This book presents a current, interdisciplinary perspective on language requisites from both a biological/comparative perspective and from a developmental/learning perspective. Perspectives regarding language and language acquisition are advanced by scientists of various backgrounds -- speech, hearing, developmental psychology, comparative psychology, and language intervention. This unique volume searches for a rational interface between findings and perspectives generated by language studies with humans and with chimpanzees. Intended to render a reconsideration as to the essence of language and the requisites to its acquisition, it also provides readers with perspectives defined by various revisionists who hold that language might be other than the consequence of a mutation unique to humans and might, fundamentally, not be limited to speech.

Originally published in 1987 this volume presented a comprehensive state-of-the-art account of what was known about the psychology of reading at the time. All the fundamental aspects of reading are considered: visual attention, visual feature analysis, visual masking, letter and word recognition, priming effects, eye movements in reading, phonological processing, working memory and reading, parsing, sentence comprehension, and text integration. The subject of reading is approached from a variety of different theoretical perspectives, including cognitive psychology, connectionism, neuropsychology and linguistics. This broad and comprehensive review will still be of value for undergraduate and graduate teaching as well as research workers engaged in experimental or theoretical investigations of any aspect of the psychology of reading.

Originally published in 1992, when connectionist natural language processing (CNLP) was a new and burgeoning research area, this book represented a timely assessment of the state of the art in the field. It includes contributions from some of the best known researchers in CNLP and covers a wide range of topics. The book comprises four main sections dealing with connectionist approaches to semantics, syntax, the debate on representational adequacy, and connectionist models of psycholinguistic processes. The semantics and syntax sections deal with a variety of approaches to issues in these traditional linguistic domains, covering the spectrum from pure connectionist approaches to hybrid models employing a mixture of connectionist and classical AI techniques. The debate on the fundamental suitability of connectionist architectures for dealing with natural language processing is the focus of the section on representational adequacy. The chapters in this section represent a range of positions on the issue, from the view that connectionist models are intrinsically unsuitable for all but the associationistic aspects of natural language, to the other extreme which holds that the classical conception of representation can be dispensed with altogether. The final section of the book focuses on the application of connectionist models to the study of psycholinguistic processes. This section is perhaps the most varied, covering topics from speech perception and speech production, to attentional deficits in reading. An introduction is provided at the beginning of each section which highlights the main issues relating to the section topic and puts the constituent chapters into a wider context.

The 1980 census recorded one million Irish speakers, but of these only about nine thousand live in communities where the language is likely to survive as a natural first language. Reg Hindley explores the many and varied factors which combine to determine and influence language distribution and trends. Starting from the premise that Irish will be dead when it is no longer the normal language of daily conversation in families and between groups of people who acquired it from their parents, he locates the surviving pockets' of the Irish language. He blends careful statistical analysis with field surveys among native Irish speakers to explore the reasons for the decline of the language - historical, economic, political, spatial and cultural - and discusses the causal relationships between geographical environment and language retention. Finally, he puts Irish into its broader context as a European minority language, and assesses its present position and prospects for survival. This book should be of interest to students in sociolinguistics, Irish studies, geography and politics.

A Linguistic History of Italian offers a clear and concise explanation of why modern Italian grammar has become the way it is. It focuses on the effects of historical changes on the modern structure of Italian, revealing patterns and structures which are not always apparent to those who are only familiar with modern Italian. Although the book concentrates on the internal history of the language, the emergence of Italian is considered against the wider background of the history of italian dialects, and other external factors such as cultural and social influences are also examined.

First Published in 1988. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book presents a new theoretical framework -- what Gernsbacher calls the Structure Building Framework -- for understanding language comprehension in particular, and cognitive processing in general. According to this framework, the goal in comprehending both linguistic and nonlinguistic materials is to build a coherent mental representation or "structure" of the information being comprehended. As such, the underlying processes and mechanisms of structure building are viewed as general, cognitive processes and mechanisms. The strength of the volume lies in its empirical detail: a thorough literature review and solid original data.

The focus of this study is upon those pidgins and creoles which are English based and which have arisen since the fifteenth century. The book examines the widespread nature of the pidgin/creole phenomenon and evaluates the current definitions of the terms and the theories which have been advanced to account for their existence. The author considers the potential of pidgins and creoles as literary media and as vehicles for education. She looks at the sociological and psychological implications of using pidgins and creoles in the classroom and examines the position of American Black English' and London Jamaican' in the pidgin/creole continuum.

In Language Change , R. L. Trask uses data from English and other languages to introduce the concepts central to language change. Language Change: covers the most frequent types of language change and how languages are born and die uses data-based exercises to show how languages change looks at other key areas such as attitudes to language change, and the consequences of changing language.

