Full analysis of ancient and medieval expressions of Celtic cursing, using evidence ranging from magical charms to curse tablets. The first comprehensive study of early Celtic cursing, this work analyses both medieval and ancient expressions of Celtic imprecation: from the binding tablets of ancient Britain and Gaul to the saintly maledictions of the early medieval period, and other traces of Celtic stipulation and binding only speculated on in earlier scholarship. It provides the first full overview and analyses of the ancient Celtic use of binding curses (as attested in Old Celticand Latin inscriptions) and examines their mooted influence in later medieval expressions. Ancient finds (among them long Gaulish curse texts, Celtic Latin Curse tablets found from the Alpine regions to Britain, and fragments of Old Brittonic tablets excavated from Roman Bath) are subjected to rigorous new interpretations, and medieval reflections of the earlier tradition are also considered. BERNARD MEES gained his PhD from the University of Melbourne.

The intuition that translations are somehow different from texts that are not translations has been around for many years, but most of the common linguistic frameworks are not comprehensive enough to account for the wealth and complexity of linguistic phenomena that make a translation a special kind of text. The present book provides a novel methodology for investigating the specific linguistic properties of translations. As this methodology is both corpus-based and driven by a functional theory of language, it is powerful enough to account for the multi-dimensional nature of cross-linguistic variation in translations and cross-lingually comparable texts.

A WORKBOOK to Help You Learn the Essentials of Biblical Greek So You Can Study the New Testament More Deeply The Greek for the Rest of Us Workbook is a companion to Greek for the Rest of Us, Third Edition (sold separately) by William D. Mounce. This workbook provides exercises to help readers practice and review, so they learn the essentials of biblical Greek more effectively and can study the New Testament more deeply. Greek for the Rest of Us, Third Edition is crash-course on "Greek for the rest of us" that acquaints the reader with the essentials of the language so they can study the New Testament more deeply. Readers will gain a sound knowledge of the fundamentals of Greek and learn how to use tools that will add muscle to their Bible studies. Readers using the Greek for the Rest of Us Workbook in conjunction with Greek for the Rest of Us, Third Edition will learn to: Read and pronounce Greek words Learn the fundamentals of the Greek noun and verb system Conduct effective Greek word studies Learn the basics of Greek exegesis for biblical interpretation Understand why translations are different Read better commentaries Be comfortable using reverse and traditional interlinears Understand the information displayed by biblical software The Greek for the Rest Us Workbook will enhance your learning experience with exercises to help you practice and reinforce the concepts you are learning in Greek for the Rest of Us, Third Edition.

The historical relationship between the Catalan and Occitan languages had a definitive impact on the linguistic identity of the powerful Crown of Aragon and the emergent Spanish Empire. Drawing upon a wealth of historical documents, linguistic treatises and literary texts, this book offers fresh insights into the political and cultural forces that shaped national identities in the Iberian Peninsula and, consequently, neighboring areas of the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. The innovative textual approach taken in these pages exposes the multifaceted ways in which the boundaries between the region's most prestigious languages were contested, and demonstrates how linguistic identities were linked to ongoing struggles for political power. As the analysis reveals, the ideological construction of Occitan would play a crucial role in the construction of a unified Catalan, and Catalan would, in turn, give rise to a fervent debate around 'Spanish' language that has endured through the present day. This book will appeal to students and scholars of historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, Hispanic linguistics, Catalan language and linguistics, anthropological linguistics, Early Modern literature and culture, and the history of the Mediterranean.

This book offers the first comprehensive description of the prosody of nine Romance languages that takes into account internal dialectal variation. Teams of experts examine the prosody of Catalan, French, Friulian, Italian, Occitan, Portuguese, Romanian, Sardinian, and Spanish using the Autosegmental Metrical framework of intonational phonology and the Tones and Breaks Indices (ToBI) transcription system. The chapters all share a common methodology, based on a common Discourse Completion Task questionnaire, and provide extensive empirical data. The authors then analyse how intonation patterns work together with other grammatical means such as syntactic constructions and discourse particles in the linguistic marking of a varied set of sentence types and pragmatic meanings across Romance languages. The ToBI prosodic systems and annotations proposed for each language are based both on a phonological analysis of the target language as well as on the shared goal of using ToBI analyses that are comparable across Romance languages. This book will pave the way for more systematic typological comparisons of prosody across both Romance and non-Romance languages.

