Kanji Clues: A Mnemonic Approach to Mastering Japanese Characters introduces a novel approach to character acquisition that combines the ancient practice of memory enhancement with a modern appreciation for active learning. By placing phonology at the center of the reading-writing process, the learner establishes an essential link between sound and meaning before addressing each character's orthography, much in the way native speakers do. Another prominent feature of these volumes is that the lessons are organized thematically according to components in order to enhance their retention and to distinguish between similar looking kanji. As a result, character order is determined by the frequency of their primary elements or components. Once a character is learned, it retains the same meaning when it appears as an element in other characters. There is thus an internal recycling of components and characters throughout the course that serves as an additional aid to their retrieval. Proceeding from components and characters, each lesson then introduces ten new compounds, half of which appear in sentences. Here again, the learner actively forges meaningful links by responding to the clues provided. Indeed, the entire learning sequence is based upon mnemonic principles, such as attention, association, and elaboration, which, when employed together, comprise a memory-enhancing network that facilitates accurate recall and retention. Designed for students who wish to master the Japanese reading/writing system, each volume is comprised of a year's worth of lessons, which can be used alongside a primary textbook, as well as for self-study, reference, or review. Upon completion of the course, the learner will have not only mastered all the 2,136 everyday use characters, but also be familiar with more than 1,200 kanji compounds and the most common sentence patterns in the Japanese language, thereby providing a deep understanding of the inner workings of the language and the tools to decipher new words. Volume 1 is an ideal supplementary resource for students throughout their first year of Japanese-language study.

This edited book focuses on practices of work in late modern society, taking an 'issue-based' and interdisciplinary approach to English Studies which acknowledges the impact of globalization on the position of English in the daily existence of millions of people around the world. Envisioning English as "a diverse yet unified subject" where the study of literature, language, and education can be pursued thematically, it constitutes part of an ongoing transformation and revitalization of English Studies. It will be of interest to readers with backgrounds in linguistics, literature and education, as well as fields normally seen as lying 'beyond' English Studies such as psychology, sociology, philosophy, urban studies, political science and childhood studies.

Introducing the English translations of 8 selected research articles originally written in Chinese by Professor Yuan Yulin, Cognition-based Studies on Chinese Grammar is an essential reading for researchers in Chinese syntax. Yuan Yulin is one of the very first Chinese scholars who introduced cognitive sciences into the study of Chinese language some twenty years ago, and his work is well-known and highly regarded in China for its originality and theoretical contribution. The collection covers the core of his engagement with Chinese language studies, ranging from lexical exploration to grammatical discussion. Cognition-based Studies on Chinese Grammar is designed for students or researchers who specialize in the Chinese language, contemporary Chinese grammar and cognitive linguistics. It can also serve as a reference book for instructors or teachers engaged in Chinese language pedagogy or in teaching Chinese as a second or foreign language.

First published in 1980. This study has two basic goals. The first is to provide an explicit and coherent analysis of a variety of phonological and morphological processes within the grammars of a number of different dialects of Dakota. The second is to investigate the relevance of certain aspects of the proposed analysis to particular tenets of the general theory of transformational generative phonology and of recent proposals regarding the role of morphology within a generative framework. This title will be of great interest to students of linguistics.

First published in 1952. This book does not confine itself to German phonetics; it aims rather at showing by what processes and tricks of sound words have been shaped in the course of years; it is therefore a book on phonology as well. It should have a wide appeal to students of German. Moreover, since the treatment of laws and sound processes is comparative, it will be useful to students of other languages, particularly of the Scandinavian group and Dutch.

The book is the first substantial description of Tundra Nenets, a highly endangered Uralic language spoken in Western Siberia and the north of European Russia, destined for the international linguistic community. Its purpose is to provide a thorough documentation of all of the major grammatical phenomena in the language. The grammar particularly emphasizes the description of syntax, because this has traditionally been a very neglected area of Nenets studies. Many syntactic aspects have not received a systematic treatment in the existing literature or have not been addressed at all. Since the existing works are not easily available, incomplete, or idiosyncratically presented, Tundra Nenets syntax has played little or no role in the considerations of modern linguists, whether more descriptively or theoretically inclined. The book is largely descriptive: it is not intended to address theoretical questions per se and the description is not meant to be formulated within a particular framework. However, it identifies and discusses issues which are of broad typological and theoretical interest. The description is richly exemplified. Most of the cited examples are the result of fieldwork conducted by the in various locations. They are sentences produced by native speakers either spontaneously or elicited in response to questions posed in Russian. Other examples are excerpts from original texts.

Thematic Structure and Para-Syntax: Arabic as a Case Study presents a structural analysis of Arabic, providing an alternative to the traditional notions of theme and rheme. Taking Arabic as a case study, this book claims that approaches to thematic structure propounded in universalist linguistic theories, of which Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics is taken as an illustrative example, are profoundly wrong. It argues that in order to produce an analysis of thematic structure and similar phenomena which is not undermined by its own theoretical presuppositions, it is necessary to remove such notions from the domain of linguistic and semiotic theory. The book initially focuses on Sudanese Arabic, because this allows for a beautifully clear exposition of general principles, before applying these principles to Modern Standard Arabic, and some other Arabic varieties. This book will be of interest to scholars in Arabic linguistics, linguistic theory, and information structure.