Why are speakers of English always calling each other names? situations. It will also help them to understand what is implied when an English speaker uses a particular way of addressing someone. These topics are entirely neglected in most courses and textbooks, and there is no other reference work on the subject.
Anyone who is fascinated by words will also find much here of interest. A wealth of historical, sociological and etymological information is set out in a highly readable style. Some 2,000 entries arranged in alphabetical order shed new light on familiar terms of address and present many curiosities. The author gives examples from a wide range of literature, particularly twentieth century novels, and provides an illuminating commentary on them.

This book contains over fifty passages of Latin from 200 BC to AD 900, each with translation and linguistic commentary. It is not intended as an elementary reader (though suitable for university courses), but as an illustrative history of Latin covering more than a millennium, with almost every century represented. Conventional histories cite constructions out of context, whereas this work gives a sense of the period, genre, stylistic aims and idiosyncrasies of specific passages. 'Informal' texts, particularly if they portray talk, reflect linguistic variety and change better than texts adhering to classicising norms. Some of the texts are recent discoveries or little known. Writing tablets are well represented, as are literary and technical texts down to the early medieval period, when striking changes appear. The commentaries identify innovations, discontinuities and phenomena of long duration. Readers will learn much about the diversity and development of Latin.

The articles in this special issue focus on experimental psychological, neuropsychological, and computer-based approaches to figurative language, suggesting the enormous impact of cognitive science on our understanding of figurative language. Where, exactly, does figurative language fit in the larger scheme of things? The basic thesis is that much of intelligent behavior partakes of indirectness -- layeredness, levels, embeddedness, and tangled hierarchies. Deficiencies in this respect, brought about by inabilities to build processing structures by using prior or old information, result in a lesser ability to process not only figurative language but all sorts of indirect cognition, including pretense, deception, etc. This special issue attempts to further the goal of "unisolating" figurative language and making it less special, whether by viewing it in the more general light of indirectness or some other rubric.

First published in 1937, this book supplies a history of the living growth of the English language from Old English to the medieval period. It offers an in-depth study of the growth of vocabulary through literature and social interaction, bringing out the fact that it is chiefly words that foreign influence has affected - leaving sentence structure almost unaltered. Isolative and combinative changes in phonology, the accidence of nouns and plurals, pronouns and adverbs, and verbs are also examined in detail, along with a general overview of the features Middle English and a brief outline of each dialect's most striking characteristics.

First Published in 1990. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This volume focuses on the remediation of impairments of word production in aphasia. It is restricted to studies focusing on single word production and comprises papers by some of the researchers most active in this field worldwide. The scope of the papers is broad and includes many relatively under-researched areas and techniques. All the papers have in common a methodological rigour and the use of a single case or case-series approach. A range of treatment tasks are evaluated: 'phonological' tasks such as phonological cueing and word repetition, and judgements regarding the phonological form; 'orthographic' tasks such as orthographic cueing, word reading and writing to dictation; 'semantic' tasks such as semantic cueing; the use of gesture; computer presentation of tasks and even just repeated attempts at naming. In addition, the individuals treated using these techniques varied in the nature of their impairments and/or level of impairment that was targeted. The majority aimed to improve word retrieval generally, but one treatment was aimed specifically at verb retrieval, and another at improving accuracy of word production for an individual with a phonological encoding impairment. Each paper relates the outcome of treatment to theoretical accounts of impairment, and one explicitly uses the results of therapy to inform these theories. Taken together these papers provide a snapshot of the 'state of the art' in the rehabilitation of word production in aphasia.

Until recently, much research in language comprehension operated under the assumption that comprehenders initially identified the syntactic structure of sentences they were hearing or reading without regard to the meanings of the words in the sentences. A significant amount of recent work has challenged that position, however, and there is now abundant evidence that lexical information plays a central role in sentence processing. The papers in this special issue reflect the increased status on lexical representations in sentence processing research. The authors approach the question of the precise role of lexical information in sentence comprehension from a variety of theoretical perspectives. They supplement experimental psycholinguistic research with work in neighboring fields, including concepts and categorization, theoretical linguistics, and computational modeling. The volume should be of interest to psycholinguistics, cognitive scientists, linguistics and computer scientists.

In recent years, there has been an upsurge of interest in the processing of major East Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean. These languages, due to their salient differences in structure from European languages, provide challenging opportunities to explore both language-specific processes involved in comprehension and communication and the universality of theories developed from the study of European languages. This volume presents an exciting sample of the most recent research on the processing of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. Topics range from written and spoken word processing to sentence and discourse comprehension. The authors include specialists working in major areas of language and cognitive processes from different parts of the world.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203427335

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

From the middle of the twentieth century, dozens of medievalists and other performers have recorded early English. Many educational institutions already own sound recordings of English before 1500, or may wish to purchase the most useful ones available. This discography aims to assist teachers, administrators and librarians to make the best use of their resources.