In this book, Ljiljana Progovac proposes a gradualist, adaptationist approach to the evolution of syntax, subject to natural selection. She provides a specific framework for its study, combining the fields of evolutionary biology, theoretical syntax, typology, neuroscience, and genetics. The author pursues an internal reconstruction of the stages of grammar based on the syntactic theory associated with Chomskyan Minimalism and arrives at specific, testable hypotheses, which are then corroborated by an abundance of theoretically analysed 'living fossils' drawn from a variety of languages. Her approach demonstrates that these fossil structures do not just coexist alongside more modern structures, but are in fact built into the very foundation of more complex structures, leading to quirks and complexities that are suggestive of a gradualist evolutionary scenario. By reconstructing a particular path along which syntax evolved, Evolutionary Syntax sheds light on the crucial properties of language design itself, as well as on the major parameters of crosslinguistic variation. As a result, this reconstruction can be meaningfully correlated with both the hominin timeline and the ever-growing body of genetic evidence that is available.

In this monograph Katsura Aoyama presents a series of psycholinguistic investigations on consonantal distinctions in Finnish and Japanese. The author deftly describes differences in adult production, perception, and child acquisition of these distinctions. This is an important work for those interested in recent developments in theoretical and psycholinguistics.

For the first time in English, this anthology offers a comprehensive selection of primary sources in the history of philosophy of language. Beginning with a detailed introduction contextualizing the subject, the editors draw out recurring themes, including the origin of language, the role of nature and convention in fixing form and meaning, language acquisition, ideal languages, varieties of meanings, language as a tool, and the nexus of language and thought, linking them to representative texts. The handbook moves on to offer seminal contributions from philosophers ranging from the pre-Socratics up to John Stuart Mill, preceding each major historical section with its own introductory assessment. With all of the most relevant primary texts on the philosophy of language included, covering well over two millennia, this judicious, and generous, selection of source material will be an indispensable research tool for historians of philosophy, as well as for philosophers of language, in the twenty-first century. A vital tool for researchers and contemporary philosophers, it will be a touchstone for much further research, with coverage of a long and varied tradition that will benefit today's scholars and enhance their awareness of earlier contributions to the field.

In this book, Aidan Doyle traces the history of the Irish language from the time of the Norman invasion at the end of the 12th century to independence in 1922, combining political, cultural, and linguistic history. The book is divided into seven main chapters that focus on a specific period in the history of the language; they each begin with a discussion of the external history and position of the Irish language in the period, before moving on to investigate the important internal changes that took place at that time. A History of the Irish Language makes available for the first time material that has previously been inaccessible to students and scholars who cannot read Irish, and will be a valuable resource not only for undergraduate students of the language, but for all those interested in Irish history and culture.

This book examines several thousand examples of tense-aspect stem participles in the Rigveda, and the passages in which they appear, in terms of both their syntax and semantics. The Rigveda is an ancient collection of sacred Indian hymns, written in Vedic Sanskrit, and is one of the oldest extant texts in any Indo-European language. It is also a poetic text in which deliberate obscurity is the governing aesthetic and in which the rules of language are pushed to their limits in order to produce the ideal poetic expression. Many Vedic sentences are of controversial, disputed meaning, and Vedic scholarship is thus fraught with controversy. John J. Lowe applies formal linguistic analysis to the data and produces a comprehensive formal model of how participles are used. The author uses his findings to recategorize the data, by defining certain stems and stem-types as outside the synchronic category of participle on the basis of their syntactic and semantic properties. He suggests alternative sources for these forms and considers the linguistic processes that transformed old participles into non-participial entities. In his conclusion he reassesses the category of participles within the verbal and nominal systems, looks at their prehistory in Proto-Indo-European, and describes their universal, typological characteristics. Among his conclusions are that tense-aspect-stem participles have the technical properties of adjectival verbs, not verbal adjectives, and that such participles are not fully dependent on corresponding finite verbal forms. That is, a perfect participle, for example, need not share all the semantic and functional features of the finite perfect forms built to the same stem. These and many other conclusions drawn either directly challenge or radically revise received opinion and recent work.

