The contributions of this volume offer both a diachronic and synchronic approach to aspects relating to different areas of colonial life as for example colonial place-naming in a comparative perspective. They comprise topics of diverse interests within the field of language and colonialism and represent the linguistic fields of sociolinguistics, onomastics, historical linguistics, language contact, obsolescence convergence and divergence, (colonial) discourse, lexicography and creolistics.

This book uses a corpus of manuscript letters from Bess of Hardwick to investigate how linguistic features characteristic of spoken communication function within early modern epistolary prose. Using these letters as a primary data source with reference to other epistolary materials from the early modern period (1500-1750), the author examines them in a unique and systematic way. The book is the first of its kind to combine a replicable scribal profiling technique, used to identify holograph and scribal handwriting within the letters, with innovative analyses of the language they contain. Furthermore, by adopting a discourse-analytic approach to the language and making reference to the socio-historical context of language use, the book provides an alternative perspective to the one often presented in traditional historical accounts of English. This volume will appeal to students and scholars of early modern English and historical linguistics.

Rather than offering variations in "world view" as evidence for linguistic relativity, this book views language related differences in terms of the facility with which information is processed. Distinctive perceptual, memory, and neurolinguistic aspects of the Chinese language are discussed, as is the cognitive style of the Chinese people. Chinese orthography and other features of morphology and syntax are examined in relation to both bottom-up and top-down cognitive processes. While providing an extensive review of the experimental literature published in English on the Chinese language, this volume also offers a significant sample of the literature originally published in Chinese.

Romani is the first language, and family and community language, of upwards of 3-4 million people and possibly many more in Europe, the Americas, and Australia. Documentation and research on the language draws on a tradition of more than two centuries, yet it remains relatively unknown and often engulfed by myths. In recent decades there has been an upsurge of interest in the language including language maintenance and educational projects, the creation of digital resources, language policy initiatives, and a flourishing community of online users of the language. This Handbook presents state of the art research on Romani language and linguistics. Bringing together key established scholars in the field of linguistics and neighbouring disciplines, it introduces the reader to the structures of Romani and its dialect divisions, and to the history of research on the language. It then goes on to explore major external influences on the language through contact with other key languages, aspects of language acquisition, and interventions in support of the language through public policy provisions, activism, translation, religious and literary initiatives, and social media. This comprehensive and groundbreaking account of Romani will appeal to students and scholars from across language and linguistics.

A compilation of the proceedings of a conference held to honor Alvin M. Liberman for his outstanding contributions to research in speech perception, this volume deals with two closely related and controversial proposals for which Liberman and his colleagues at Haskins Laboratories have argued forcefully over the past 35 years. The first is that articulatory gestures are the units not only of speech production but also of speech perception; the second is that speech production and perception are not cognitive processes, but rather functions of a special mechanism. This book explores the implications of these proposals not only for speech production and speech perception, but for the neurophysiology of language, language acquisition, higher-level linguistic processing, the visual perception of phonetic gestures, the production and perception of sign language, the reading process, and learning to read. The contributors to this volume include linguists, psycholinguists, speech scientists, neurophysiologists, and ethologists. Liberman himself responds in the final chapter.

The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics.

Comprehension Processes in Reading addresses the interrelationship among several areas relevant to understanding how people comprehend text. The contributors focus on the on-line processes associated with text understanding rather than simply with the product of that comprehension -- what people remember from reading. Presenting the latest theories and research findings from a distinguished group of contributors, Comprehension Processes in Reading is divided into four major sections. Each section, concluding with a commentary chapter, discusses a different aspect of reader understanding or dysfunction such as individual word comprehension, sentence parsing, text comprehension, and comprehension failures and dyslexia .

