Jay Jasanoff puts forward a revolutionary model of the Proto-Indo-European verbal system which will have a profound impact on the study of the Indo-European language family and marks a significant advance in the understanding of its history. The decipherment of Hittite in 1917 and the recognition that it was an Indo-European language had dramatic consequences for conceptions of the parent language. After decades of studying the 'disconnects' between Hittite and early languages such as Sanskrit and Greek, scholars finally realized that the question was not whether received ideas about the parent language should be modified to account for Hittite, but how. This book provides the answer.

This book offers an innovative, unified theoretical model for better understanding the processes underpinning naming and framing and the power that words exert over human minds. The volume integrates theoretical paradigms and empirical insights from across a broad array of research disciplines, several of which have not been combined before, and uses this foundation as a point of departure for introducing its four-layered model of distinct but connected levels of analysis. Bringing together insights from cognitive linguistics and psycholinguistics together with multimodal perspectives, Smith establishes new cross-disciplinary links, further integrating work from neighbouring fields such as marketing, health communication, and political communication, that indicate paths for future research and implications for communicative ethics. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in multimodality, communication, semiotics, cognitive psychology, and linguistics, as well as those in related disciplines such as marketing, political communication, and health communication.

This book illustrates the potential of Relevance Theory (RT) in offering a cognitive-pragmatic, cause-effect account of translation and interpreting (T&I), one which more closely engages T&I activity with the mental processes of speakers, listeners, writers, and readers during communicative acts. The volume provides an overview of the cognitive approach to communication taken by RT, with a particular focus on the distinction between explicit and implicit content and the relationship between thoughts and utterances. The book begins by outlining key concepts and theory in RT pragmatics and charting the development of their disciplinary relationship with work from T&I studies. Chapters draw on practical examples from a wide range of T&I contexts, including news media, scientific materials, literary translation, audiovisual translation, conference interpreting, and legal interpreting. The book also explores the myriad applications of RT pragmatics-inspired work and future implications for translation and interpreting research. This volume will be of interest to scholars in T&I studies and pragmatics.

The book is dedicated to the blessed memory of Prof. Zvia Breznitz, whose groundbreaking research has made a tremendous impact on the understanding of fluency in reading. The book presents a multidimensional perspective of recent research and reviews on fluency in reading. The first part presents recent brain-imaging findings from studies into the neurobiological basis of reading, as well as cognitive and language studies exploring the underlying factors of fluency in reading and its development. The second part comprises reviews of intervention studies that address reading ability, and in particular, fluency in reading. The book provides a unique multilingual perspective on reading research by including studies of readers of different orthographies and speakers of different languages. Both scientists exploring the different aspects of reading and language, and clinicians of reading intervention will find this book not only of great interest but extremely useful in its clear and in-depth presentation of current reading research.

This book presents an investigation of language contact, focusing on Northwestern China. It breaks down the barrier between human sciences and natural sciences in order to reconsider the diversity of languages on the basis of the latest research findings from genetics, linguistics, and other domains, offering valuable insights into when and how the divergence of languages and genes began and language and gene admixture and replacement occurred. The book focuses on language evolution between the border of Gansu and Qinghai Province in China, but the research doesn't neglect the area beyond China's northern borders. Manchu, a dying language belonging to the Tungusic group, is also studied to enhance our understanding of language replacement. This work is the result of a four-year collaboration between teams of geneticists and linguists in France and China.

The volume investigates such key themes as covariation and co-occurrence restrictions; indexicality, perception and social meaning; coherence and language change; and the structure and measurement of coherence at different levels of analysis.

Korangy and Sharifian's groundbreaking book offers the first in-depth study into cultural linguistics for the Persian language. The book highlights a multitude of angles through which the intricacies of Persian and its many dialects and accents, wherever spoken, can be examined. Linguistics with cultural studies as its backdrop is not a new phenomenon; however, with this text we are afforded an insight into the complex relationship that exists between human cognizance and human expression in this ancient civilization. This study helps develop an innovative understanding of history, intent, and meaning as understood by a culture and by a people, in this case the Persian-speaking folk of Iran. The chapters are insightful resources for analyzing and augmenting our knowledge of linguistics under the rubric of Persian culture but also for proposing and foregrounding new ideas in this field of study.

