This book is concerned with three central issues: the universality of constraints on code-switching, the nature of the relation between language contact and bilingualism, and the social and linguistic components that facilitate code-switching.

Of the approximately 7,000 languages in the world, at least half may no longer be spoken by the end of the twenty-first century. Languages are endangered by a number of factors, including globalization, education policies, and the political, economic and cultural marginalization of minority groups. This guidebook provides ideas and strategies, as well as some background, to help with the effective revitalization of endangered languages. It covers a broad scope of themes including effective planning, benefits, wellbeing, economic aspects, attitudes and ideologies. The chapter authors have hands-on experience of language revitalization in many countries around the world, and each chapter includes a wealth of examples, such as case studies from specific languages and language areas. Clearly and accessibly written, it is suitable for non-specialists as well as academic researchers and students interested in language revitalization. This book is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.

"Explaining Mantras" explores the intersection of poetry and magic in the mantras or verbal formulas of Hindu Tantra. The author reveals how mantras work in light of both the esoteric tradition of Tantra and a general semiotic theory of ritual. Mantras mimic the act of sexual reproduction and the cosmic cycle of creation and destruction. A mantra that imitates creation is believed to be more creative and effective in producing a real-world result. Drawing from linguistics, semiotics, anthropology, and philosophy, as well as the history of religions, the author argues that mantras and other ritual discourses use rhetorical devices, including imitation, to construct the persuasive illusion of a "natural language," one with a direct and immediate connection to reality. This vital relation between poetry and ritual has been neglected in many current theories of religion. "Explaining Mantras" combines the study of ancient Tantric rituals with the latest theories in the human sciences, and will be of interest to a broad range of readers.

This book provides a systematic, contrastive analysis of the segmentation and representation of English and Chinese Translocative Motion Events (TMEs), which possess Macro-Event Property (MEP). It addresses all the issues critical to understanding TMEs in English and Chinese, from event segmentation, MEP principles and the conceptual structure of TMEs and their constituents, to the representation of Actant, Motion, Path and Ground. The book argues that the corpus-based alignment for the TME segmentation in both languages, the parameters of Actant, Motion, Path and Ground and their relevant statistical description are particularly important for understanding English and Chinese TMEs. The linguistic materialization of Actant, Ground, Path and Motion, together with a wealth of tables and figures, offers convincing evidence to support the typological classification of English and Chinese. The book's suggestions regarding the Talmyan bipartite typology and Bohnemeyer's MEP contribute to the advancement of TME studies and language typology, and help learners to understand motion events and English-Chinese typological similarities and differences.

Contents:
P.M. Beeson, S.Z. Rapcsak, E. Plante, J. Chargualaf, A. Chug, S.C. Johnson, T.P. Trouard, The Neural Substrates of Writing: A Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study. M.-J. Tainturier, B. Rapp, Is a Common Graphemic Buffer Used in Reading and Spelling? N.S. Clausen, P.M. Beeson, Conversational Use of Writing in Severe Aphasia: A Group Treatment Approach. S. Reich, T.-L. Chou, K. Patterson, Acquired Dysgraphia in Chinese: Further Evidence on the Links between Phonology and Orthography. B. Weekes, R. Davies, B. Parris, G. Robinson, Age of Acquisition Effects on Spelling in Surface Dysgraphia. A.M. Raymer, C. Cudworth, M.A. Haley, Spelling Treatment for an Individual with Dysgraphia: Analysis of Generalization to Untrained Words. K. Nakamura, S. Kouider, Functional Neuroanatomy of Japanese Writing Systems.

Contents:
Chapter 1: Introduction. Language and Thought. The Nature of Language. Methods of Studying Language. Problem Solving and Decision Making. The Study of Problem Solving and Decision Making. Summary. Chapter 2: The Relationship Between Language and Thought. Introduction. The Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. Thought Determines Language. The Interdependence of Language and Thought. Summary. Review Exercise. Chapter 3: Social and Cultural Aspects of Language. Introduction. Social Class. Ethnic Background. Gender. Summary. Review Exercise. Chapter 4: Language Acquisition. Introduction. The Stages of Language Acquisition. Pre-linguistic. One-word Stage. Development of Grammar. Meaning and Pragmatics. Summary. Review Exercise. Chapter 5: Theories of language acquisition. Introduction. Environmental Theories of Language Acquisition. Nativist Theories of Language Acquisition. Summary. Review Exercise. Chapter 6: Problem-solving. Introduction. Types of Problems. Gestalt Approach. Information Processing Approach. Information Processing and 'Insight'. Use of Analogy in Problem Solving. Problem Solving in Everyday Life. Summary. Review Exercise. Chapter 7: Decision Making. Introduction. The Heuristics and Biases Approach to Judgements. Other Factors that Influence Judgements. Evaluation of the Heuristics and Biases Approach. Theories of Decision Making. Summary. Review Exercise. Chapter 8: Study Aids. Glossary. Solutions to Problems. Bibliography. Index.