This book considers how expressions involving number are used by speakers and understood by hearers. A speaker's choice of expression can be a complex problem even in relatively simple-looking domains. In the case of numerical expressions, there are often many choices that would be semantically acceptable: for instance, if 'more than 200' is true, then so is 'more than 199', 'more than 150', and 'more than 100', among others. A speaker does not choose between these options arbitrarily but also does not consistently follow any simple rule. The hearer is interested not just in what has been said but also in any further inferences that can be drawn. Chris Cummins offers a set of criteria that individually influence the speaker's choice of expression. The process of choosing what to say is then treated as a problem of multiple constraint satisfaction. This approach enables multiple different considerations, drawn from principles of semantics, philosophy, psycholinguistics and the psychology of number, simultaneously to be integrated within a single coherent account. This constraint-based model offers novel predictions about usage and interpretation that are borne out experimentally and in corpus research. It also explains problematic data in numerical quantification that have previously been handled by more stipulative means, and offers a potential line of attack for addressing the problem of the speaker's choice in more general linguistic environments.

This volume offers a diachronic sociolinguistic perspective on one of the most complex and fascinating variable speech phenomena in contemporary French. Liaison affects a number of word-final consonants which are realized before a vowel but not pre-pausally or before a consonant. Liaisons have traditionally been classified as obligatoire (obligatory), interdite (forbidden) and facultative (optional), the latter category subject to a highly complex prescriptive norm. This volume traces the evolution of this norm in prescriptive works published since the 16th Century, and sets it against actual practice as evidenced from linguists' descriptions and recorded corpora. The author argues that optional (or variable) liaison in French offers a rich and well-documented example of language change driven by ideology in Kroch's (1978) terms, in which an elite seeks to maintain a complex conservative norm in the face of generally simplifying changes led by lower socio-economic groups, who tend in this case to restrict liaison to a small set of traditionally obligatory environments.

Possession and Ownership brings together linguists and anthropologists in a series of cross-linguistic explorations of expressions used to denote possession and ownership, concepts central to most if not all the varied cultures and ideologies of humankind. Possessive noun phrases can be broadly divided into three categories - ownership of property, whole-part relations (such as body and plant parts), and blood and affinal kinship relations. As Professor Aikhenvald shows in her extensive opening essay, the same possessive noun or pronoun phrase is used in English and in many other Indo-European languages to express possession of all three kinds - as in 'Ann and her husband Henry live in the castle Henry's father built with his own hands' - but that this is by no means the case in all languages. In some, for example, the grammar expresses the inalienability of consanguineal kinship and sometimes also of treasured or sacred objects. Furthermore the degree to which possession and ownership are conceived as the same (when possession is 100% of the law) differs from one society to another, and this may be reflected in their linguistic expression. Like others in the series this pioneering book will be welcomed equally by linguists and anthropologists.

Early Greek Relative Clauses contributes to an old debate currently enjoying a revival: should we expect languages spoken a few thousand years ago, such as Proto-Indo-European, to be less well-equipped than modern languages when it comes to subordinate clauses? Early Greek relative clauses provide a test case for this problem. Early Greek uses several kinds of relative clause, but all these are usually thought to come from one, or at most two, prehistoric types. In a new look at the evidence, this book finds that a rich variety of relative clause types has been in place for a considerable time. The reconstruction of prehistoric linguistic stages requires detailed work on the individual languages descending from them. A substantial part of the book is therefore devoted to a new look at the relative clause systems found in a wide variety of early Greek texts. It emerges that the same basic system is in use across all these texts. Different kinds of relative clause predominate in different kinds of text, however, because relative clause syntax and semantics interact with the needs of different kinds of text. Considering material as diverse as the Homeric poems, laws inscribed in stone on the island of Crete, and the philosophical prose of Heraclitus, the discussion remains clear and straightforward as Probert considers the uses and histories of different relative clause types.