* Arabic code-switching and translanguaging in written Arabic has recently emerged as a powerful form of communication online and the connection between these forms of communication and the socio-political impact they have within the ongoing tumultuous transformations in the Arab world makes this study very appealing to students and researchers * addresses the colloquial/standard variation of written Arabic for students of Arabic sociolinguistics * many scholars/teachers in the filed of Arabic are re-thinking the ways in which the Arabic language can be taught in a more efficient way that would address the challenges posed by Arabic diglossia * a useful practical and theoretical tool that scholars could use in their explorations and teaching. This book would appeal to: sociolinguistic researchers mixed Arabic writing and the concepts of code-switching, code-mixing and translanguaging teachers and students of Arabic wishing to understand better the mixed forms of writing we find in modern Arabic literature and on social media. Early literacy advocates, researchers and teachers, who wish to better understand the issues young learners face and possible solutions to overcoming the barriers to achieving higher literacy and attainment policy makers and educators interested in Arabic phonics, a new yet popular concept in Arabic language teaching and learning

This book explores dominant ideologies about citizenship, nation, and language that frame the everyday lives of Spanish-speaking immigrant day laborers in Arizona. It examines the value of speaking English in this context and the dynamics of intercultural communication in fast-paced job negotiations.

A practical, accessible textbook for undergraduate students with no background in linguistics. Incorporates a range of pedagogical features such as real texts, end of chapter exercises, web links, annotated bibliography and glossary which makes it the ideal textbook for students coming to this topic for the first time. Now supported by IOS and Android app that features grammar exercises; translations; and readings of texts that will support and engage student in their understanding of this topic. Only textbook available that combines the study of Old, Middle and Early Modern English which sets this book apart from the competition.

This is the first volume specifically dedicated to competition in inflection and word-formation, a topic that has increasingly attracted attention. Semantic categories, such as concepts, classes, and feature bundles, can be expressed by more than one form or formal pattern. This departure from the ideal principle "one form - one meaning" is particularly frequent in morphology, where it has been treated under diverse headings, such as blocking, Elsewhere Condition, Panini's Principle, rivalry, synonymy, doublets, overabundance, suppletion and other terms. Since these research traditions, despite the heterogeneous terminology, essentially refer to the same underlying problems, this volume unites the phenomena studied in this field of linguistic morphology under the more general heading of competition. The volume features an extensive state of the art report on the subject and 11 research papers, which represent various theoretical approaches to morphology and address a wide range of aspects of competition, including morphophonology, lexicology, diachrony, language contact, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics and language acquisition.

The first comprehensive guide to research methods and technologies in psycholinguistics and the neurobiology of language Bringing together contributions from a distinguished group of researchers and practitioners, editors Annette M. B. de Groot and Peter Hagoort explore the methods and technologies used by researchers of language acquisition, language processing, and communication, including: traditional observational and behavioral methods; computational modelling; corpus linguistics; and virtual reality. The book also examines neurobiological methods, including functional and structural neuroimaging and molecular genetics. Ideal for students engaged in the field, Research Methods in Psycholinguistics and the Neurobiology of Language examines the relative strengths and weaknesses of various methods in relation to competing approaches. It describes the apparatus involved, the nature of the stimuli and data used, and the data collection and analysis techniques for each method. Featuring numerous example studies, along with many full-color illustrations, this indispensable text will help readers gain a clear picture of the practices and tools described. * Brings together contributions from distinguished researchers across an array of related disciplines who explain the underlying assumptions and rationales of their research methods * Describes the apparatus involved, the nature of the stimuli and data used, and the data collection and analysis techniques for each method * Explores the relative strengths and weaknesses of various methods in relation to competing approaches * Features numerous real-world examples, along with many full-color illustrations, to help readers gain a clear picture of the practices and tools described