At present, much of the research on bilingual cognition focuses on late second language learners of a small number of languages. In this fascinating book, Evangelia Adamou widens the net by integrating advances in the field of bilingualism with the study of endangered languages. Drawing on recent studies from Europe and Latin America, she demonstrates that experimental psycholinguistic methods can be successfully applied outside the lab and, conversely, how data from these understudied populations provide new insights into the adaptive capacities of the bilingual mind. Adamou shows how bilinguals manage competing conceptualizations of time and space, how their grammars and language mixing patterns adapt to cognitive constraints such as the need for simplification, and how language processing concurrently adapts to their complex bilingual experience. Combining statistical analyses with detailed linguistic and ethnographic information, this essential book will appeal to scholars of bilingualism, cognitive sciences, language endangerment, and language contact.

Adopting a corpus-based methodology, this volume analyses phraseological patterns in nine European languages from a monolingual, bilingual and multilingual point of view, following a mostly Construction Grammar approach. At present, corpus-based constructional research represents an interesting and innovative field of phraseology with great relevance to translatology, foreign language didactics and lexicography.

As the first systematic attempt to probe the linguistic strategies of Daoist Zhuangzi and Chan Buddhism, this book investigates three areas: deconstructive strategy, liminology of language, and indirect communication. It bases these investigations on the critical examination of original texts, placing them strictly within soteriological contexts. Whilst focusing on language use, the study also reveals some important truths about these two traditions and challenges many conventional understandings of them. Responding to recent critiques of Daoist and Chan Buddhist thought, it brings these two traditions into a constructive dialogue with contemporary philosophical reflection. It discovers Zhuangzian and Chan perspectives and sheds light on issues such as the relationship between philosophy and non-philosophy, de-reification of words, relativising the limit of language, structure of indirect communication, and use of paradox, tautology and poetic language.

This book is designed to ease the beginner into competent reading of Old English texts. It presents the essential points of Old English grammar and also includes a selection of short, relatively simple original language texts, glossed and annotated. Numerous practice exercises are also included throughout. A companion website includes additional interactive exercises, a fuller grammar, and further original language texts.

Having emerged as the most widespread global language, English now has substantially more second and foreign-language speakers than native speakers. Long associated with an 'educated elite', including academics, politicians and business professionals, English is now increasingly spreading at the grassroots of societies, among speakers with limited access to formal education a process which is becoming increasingly visible and influential.Bringing together an international roster of contributors, this book explores uses of English in a variety of grassroots multilingual contexts; drawing on a diverse range of experiences, such as motorcycle taxi drivers, market vendors, cleaners, hotel staff, tour guides, migrant domestic workers, refugees and asylum seekers. Divided into three parts, the book explores the spread of English in former areas of British domination including Africa and the East, in trade and work migration, and in forced migration by refugees. The chapters present cutting edge case studies which draw on spoken data from Bahrainis, South Africans, Tanzanians, Ugandans, Bangladeshis in the Middle East, Italians in the UK, Indians in the US, and Nigerians and Syrians in Germany. This important and innovative volume presents a first documentation of world Englishes at the grassroots of societies and an empirical basis for their further study and for the theorising of world Englishes by integrating Englishes at the grassroots into existing models of English.