Thomas G. Bever's now iconic sentence, The horse raced past the barn fell, first appeared in his 1970 paper "The Cognitive Basis of Linguistic Structures". This 'garden path sentence', so-called because of the way it leads the reader or listener down the wrong parsing path, helped spawn the entire subfield of sentence processing. It has become the most often quoted element of a paper which spanned a wealth of research into the relationship between the grammatical system and language processing. Language Down the garden Path traces the lines of research that grew out of Bever's classic paper. Leading scientists review over 40 years of debates on the factors at play in language comprehension, production, and acquisition (the role of prediction, grammar, working memory, prosody, abstractness, syntax, and semantics mapping); the current status of universals and narrow syntax; and virtually every topic relevant in psycholinguistics since 1970. Written in an accessible and engaging style, the book will appeal to all those interested in understanding the questions that shaped, and are still shaping, this field and the ways in which linguists, cognitive scientists, psychologists, and neuroscientists are seeking to answer them.

This dictionary provides a full and authoritative guide to the meanings of the terms, concepts, and theories employed in pragmatics, the study of language in use.
Pragmatics is a central subject in linguistics and philosophy and an increasingly important topic in fields such as cognitive science, informatics, artificial intelligence, neuroscience, and pathology. Its rapid development has produced new theories, methods, approaches, and schools of thought. These in turn have resulted in a vast vocabulary of new terms and in modified meanings for existing terms. Such terms help advance research and facilitate discussion, but they can also cause confusion and act as barriers to understanding and communication. Yan Huang defines and explains them all, from the most traditional to the most recent. Covering every branch of research and all theoretical approaches and with the needs of students and researchers firmly in mind he writes each entry in the simplest possible terms for the subject in question, gives references to relevant seminal and recent work, provides numerous cross-references to related entries, and shows how each term and concept is applied and used in different contexts.
Written by one of the leading experts in the field, Professor Huang's dictionary, the first of its kind ever published, will be a much valued resource for students and researchers in every aspect of the field.

'Linguistic' theories in the eighteenth-century are also theories of literature and art, and it is probably better, therefore, to think of them as 'aesthetic' theories. As such, they are answers to the age-old question 'what is beauty?' Edward Nye charts the way in which a wide range of language theorists answer this question, and how their ideas complement contemporary literary debates about poetry, prose, preciosity, style, and artistic representation in general.

This volume examines the conflicting factors that shape the content and form of grammatical rules in language usage. Speakers and addressees need to contend with these rules when expressing themselves and when trying to comprehend messages. For example, there are on-going competitions between the speaker's interests and the addressee's needs, or between constraints imposed by grammar and those imposed by online processing. These competitions influence a wide variety of systems, including case marking, agreement and word order, politeness forms, lexical choices, and the position of relative clauses. Chapters in the book analyse grammar and usage in adult language as well as first and second language acquisition, and the motivations that drive historical change. Several of the chapters seek explanations for the competitions involved, based on earlier accounts including the Competition Model, Natural Morphology, the functional-typological tradition, and Optimality Theory. The book will be of interest to linguists from a wide variety of backgrounds, particularly those interested in psycholinguistics, historical linguistics, philosophy of language, and language acquisition, from advanced undergraduate level upwards.

This book, the second volume in A Linguistic History of English, describes the development of Old English from Proto-Germanic. Like Volume I, it is an internal history of the structure of English that combines traditional historical linguistics, modern syntactic theory, the study of languages in contact, and the variationist approach to language change. The first part of the book considers the development of Northwest and West Germanic, and the northern dialects of the latter, with particular reference to phonological and morphological phenomena. Later chapters present a detailed account of changes in the Old English sound system, inflectional system, and syntax. The book aims to make the findings of traditional historical linguistics accessible to scholars and students in other subdisciplines, and also to adopt approaches from contemporary theoretical linguistics in such a way that they are accessible to a wide range of historical linguists.