Whether we are touched by the 2015 migrant crisis in the Mediterranean or the heated debates about the status of the (260+ million) displaced persons in our different societies, all of us have been affected by the "age of migration." Marco Micone's hybrid text, which through this translation will now be available to English readers, is made up of autobiographical snapshots, brief commentaries, and a short theatrical exchange. It includes the author's own childhood experiences in Italy and his emigration as a teenager with his family to Quebec. The author's clear-sighted, often tongue-in-cheek descriptions continue to be relevant today, not least when he explores the challenges of the Canadian policy of multiculturalism and Quebec's decision to choose a different, "intercultural" model to defuse the springing up of ethnic village-like ghettos, particularly in urban centers like Montreal. His promise to the Francophone Quebecois that "one hundred peoples coming from afar" would ensure that the French-speaking community could endure within the North American context, has been borne out by his own texts. The author writes with passion, with sincerity and, as literary critic Gilles Marcotte notes, with an intelligence that often helps to stretch the reader.

Originally published in 1978, The Process of Question Answering examines a phenomenon that relies on many realms of human cognition: language comprehension, memory retrieval, and language generation. Problems in computational question answering assume a new perspective when question answering is viewed as a problem in natural language processing. A theory of human question answering must necessarily entail a theory of human memory organization and theories of the cognitive processes that access and manipulate information in memory. This book describes question answering as a particular task in information processing. The theoretical models described here have been built on a formulation of general theories in natural language processing: theories about language that were developed without the specific problem of question answering in mind. By requiring programmers to be concerned with the precise form of information in memory, and the precise operations manipulating that information, they can uncover significant problems that would otherwise be overlooked. An early insight into artificial intelligence, today this reissue can be enjoyed in its historical context.

The phrase "Daughter of Zion" is in recent Bible translations often rendered "Daughter Zion". The discussion behind this change has continued for decades, but lacks proper linguistic footing. Parlance in grammars, dictionaries, commentaries and textbooks is often confusing. The present book seeks to remedy this defect by treating all relevant expressions from a linguistic point of view. To do this, it also discusses the understanding of Hebrew construct phrases, and finds that while there is a morphological category of genitive in Akkadian, Ugaritic and Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic and Syriac do not display it. The use of this term as a syntactical category is unfortunate, and the term should be avoided in Hebrew grammar. Metaphor theory and the use of irony are also tools in the discussion of the phrases. As a result of the treatment, the author finds that there are some Hebrew construct phrases where nomen regens describes the following nomen rectum, and the description may be metaphorical, in some cases also ironical. This seems to be the case with "Daughter of Zion" and similar phrases. This understanding calls for a revision of the translation of the phrases, and new translations are suggested.

This accessible and engaging textbook offers a practical approach to understanding the complexity of language by exploring language use and language learning in a wide variety of contexts. Bringing together leading specialists who are active researchers in the field of linguistics, this book introduces readers to major fields of language study by focusing on social, cultural and historical factors that show the dynamic nature of language. Topics explored include first and second language acquisition, grammar, meaning-making and pragmatics, language use and technology, language variation, and English as a global language. This book surveys major principles and shows how to apply them through structured discussion topics and activities to facilitate a greater understanding and appreciation of language. This is essential reading for undergraduate students taking courses in linguistics and language use, and a valuable resource for students of communication studies, media studies, sociology and anthropology.

This book posits a universal syntactic constraint (FPC) for code switching, using as its basis a study of different types of code-switching between French, Moroccan Arabic and Standard Arabic in a language contact situation. After presenting the theoretical background and linguistic context under study, the author closely examines examples of syntactic constraints in the language of functional bilinguals switching between French and forms of Arabic, proposing that this hypothesis can also be applied in other comparable language contact and translanguaging contexts worldwide. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of French, Arabic, theoretical linguistics, syntax and bilingualism.