This volume looks at spatialization of abstract concepts in verbo-pictorial aphorisms at work in the cartoons of a single artist. While extensive work has been done in studying spatialization of abstract concepts in grammar and lexicon within cognitive linguistics, this book is the first of its kind to provide a detailed account of such phenomena in multimodal discourse. The volume integrates a range of approaches from cognitive linguistics, including image schema theory, conceptual theory of metaphor, multimodal metaphor theory, the dynamic approach to metaphor, and a multimodal approach to metonymy, and applies this multi-faceted framework to a selection of cartoons from the work of Polish artist Janusz Kapusta. Taken together, these cartoons form the basis of two comprehensive case studies which explore the abstract concepts of "emotions" and "life," highlighting the ways in which cartoons can illustrate the important relationship between space, situated cognition, and language and in turn, a clear and systematic framework for establishing cohesive ties between the verbal and pictorial modes in multimodal cognitive linguistic research. The volume sheds new light on visual thinking and multimodal rendition of creative abstract thought.

An entirely new follow-up volume providing a detailed account of numerous additional issues, methods, and results that characterize current work in historical linguistics. This brand-new, second volume of The Handbook of Historical Linguistics is a complement to the well-established first volume first published in 2003. It includes extended content allowing uniquely comprehensive coverage of the study of language(s) over time. Though it adds fresh perspectives on several topics previously treated in the first volume, this Handbook focuses on extensions of diachronic linguistics beyond those key issues. This Handbook provides readers with studies of language change whose perspectives range from comparisons of large open vs. small closed corpora, via creolistics and linguistic contact in general, to obsolescence and endangerment of languages. Written by leading scholars in their respective fields, new chapters are offered on matters such as the origin of language, evidence from language for reconstructing human prehistory, invocations of language present in studies of language past, benefits of linguistic fieldwork for historical investigation, ways in which not only biological evolution but also field biology can serve as heuristics for research into the rise and spread of linguistic innovations, and more. Moreover, it: offers novel and broadened content complementing the earlier volume so as to provide the fullest available overview of a wholly engrossing field includes 23 all-new contributed chapters, treating some familiar themes from fresh perspectives but mostly covering entirely new topics features expanded discussion of material from language families other than Indo-European provides a multiplicity of views from numerous specialists in linguistic diachrony. The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, Volume II is an ideal book for undergraduate and graduate students in linguistics, researchers and professional linguists, as well as all those interested in the history of particular languages and the history of language more generally.

Transforming Early English shows how historical pragmatics can offer a powerful explanatory framework for the changes medieval English and Older Scots texts undergo, as they are transmitted over time and space. The book argues that formal features such as spelling, script and font, and punctuation - often neglected in critical engagement with past texts - relate closely to dynamic, shifting socio-cultural processes, imperatives and functions. This theme is illustrated through numerous case-studies in textual recuperation, ranging from the reinvention of Old English poetry and prose in the later medieval and early modern periods, to the eighteenth-century 'vernacular revival' of literature in Older Scots.

In this book, Stanley E. Porter offers a unique, language-based critique of New Testament theology by comparing it to the development of language study from the Enlightenment to the present. Tracing the histories of two disciplines that are rarely considered together, Porter shows how the study of New Testament theology has followed outmoded conceptual models from previous eras of intellectual discussion. He reconceptualizes the study of New Testament theology via methods that are based upon the categories of modern linguistics, and demonstrates how they have already been applied to New Testament Greek studies. Porter also develops a workable linguistic model that can be applied to other areas of New Testament research. Opening New Testament Greek linguistics to a wider audience, his volume offers numerous examples of the productivity of this linguistic model, especially in his chapter devoted to the case study of the Son of Man.

Latin names - frequently unpronounceable, all too often wrong and always a tiny puzzle to unravel - have been annoying the layman since they first became formalised as scientific terms in the eighteenth century. Why on earth has the entirely land-loving Eastern Mole been named Scalopus aquaticus, or the Oxford Ragwort been called Senecio squalidus - 'dirty old man'? What were naturalists thinking when they called a beetle Agra katewinsletae, a genus of fish Batman, and a Trilobite Han solo? Why is zoology replete with names such as Chloris chloris chloris (the greenfinch), and Gorilla gorilla gorilla (a species of, well gorilla)? The Naming of the Shrew will unveil these mysteries, exploring the history, celebrating their poetic nature and revealing how naturalists sometimes get things so terribly wrong. With wonderfully witty style and captivating narrative, this book will make you see Latin names in a whole new light.