Lexicography, together with grammatical studies and textual criticism, forms the basis of biblical exegesis. Recent decades have seen much progress in this field, yet increasing specialization also tends to have the paradoxical effect of turning exegesis into an independent discipline, while leaving lexicography to the experts. The present volume seeks to renew and intensify the exchange between the study of words and the study of texts. This is done in reference to both the Hebrew source text and the earliest Greek translation, the Septuagint. Questions addressed in the contributions to this volume are how linguistic meaning is effected, how it relates to words, and how words may be translated into another language, in Antiquity and today. Etymology, semantic fields, syntagmatic relations, word history, neologisms and other subthemes are discussed. The main current and prospective projects of biblical lexicology or lexicography are presented, thus giving an idea of the state of the art. Some of the papers also open up wider perspectives of interpretation.

What is it that makes language powerful? This book uses the psychoanalytic concepts of narcissism and libidinal investment to explain how rhetoric compels us and how it can effect change. Synthesizing the ideas of theorists as diverse as Aristotle and Althusser, Kohut and Derrida, Alcorn explores the relationships between language and subjectivity. The works of Joseph Conrad, James Baldwin, William Faulkner, Arthur Miller, D. H. Lawrence, Ben Jonson, George Orwell, and others are the basis of this thoughtful analysis of the rhetorical resources of literary language. Using Freudian, post-Freudian, and Lacanian theory, Alcorn Investigates the power by means of which literary texts are able to fashion new and distinctly rhetorical experiences for readers. He shows how the production of literary texts begins and ends with narcissistic self-love, and also shows how the reader's interest in these texts is directed by libidinal investment. Psychoanalysts, psychologists, and lovers of literature will enjoy Alcorn's diverse and far-reaching insights into classic and contemporary writers and thinkers.

Place has always been central to studies of language, variation and change. Since the eighteenth century, dialectologists have been mapping language features according to boundaries - both physical and institutional. In the twentieth century, variationist sociolinguists developed techniques to correlate language use with speakers' orientations to place. More recently, perceptual dialectologists are examining the cognitive and ideological processes involved in language-place correlations and working on ways to understand how speakers mentally process space. Bringing together research from across the field of language variation, this volume explores the extent of twenty-first century approaches to place. It features work from both established and influential scholars, and up and coming researchers, and brings language variation research up to date. The volume focuses on four key areas of research: processes of language variation and change across time and space; methods and datasets for regional analysis; perceptions of the local in language research; and ideological representations of place.

Origins of Language: A Slim Guide offers a concise and accessible overview of what is known about the evolution of the human capacity for language. Non-human animals communicate in simple ways: they may be able to form simple concepts, to feel some limited empathy for others, to cooperate to some extent, and to engage in mind-reading. Human language, however, is characterized by its ability to efficiently express a wide range of subtle and complex meanings. After the first simple beginnings, human language underwent an explosion of complexity, leading to the very complicated systems of grammar and pronunciation found in modern languages. Jim Hurford looks at the very varied aspects of this evolution, covering human prehistory; the relation between instinct and learning; biology and culture; trust, altruism, and cooperation; animal thought; human and non-human vocal anatomy; the meanings and forms of the first words; and the growth of complex systems of grammar and pronunciation. Written by an internationally recognized expert in the field, it draws on a number of disciplines besides linguistics, including philosophy, neuroscience, genetics, and animal behaviour, and will appeal to a wide range of readers interested in language origins and evolution.

This volume is the first comprehensive archaeological catalogue of all the extant inscriptions written in the un-deciphered syllabary of Late Bronze Age Cyprus (1500-1200 BC): the so-called Cypro-Minoan script. In conjunction with Cypro-Minoan Inscriptions Volume 1: Analysis, this volume focuses on the physical reality of the inscribed objects containing Cypro-Minoan and the archaeological contexts in which they were found. Offering a detailed, systematic, and rigorous examination of both the objects and their functions in the material record, it proposes a new way of examining the inscriptions. This comprehensive standpoint therefore considers not only the inscriptions themselves, but more importantly the contexts and functions of the inscribed objects, which are significant for the documentary evidence they bear and the part they play as physical entities manufactured, shaped, and used by past peoples for a defined purpose. Organized in a catalogue format, each object is analysed, illustrated, and accompanied by a detailed commentary on the context of recovery and typological characteristics with full bibliographical references. While a standalone reference work, it aims to showcase the inscribed objects discussed in Volume 1: Analysis, fully illustrating them in a series of photographs, including 50 colour plates, and drawings.