Based on extensive analysis of real-time, authentic crisis encounters collected in the UK and US, Crisis Talk: Negotiating with Individuals in Crisis sheds light on the relatively hidden world of communication between people in crisis and the professionals whose job it is to help them. The crisis situations explored in this book involve police hostage and crisis negotiators and emergency dispatchers interacting with individuals in crisis who threaten suicide or self-harm. The practitioners face various communicative challenges in these encounters, including managing strong emotions, resistance, hostility, and unresponsiveness. Using conversation analysis, Crisis Talk presents evidence on how practitioners deal with the interactional challenge of negotiating with people in crisis and how what they say shapes outcomes. Each chapter includes recommendations based on the detailed analysis of numerous cases of actual negotiation. Crisis Talk shows readers how every turn taken by negotiators can exacerbate or solve the communicative challenges created by crisis situations, making it a unique and invaluable text for academics in psychology, sociology, linguistic sciences, and related fields, as well as for practitioners engaging in crisis negotiation training or fieldwork.

Based on extensive analysis of real-time, authentic crisis encounters collected in the UK and US, Crisis Talk: Negotiating with Individuals in Crisis sheds light on the relatively hidden world of communication between people in crisis and the professionals whose job it is to help them. The crisis situations explored in this book involve police hostage and crisis negotiators and emergency dispatchers interacting with individuals in crisis who threaten suicide or self-harm. The practitioners face various communicative challenges in these encounters, including managing strong emotions, resistance, hostility, and unresponsiveness. Using conversation analysis, Crisis Talk presents evidence on how practitioners deal with the interactional challenge of negotiating with people in crisis and how what they say shapes outcomes. Each chapter includes recommendations based on the detailed analysis of numerous cases of actual negotiation. Crisis Talk shows readers how every turn taken by negotiators can exacerbate or solve the communicative challenges created by crisis situations, making it a unique and invaluable text for academics in psychology, sociology, linguistic sciences, and related fields, as well as for practitioners engaging in crisis negotiation training or fieldwork.

This study examines the relationship between thought and language by considering the views of Kant and the later Wittgenstein alongside many strands of contemporary debate in the area of mental content, represented by the work of Evans, Peacocke, and McGinn. Building on an analysis of the nature of concepts and conceptions of objects, Grant Gillett generates an interesting account of psychological explanation and of the subject of experience. He offers a novel perspective on mental representation and linguistic meaning, accommodating the vexed topics of cognitive roles and singular thought. He concludes by outlining certain considerations relevant to sceptical arguments and the nature of perception. The synthesis that results from this project shows some significant correlations with contemporary work in cognitive and developmental psychology and is directly relevant to work in epistemology, philosophy of mind, and philosophical psychology.

Over the last decades, it has been hotly debated whether and how compounds, i.e. word-formations, and phrases differ from each other. The book discusses this issue by investigating compounds and phrases from a structural, semantic-functional and, crucially, cognitive perspective. The analysis focuses on compounds and phrases that are composed of either an adjective and a noun or two nouns in German, French and English. Having distinguished compounds from phrases on structural and semantic-functional grounds, the author claims that compounds are by their nature more appropriate to be stored in the mental lexicon than phrases and supports his argument with empirical evidence from new psycholinguistic studies. In sum, the book maintains the separation between compounds and phrases and reflects upon its cognitive consequences.

This open access book introduces a general framework that allows natural language researchers to enhance existing competence theories with fully specified performance and processing components. Gradually developing increasingly complex and cognitively realistic competence-performance models, it provides running code for these models and shows how to fit them to real-time experimental data. This computational cognitive modeling approach opens up exciting new directions for research in formal semantics, and linguistics more generally, and offers new ways of (re)connecting semantics and the broader field of cognitive science. The approach of this book is novel in more ways than one. Assuming the mental architecture and procedural modalities of Anderson's ACT-R framework, it presents fine-grained computational models of human language processing tasks which make detailed quantitative predictions that can be checked against the results of self-paced reading and other psycho-linguistic experiments. All models are presented as computer programs that readers can run on their own computer and on inputs of their choice, thereby learning to design, program and run their own models. But even for readers who won't do all that, the book will show how such detailed, quantitatively predicting modeling of linguistic processes is possible. A methodological breakthrough and a must for anyone concerned about the future of linguistics! (Hans Kamp) This book constitutes a major step forward in linguistics and psycholinguistics. It constitutes a unique synthesis of several different research traditions: computational models of psycholinguistic processes, and formal models of semantics and discourse processing. The work also introduces a sophisticated python-based software environment for modeling linguistic processes. This book has the potential to revolutionize not only formal models of linguistics, but also models of language processing more generally. (Shravan Vasishth)