In a small village on the southern coast of Crete, the narrator meets a young man who tells him a history of his journey which took him from Prague as far as to the Libyan sea. It is a voyage to uncover mysterious deaths of two brothers: one was murdered during the ballet performance, the body of the second one was found by Turkish fishermen at the Asia Minor shores. On the move, the amateur detective is accompanied by one of the brothers girlfriend. They have to work out a lot of traces, clues and rebuses - seemingly meaningless clusters of letters in the picture of a Hungarian painter, fragments of words created in the sea by bodies of phosphorescing worms, puzzling shapes of jelly sweets found in a small shop in Croatia or the plot of an American sci-fi thriller movie, which the protagonists watch in the cinema in Rome suburb. Such leads send the heroes from town to town, the plot takes part on night trains and many places in Europe - in Bratislava, Budapest, Lublan, on the islands of Mykon and Crete... With the search for the murderer of both the brothers many other stories are interconnected, and they take the readers to even more distant places of the Earth: Moscow, Boston, Mexico City...

This book contextualizes the field of English for Academic Purposes (EAP), with a particular focus on the professional and academic identity and role of the EAP practitioner. The authors examine previously neglected areas such as the socio-economic, academic and employment contexts within which EAP practitioners function. In doing so, they develop a better understanding of the roles, expectations and constraints that arise from these contexts, which in turn shape professional practice and the identity of the practitioner. As EAP is emerging as an academic discipline with a growing body of published research, this book will appeal to trainee and established practitioners, along with researchers and students of linguistics and education.

After publishing "A Grammar of the Bedouin Dialects of the Northern Sinai Littoral: Bridging the Linguistic Gap between the Eastern and Western Arab World" (Brill:2000), Rudolf de Jong completes his description of the Bedouin dialects of the Sinai Desert of Egypt by adding the present volume. To facilitate direct comparison of all Sinai dialects, the dialect descriptions in both volumes run parallel and are thus structured in the same manner. Quoting from his own extensive material and using a total of 95 criteria for comparison, De Jong applies the method of 'multi-dimensional scaling' and his own 'step-method' to arrive at a subdivision into eight (of which seven are 'Bedouin') typological groups in Sinai. An appendix with 68 maps and dialectrometrical plots completes the picture.

This book reports the results of an ethnographic study, focusing primarily on the experiences of four teachers of the Chinese language in Australian secondary schools. The author creates an audience for their voices as they reflect on their own understandings of culture, language teaching, and culture in language teaching through semi-structured interviews, and compares these reflections with written stimulus dialogues designed to elicit 'culture-in-language' reflections, as well as curriculum and policy documents produced by the Australian government. The book's findings indicate that teachers of the Chinese language are diverse in their views on culture, language teaching, and the ways in which culture can or should inform language teaching, and the author argues that language teacher intercultural competence cannot be assessed through a synthesis of the current English-only research literature. This book will be of interest to teachers and teacher trainers of Chinese as a foreign language, as well as students and scholars of applied linguistics and language education more broadly.

This volume offers a comprehensive examination of mitigation in speech in English and Spanish, exploring how it is defined and theorized and the various linguistic features employed to soften or downgrade the impact of a particular message across a range of settings. Building on the body of work done on mitigation in English, the book begins by discussing how it has been conceptualized in the literature, drawing on politeness theory among other perspectives from pragmatics, and highlighting increasing research on these topics in native and bilingual Spanish speakers and learners of Spanish. The volume explores examples from a variety of discursive contexts, including institutions, courts, and classrooms, to unpack mitigation as it occurs in spontaneous speech through different lenses, looking both at the actual units of discourse but also taking a broader view by examining differences across dialects as well. The book also looks at the ways in which conclusions drawn from this research might be applied pedagogically in language learning classrooms. This volume will serve as a jumping-off point for broader discussion in the field of mitigation and will be of particular interest to graduate students and researchers in pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis, in addition to learners and pre-service teachers of Spanish.

Non-Western Colonization, Orientalism, and the 'Comfort Women: The Collective Memory of Sexual Slavery under the Japanese Imperial Military examines the collective memory of sexual slavery under the Japanese Imperial Military in Japan over the past seventy-five years. Euphemistically known as the "comfort women," tens of thousands of young females were forced into sexual servitude for Japanese soldiers during the Asia-Pacific War. The majority of these women are believed to have been deceitfully or forcibly taken from Korea, a former Japanese colony. The ways in which sexual slavery has been remembered in Japan lies at the root of a long-standing diplomatic conflict between Japan and South Korea and has fueled a "memory war" among Japanese scholars and activists. The author argues that Korean "comfort women" have been exoticized in the collective memory similarly to "Oriental" women's presentations by Western Orientalists. This book is a comprehensive analysis of the memory of sexual slavery in Japan, examining various artifacts produced since the end of the Asia-Pacific War, including nonfiction books, novels, newspaper articles, popular and documentary films, and a commemorative museum. It provides novel insights into a decade old international and domestic controversy.