Comprehension Processes in Reading addresses the interrelationship among several areas relevant to understanding how people comprehend text. The contributors focus on the on-line processes associated with text understanding rather than simply with the product of that comprehension -- what people remember from reading. Presenting the latest theories and research findings from a distinguished group of contributors, Comprehension Processes in Reading is divided into four major sections. Each section, concluding with a commentary chapter, discusses a different aspect of reader understanding or dysfunction such as individual word comprehension, sentence parsing, text comprehension, and comprehension failures and dyslexia .

Singapore English is a focal point across the many subfields of linguistics, as its semantic, syntactic and phonetic/phonological qualities tell us a great deal about what happens when very different types of language come together. Sociolinguists are also interested in the relative status of Singapore English compared to other languages in the country. This book charts the history of Singapore English and explores the linguistic, historical and social factors that have influenced the variety as it is spoken today. It identifies novel grammatical features of the language, discusses their structure and function, and traces their origins to the local languages of Singapore. It places grammatical system and usage at the core of the analysis, and shows that introspective and corpus data are complementary. This study will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on language contact, world varieties of English, historical linguistics and sociolinguistics.

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 use of vague language (for example expressions such as 'bags of time', 'doing stuff', 'sort of thing', 'and all that') is an aspect of communicative competence of considerable social importance. Vague Language Explored examines the function of vague language in context. It spans genre analysis, critical discourse analysis, psycholinguistics and cross-cultural sociolinguistics, in a variety of world cultures. It suggests also applications in TEFL, asking questions such as 'What should learners be taught to understand and use, and why?' and suggesting directions for future research.

The Bloomsbury Companion to Cognitive Linguistics is a comprehensive and accessible reference resource to research in contemporary cognitive linguistics. Written by leading figures in the field, the volume provides readers with an authoritative overview of methods and current research topics and future directions. The volume covers all the most important issues, concepts, movements and approaches in the field. It devotes space to looking specifically at the major figures and their contributions. It is a complete resource for postgraduate students and researchers working within cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics and those interested more generally in language and cognition.

One of the keys to effectively preaching and teaching God's Word is a deep understanding of the meaning of biblical words in the original Hebrew and Greek. As the building blocks of language, words are the means we use to communicate with one another, and they're also the means God has chosen for communicating with us, his people. To enrich your preaching, teaching, and personal study of God's Word, this clear, accurate, and easy-to-use dictionary offers the most up-to-date evangelical biblical scholarship as well as fascinating, detailed explanations of biblical words. Whether you're a pastor, a seminary student, or a lay student of the Bible, this expository dictionary offers a wealth of information about the original Hebrew and Greek words of Scripture.

Generative analyses of comparatives traditionally include two construction specific ellipsis operations, Comparative Deletion and Comparative Ellipsis. Drawing from a wide array of new data, the present monograph develops a novel, directly semantically interpretable analysis of comparatives which does not require reference to designated deletion processes. On the one hand, Comparative Deletion is reinterpreted in terms of overt movement of the degree predicate. The resulting head-raising analysis contributes to an understanding of various puzzles for comparatives related to binding, locality and the influence of word-order variation on the interpretation and size of the ellipsis site. On the other hand, it is argued that Comparative Ellipsis can entirely be subsumed under standardly sanctioned ellipsis operations such as Gapping, Right Node Raising and Across-the-Board-movement. In addition, the study presents arguments for an ellipsis analysis of phrasal comparatives (such as Millhouse saw more movies than Bart). Empirical support for this conception derives, among others, from the complex interdependencies between ellipsis and serialization in English and German, and the binding properties of remnants inside the comparative complement. The study is directed towards readers interested in formal syntax and the syntax/semantics interface.

First published in 1987. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

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.