This book introduces readers to oracle bone inscriptions (OBI), the oldest known form of Chinese writing. It presents 120 rubbings made from unearthed animal bones and turtle shells that the Shang royal court employed to record royal divinations 3500 years ago, covering topics ranging from ancestor worship, rituals, and astronomy to agriculture, war, and hunting. Each rubbing is accompanied by a graph-to-graph transcription, a translation and a detailed annotation. The book is intended for both general readers and scholars who are interested in ancient civilizations and Early China in particular, acquainting them not only with OBI graphs and the development of the Chinese writing system, but also the history of the Shang Dynasty. The didactic and tutorial format makes this book ideal for teaching and for self-learning. Sumerian, Egyptian, Chinese OBI and Mayan constitute the four pristine writing systems. Of these, only Chinese writing has remained logographic and survived to the present day. The study of OBI not only plays a pivotal role in connecting archaeology to history, but is also of great importance to the comparative study of the origin of writing and civilization. Though there are numerous books on Mayan and Egyptian hieroglyphs, there are very few on OBI; this book fills that gap.

Is language sexist? Do women and men speak different languages?
Gender, Language and Discourse uniquely examines the contribution that psychological research - in particular, discursive psychology - has made to answering these questions. Until now, books on gender and language have tended to be from the sociolinguistic perspective and have focused on one of two issues - sexism in language or gender differences in speech. This book considers both issues and develops the idea that they shouldn't be viewed as mutually exclusive endeavours but rather as part of the same process - the social construction of gender. Ann Weatherall highlights the fresh insights that a social constructionist approach has made to these debates, and presents recent theoretical developments and empirical work in discursive psychology relevant to gender and language.
Gender, Language and Discourse provides the most comprehensive and up-to-date discussion of the gender and language field from a psychological perspective. It will be invaluable to students and researchers in social psychology, cultural studies, education, linguistic anthropology and women's studies.

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This fascinating collection of traditional metaphors and figures of speech, groups expressions according to theme. The second edition includes over 1,500 new entries, more information on first known usages, a new introduction and two expanded indexes. It will appeal to those interested in cultural history and the English language.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203219856

Combining statistical modelling and archival study, English and Empire investigates how African diasporic, Chinese, and Indian characters have been voiced in British fiction and drama produced between 1768 and 1929. The analysis connects patterns of linguistic representation to changes in the imperial political economy, to evolving language ideologies that circulate in the Anglophone world, and to shifts in sociocultural anxieties that crosscut race and empire. In carrying out his investigation, David West Brown makes the case for a methodological approach that links the distant (quantitative) and close (qualitative) reading of diverse digital artefacts. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, the book will appeal to a variety of scholars and students including sociolinguists interested in historical language variation, as well as literary scholars interested in postcolonial studies and the digital humanities.

Demonstratives play a crucial role in the acquisition and use of language. Bringing together a team of leading scholars this detailed study, a first of its kind, explores meaning and use across fifteen typologically and geographically unrelated languages to find out what cross-linguistic comparisons and generalizations can be made, and how this might challenge current theory in linguistics, psychology, anthropology and philosophy. Using a shared experimental task, rounded out with studies of natural language use, specialists in each of the languages undertook extensive fieldwork for this comparative study of semantics and usage. An introduction summarizes the shared patterns and divergences in meaning and use that emerge.

Historical linguistic theory and practice consist of a large number of chronological "layers" that have been accepted in the course of time and have acquired a permanence of their own. These range from neogrammarian conceptualizations of sound change, analogy, and borrowing, to prosodic, lexical, morphological, and syntactic change, and to present-day views on rule change and the effects of language contact. To get a full grasp of the principles of historical linguistics it is therefore necessary to understand the nature of each of these "layers". This book is a major revision and reorganization of the earlier editions and adds entirely new chapters on morphological change and lexical change, as well as a detailed discussion of linguistic palaeontology and ideological responses to the findings of historical linguistics to this landmark publication.

This book is a comprehensive introduction to the study of language contact and its outcomes, as well as the social and linguistic factors involved.

"An Introduction to Contact Linguistics" examines a wide range of language contact phenomena from both general linguistic and sociolinguistic perspectives. It provides an account of current approaches to all of the major types of contact-induced change. Each chapter describes both the linguistic and social aspects of the contact situation and how they affect the outcome. There is also discussion of the general processes and principles that are at work in cases of contact.

The book treats all of these diverse contact phenomena in a unified empirical and theoretical framework within which both the outcomes and the processes and principles at work in each case can be identified and compared.