The Evolution of Spanish Past Forms examines how Spanish past forms have changed diachronically. With examples from Medieval Spanish, Golden Age Spanish, and Modern Spanish literary works, this book demonstrates how language is dynamic and susceptible to change. The past forms considered here include the preterit, the imperfect, the imperfect progressive with estar (temporal to be), the present perfect, the imperfect progressive with other auxiliary verbs, the preterit progressive with estar, and the preterit progressive with other auxiliary verbs. This book will be of interest to scholars and graduate students investigating tense and aspect phenomena in Spanish and other languages, grammaticalization processes, and language variation and change.

In On the Genesis of Thought and Language, linguist Alexey Koshelev explores fundamental questions of how human concepts arise in a child, why concepts appear in a child before words, the genesis of language, and why there are so many languages. Chapter One introduces the fundamental dichotomy "visual (exogenous) vs. functional (endogenous)" cognitive units; these units are used to give non-verbal definitions of mental representations of various objects, actions, and situations. In particular, definitions of such concepts as GLASS, CHAIR, BANANA, TREE, LAKE, RUN, and some others are given. Chapter Two discusses how children form concepts, hierarchical relationships, and propositions (conceptual 'utterances'). It is shown that the initial units of the child's representation of the world are pre-conceptual cognitive units-mental representations of whole situations. In the course of two consecutive cycles in the child's cognitive development, these units transform into (a) primary notions-object and motor concepts, and (b) binary role relationships. Together, they constitute the elementary language of thought which, in the process of thinking, is used to build conceptual structures-propositions. It is further demonstrated that, immediately after the formation of thought, the child begins to develop his native language in which concrete and motor concepts become initial meanings of nouns and verbs, while propositions become the meanings of the child's expressions. The chapter concludes with a contrastive analysis of the proposed approach and Aristotle's and Chomsky's views on thought and language. Chapter Three analyzes how a community's culture affects its language. It is demonstrated that the progress of a community, the main constituent of the civilizational component of its culture, enhances the development of the content component of language by extending the range of its lexical and grammatical meanings. In the context of this analysis, Daniel Everett's (2008) hypothesis that culture affects language structure is discussed. In the subsequent sections, models of the development of human and social activity are offered. These models comprise three components: Activity (main component), Thought, and Language (auxiliary components that ensure the successful realization of activities). The models are illustrated with examples of some concrete societies.

The book explores two fundamental aspects of the human mind and their relation to one another. The first is the way that information is put to use in the mind. When we are doing a mental arithmetic problem, for example, how do we bring the relevant bits of information to mind and hold them there while carrying out the series of calculations? This is working memory, the subject of an enormous research literature in psychology, neuroscience, and a great many other disciplines. Characterizing the working memory process is now a major part of efforts to understand the human mind. How we characterize this process depends of course on how we characterize the human mind as a whole. In particular, is the mind made up of a number of distinct units, each carrying out a specialized function? There is considerable reason to say that it is, and this modular view of the mind has become prominent in a great deal of academic work, notably in cognitive neuroscience, with important implications for our understanding of how working memory works. But these implications have received surprisingly little consideration to this point. The aim of the book is to explore this relation between working memory and modularity, first in general terms and then using a specific modular view of the mind - the Modular Cognition Framework. The ideas are illustrated and further developed through an application to language and especially second language acquisition and use.