did not only affect its inflectional system and the encoding of grammatical information, but also the derivational component. Based on a cognitive approach to derivation, the book provides empirical evidence for a considerable decline in the use of synthetic structures and a trend towards higher degrees of analyticity in a specific lexical domain of English, the formation of nouns by means of derivation. The full extent of this change surfaced during the transition from Old English to early Middle English, but it was later partly reversed though influence from French. The typological shift was thus the result of a global structural reorganization of the language that resulted in a fundamental change of the structure of words. The book also presents a comprehensive account of the historical development of nominal derivation from the beginnings of Old English until the end of the early Middle English period. Based on empirical data from written sources the study documents the frequency of use of all Germanic-based derivational morphemes for nominalizations over different subperiods and discusses their origin as well as important changes of their semantic and morphological properties.
The series is a platform for contributions of all kinds to this rapidly developing field. General problems are studied from the perspective of individual languages, language families, language groups, or language samples. Conclusions are the result of a deepened study of empirical data. Special emphasis is given to little-known languages, whose analysis may shed new light on long-standing problems in general linguistics.
This history of the Spanish lexicon is written from the interacting perspectives of linguistic and cultural change and in the light of advances in the study of language contact and lexical change. The author describes the language inherited from spoken Latin in the Iberian Peninsula during six centuries of Roman occupation and examines the degree to which it imported words from the languages - of which only Basque survives - of pre-Roman Spain. He then shows how Germanic words were imported either indirectly through Latin or Old French or directly by contact with the Visigoths. He describes the importation of Arabisms following the eighth-century Arab conquest of Spain, distinguishing those documented in medieval sources from those adopted for everyday use, many of which survive in modern Spanish. He considers the influence of Old French and Old Provencal and identifies late direct and indirect borrowings from Latin, including the Italian elements taken up during the Renaissance. After outlining minor influences from languages such as Flemish, Portuguese, and Catalan, Professor Dworkin examines the effects on the lexicon of contact between Spanish and the indigenous languages of South and Central America, and the impact of contact with English. The book is aimed at advanced students and scholars of Spanish linguistics and will interest specialists in Hispanic literary and cultural studies.
The book contains a selection of papers from the conference The Verb in Cognitive Linguistics, held at Gran, Norway in June, 1998. The papers in this book are all written within a cognitive linguistics framework, concentrated around different linguistic aspects of the verb. The two keynote papers (by Richard A. Hudson and Ronald W. Langacker) serve as an introduction to this main theme, providing a broad perspective and a general, theoretical background from word grammar and cognitive grammar, respectively. The remaining ten papers are more closely aiming at addressing morphological, syntactic and semantic aspects of the verb, illustrated through a variety of languages and research areas, including, i.a., adult language processing, language acquisition, connectionist modelling, and typology. A majority of the papers describe different aspects of Norwegian - a language not earlier investigated at such a scale within cognitive linguistics. Norwegian offers valuable contributions through being closely related to English, yet differing in certain important and interesting ways. In addition, data from several other languages are included, among others Italian, Russian, and different African languages, providing a wider typological range.
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.
Applying insights from variationist linguistics to historical
change mechanisms that have affected the consonantal system of
English, Daniel Schreier reports findings from a historical
corpus-based study on the reduction of particular consonant
clusters and compares them with similar processes in synchronic
varieties, thus defining consonantal change as a phenomenon
involving psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, phonological theory
and contact linguistics. Moreover, he weighs the impact of external
and internal effects on causation, examining data from a total of
fifteen varieties with different time depths and social
histories.
Childhood multilingualism has become a norm rather than an exception. This is the first handbook to survey state-of-the-art research on the uniqueness of early multilingual development in children growing up with more than two languages in contact. It provides in-depth accounts of the complexity and dynamics of early multilingualism by internationally renowned scholars who have researched typologically different languages in different continents. Chapters are divided into six thematic areas, following the trajectory, environment and conditions underlying the incipient and early stages of multilingual children's language development. The many facets of childhood multilingualism are approached from a range of perspectives, showcasing not only the challenges of multilingual education and child-rearing but also the richness in linguistic and cognitive development of these children from infancy to early schooling. It is essential reading for anyone interested in deepening their understanding of the multiple aspects of multilingualism, seen through the unique prism of children.
The majority of children acquire language effortlessly but approximately 10% of all children find it difficult especially in the early or preschool years with consequences for many aspects of their subsequent development and experience: literacy, social skills, educational qualifications, mental health and employment. With contributions from an international team of researchers, this book is the first to draw together a series of new analyses of data related to children's language development, primarily from large-scale nationally representative population studies, and to bring a public health perspective to the field. The book begins with a section on factors influencing the patterns of language development. A second section explores continuity and change in language development over time. The third explores the impact on individuals with developmental language disorders (DLD), the effectiveness of available interventions, and broader issues about the need for equity in the delivery of services to those with DLD.
The linguistic study of Chinese, with its rich morphological, syntactic and prosodic/tonal structures, its complex writing system, and its diverse socio-historical background, is already a long-established and vast research area. With contributions from internationally renowned experts in the field, this Handbook provides a state-of-the-art survey of the central issues in Chinese linguistics. Chapters are divided into four thematic areas: writing systems and the neuro-cognitive processing of Chinese, morpho-lexical structures, phonetic and phonological characteristics, and issues in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and discourse. By following a context-driven approach, it shows how theoretical issues in Chinese linguistics can be resolved with empirical evidence and argumentation, and provides a range of different perspectives. Its dialectical design sets a state-of-the-art benchmark for research in a wide range of interdisciplinary and cross-lingual studies involving the Chinese language. It is an essential resource for students and researchers wishing to explore the fascinating field of Chinese linguistics.
Representing what someone else has said is an integral part of spoken and written communication. Speech representation occurs in many contexts from news reports and legal trials to everyday conversation. Although commonplace, it requires sophisticated choices regarding what to represent and how to represent it. These choices can highlight a speaker's voice, shape our perception of the reported speech, or support our claims of authority.While speech representation in Present-day English has been studied extensively, this book extends the discussion to historical periods. Speech Representation in the History of English explores speech representation of the past, providing in-depth analyses of how speakers and writers mark, structure, and discuss a previous speech event or fictional speech. Focusing on the Early Modern English and the Late Modern English periods (1500-1900), this volume covers topics such as parentheses as markers of represented speech, the development of like as a reporting expression, the gradual formation of free indirect speech reporting, and the interpersonal functions of represented speech. Chapters draw on a wide range of methodologies, including historical sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and corpus linguistics, and cover many genres from witness depositions, literary texts, and letters, to the spoken language of the recent past. In this comprehensive volume, Peter Grund and Terry Walker bring together a collection of works that use cutting-edge approaches to speech representation. Researchers and students of the history of English, sociolinguistics, and discourse studies alike will find Speech Representation in the History of English to be an invaluable addition to the field.
The Power of Tests applies a critical perspective of language tests by examining their uses and consequences in education and society and by viewing tests not as isolated events but rather as embedded in social, educational and political contexts.
This accessible and lively introduction to semantics and the multi-faceted nature of language guides the student and non-specialist through the major ways in which the English language makes meaning. The author discusses the meaning of linguistic units at all levels of language, from sound to discourse, while studying also the role of theories and models themselves in helping us to understand human linguistic behaviour. Through examples and exercises, readers are encouraged to think through and evaluate complex ideas and theories for themselves.
First published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
"Greek: A History of the Language and its Speakers, Second Edition" reveals the trajectory of the Greek language from the Mycenaean period of the second millennium BC to the current day. - Offers a complete linguistic treatment of the history of the
Greek language |
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