This book takes a close look at the ways that five sign languages borrow elements from the surrounding, dominant spoken language community where each is situated. It offers careful analyses of semantic, morphosyntactic, and phonological adaption of forms taken from a source language (in this case a spoken language) to a recipient signed language. In addition, the contributions contained in the volume examine the social attitudes and cultural values that play a role in this linguistic process. Since the cultural identity of Deaf communities is manifested most strongly in their sign languages, this topic is of interest for cultural and linguistic reasons. Linguists interested in phonology, morphology, word formation, bilingualism, and linguistic anthropology will find this an interesting set of cases of language contact. Interpreters and sign language teachers will also find a wealth of interesting facts about the sign languages of these diverse Deaf communities.

In this book, Douglas Robinson introduces a new distinction between 'constative' and 'performative' linguistics, arguing that Austin's distinction can be used to understand linguistic methodologies. Constative linguistics, Robinson suggests, includes methodologies aimed at 'freezing' language as an abstract sign system, while performative linguistics explores how language is used or 'performed' in those speech situations. Robinson then tests his hypothesis on the act of translation.
Drawing on a range of language scholars and theorists, Performative Linguistics consolidates the many disparate action-approaches to language into a new paradigm for the study of language.

Spoken word access processes are the mental processes which underlie our ability to recognise spoken words. They are the perceptual processes which take the sequence of buzzes, bursts and chirps that make up the raw speech signal and convert them into a sequence of words. This edited volume contains articles and short reports which examine these processes. These papers are based on presentations at the workshop Spoken Word Access Processes (SWAP), held in Nijmegen in May 2000. They cover the major issues that the field is now concerned with, and thus provide a snapshot of the current state of the SWAP art. Core representational issues about spoken words are addressed: the form of the representations which are used to access the mental lexicon; how phonological information is coded in the lexicon; and how morphological and semantic information about each word is stored. The main components of the lexical access process are also discussed: competition between candidate words; computation of goodness-of-fit between the signal and stored lexical knowledge; segmentation of continuous speech into words; whether there is feedback from the lexicon to earlier stages of processing; and the relationship of form-based processes to the processes responsible for deriving interpretations of utterances. This collection should be essential reading for those working in this or related areas of psycholinguistics. An introductory article is included which makes this research more accessible to students in cognitive psychology and phonetics, and to specialists in other fields of psychology and linguistics.

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This book examines the phenomenon of vowel reduction, in which two or more underlying vowel qualities are neutralized in the unstressed position. The main purpose is to identify any cross-linguistic trends seen in languages that have vowel reduction and to explain the reasons behind these trends.

This collection of essays gives an insight into the problems that we encounter when we try to (re)construct events from Israel's past. On the one hand, the Hebrew Bible is a biased source, on the other hand, the data provided by archaeology and extra-biblical texts are constrained and sometimes contradictory. Discussing a set of examples, the author applies fundamental insight from the philosophy of history to clarify Israel's past.

This book explores the usage patterns of a group of adversative and concessive conjunctions in English texts written by Chinese EFL learners and their native speaker counterparts. Focusing on probability profiles and systemic potentials, the study encompasses three stages and combines the strengths of two research methods - the corpus-based approach and text-based analysis - to examine the conjunctions under the theoretical framework of systemic functional linguistics and rhetorical structure theory. Starting with an overview of seventeen conjunctions across two corpora in terms of overall frequency, positional distribution and distribution of semantic categories, the book then offers a more detailed discussion of three individual conjunctions, highlighting the interconnections between 1) syntactic positions and co-occurrence patterns and 2) semantic relations encoded by these conjunctions. Lastly, it presents a case study of one full-length text taken from the learner corpus, applying rhetorical structure theory to provide new insights into the relevance of adversative and concessive relations to text structure. This comprehensive, in-depth analysis is both diagnostic and pedagogically informative.

African American English (AAE) is a major area of research in linguistics, but until now, work has primarily been focused on AAE as it is spoken amongst the working classes. From its historical development to its contemporary context, this is the first full-length overview of the use and evaluation of AAE by middle class speakers, giving voice to this relatively neglected segment of the African American speech community. Weldon offers a unique first-person account of middle class AAE, and highlights distinguishing elements such as codeswitching, camouflaged feature usage, Standard AAE, and talking/sounding 'Black' vs. 'Proper'. Readers can hear authentic excerpts and audio prompts of the language described through a wide range of audio files, which can be accessed directly from the book's page using QR technology or through the book's online Resource Tab. Engaging and accessible, it will help students and researchers gain a broader understanding of both the African American speech community and the AAE continuum.