First published in 1987. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

In this work, originally published in Dutch, Rik Smits theorizes that language could not have developed originally as a system of communication. It is, instead, the result of combining separate abilities, each of which developed independently to aid the survival of early humans. Lacking strength and speed, man relies on wisdom for survival. Smits theorizes that human skills in calculation and estimation continued to develop until they were sufficient to accommodate a system as complex as grammar. Only after our linguistic ability emerged could humans think logically and share our reasoning with others, at which point almost everything we now call culture began to flourish. Smits concludes that language cannot have long predated the invention of agriculture in the Middle East, some 14,000 years ago. The huge advance in civilization represented by language made abstract powers of reasoning indispensable for the first time, along with highly developed concepts of identity, past, present, and future, all of which rely upon language. This explanation of the origins of language throws new light on cave paintings by Cro-Magnon man, whose masterpieces date from about 40,000 to 15,000 years ago. Anatomically Cro-Magnons were modern humans, but they had no language in the modern sense. Their absence of language gave them no true sense of individual identity. This translation was made possible by a grant from the Dutch Foundation for Literature.

An essential handbook for professionals and advanced students in the field. Volume 1 contains comprehensive studies on the acquisition of 15 different languages (from ASL to Samoan) -- written by top researchers on each topic. Volume 2 concentrates on theoretical issues, emphasizing current linguistic and psycholinguistic research. Unique in its approach toward individual languages and in its comparative perspective, this book is a hallmark of a rapidly growing area of interdisciplinary, international research.

This volume is the first comprehensive comparative dictionary to cover the whole of the Chukotko-Kamchatkan family. The genealogical status of this family (whether from a common source or due to convergence) has long been controversial, but its coherence as a family can now be taken as proven. Its geographical position between Siberia and northernmost America renders it crucial in any attempt to relate the languages and peoples of these large linguistic regions. The dictionary consists of cognate sets arranged alphabetically according to reconstructed proto-forms and covers all published lexical sources for the languages concerned (plus a good deal of unpublished material). The criterion for setting up Proto-Chukotian sets is the existence of clear cognates in at least two of the four languages: Chukchi, Koryak, Alutor, and (now extinct) Kerek, and for Proto-Chukotko-Kamchatkan sets cognates in at least one of these plus Itelmen. Internal loans between the two branches of the family are indicated - this is particularly important in the case of the many loans from Koryak to modern western Itelmen. Proto-Itelmen sets without clear cognates in Chukotian are listed separately, without reconstructions. The data is presented in a reader-friendly format, with each set divided into separate lines for the individual languages concerned and with a common orthography for all reliable modern forms (given as full word stems, not just 'roots'). The introduction contains information on the distribution of the individual languages and dialects and all sound correspondences relating them, plus a sketch of what is known of their (pre)historical background. Inflections and derivational affixes are treated in separate sections, and Chukchi and English proto-form indexes allows multiple routes of access to the data. A full reference list of sources is included.

Anglo-Saxons valued education yet understood how precarious it could be, alternately bolstered and undermined by fear, desire, and memory. They praised their teachers in official writing, but composed and translated scenes of instruction that revealed the emotional and cognitive complexity of learning. Irina Dumitrescu explores how early medieval writers used fictional representations of education to explore the relationship between teacher and student. These texts hint at the challenges of teaching and learning: curiosity, pride, forgetfulness, inattention, and despair. Still, these difficulties are understood to be part of the dynamic process of pedagogy, not simply a sign of its failure. The book demonstrates the enduring concern of Anglo-Saxon authors with learning throughout Old English and Latin poems, hagiographies, histories, and schoolbooks.

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 book is the first collection of studies on an important yet under-investigated linguistic phenomenon, the processing and production of head-final syntactic structures. Until now, the remarkable progress made in the field of human sentence processing had been achieved largely by investigating head-initial languages such as English. The goal of the present volume is to deepen our understanding by examining head-final languages and offering a comparison of those results to findings from head-initial languages. This book brings together cross-linguistic investigations of languages with prominent head-final structures such as Basque, Chinese, German, Japanese, Korean, and Hindi. It will inform readers of linguistics with both theoretical and experimental backgrounds, as it provides accounts of previous studies, offers experimentally-based theoretical discussions, and includes experimental stimuli in the original languages.

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.