What role does language play in the formation and perpetuation of our ideas about nationality and other social categories? And what role does it play in the formation and perpetuation of nations themselves, and of other human groups? Language and Nationality considers these questions and examines the consequences of the notion that a language and a nationality are intrinsically connected. Pietro Bortone illustrates how our use of language reveals more about us than we think, is constantly judged, and marks group insiders and group outsiders. Casting doubt on several assumptions common among academics and non-academics alike, he highlights how languages significantly differ among themselves in structure, vocabulary, and social use, in ways that are often untranslatable and can imply a particular culture. Nevertheless, he argues, this does not warrant the way language has been used for promoting a national outlook and for teaching us to identify with a nation. Above all, the common belief that languages indicate nationalities reflects our intellectual and political history, and has had a tremendous social cost. Bortone elucidates how the development of standardized national languages - while having merits - has fostered an unrealistic image of nations and has created new social inequalities. He also shows how it has obscured the history of many languages, artificially altered their fundamental features, and distorted the public understanding of what a language is.

Spelling and Writing Words: Theoretical and Methodological Advances provides a set of contributions about how individuals write words. Understanding word production is of major importance as it allows understanding how words -the basic elements of written language- are stored in the writers' brain and how do writers select the spelling of a word. < The theoretical chapters address hot topics in the field such as the role of phonology in writing, bilingualism, language disorders, orthographic acquisition, and the influence of handwriting on reading. The methodological chapters address individual differences, how to measure handwriting performance in different handwriting styles, and neuroscientific approaches. The concluding chapters explore the future of written word production research.

Professor Gyoergy Kara, an outstanding member of academia, celebrated his 80th birthday recently. His students and colleagues commemorate this occasion with papers on a wide range of topics in Altaic Studies, with a focus on the literacy, culture and languages of the steppe civilizations.

Thanks to the digital revolution, even a traditional discipline like philology has been enjoying a renaissance within academia and beyond. Decades of work have been producing groundbreaking results, raising new research questions and creating innovative educational resources. This book describes the rapidly developing state of the art of digital philology with a focus on Ancient Greek and Latin, the classical languages of Western culture. Contributions cover a wide range of topics about the accessibility and analysis of Greek and Latin sources. The discussion is organized in five sections concerning open data of Greek and Latin texts; catalogs and citations of authors and works; data entry, collection and analysis for classical philology; critical editions and annotations of sources; and finally linguistic annotations and lexical databases. As a whole, the volume provides a comprehensive outline of an emergent research field for a new generation of scholars and students, explaining what is reachable and analyzable that was not before in terms of technology and accessibility.

The volume explores the body part 'eye' as a source domain in conceptualization and a vehicle of embodied cognition. It includes in-depth case studies of languages situated in different cultural contexts in Europe, Asia, Africa, America, and Oceania. It also provides insights into cross-linguistic comparison of conceptualization patterns and semantic extension of the term 'eye' on various target domains. The contributions in the volume present a range of cultural models associated with the visual organ which take into account socio-cultural factors and language usage practices. The book offers new material and novel analyses within the subject of polysemy of body part terms. It also adds to studies on metaphor, metonymy and cultural conceptualizations within a cognitive linguistic paradigm.

The stories of the Cherokee people presented here capture in written form tales of history, myth, and legend for readers, speakers, and scholars of the Cherokee language. Assembled by noted authorities on Cherokee, this volume marks an unparalleled contribution to the linguistic analysis, understanding, and preservation of Cherokee language and culture. Cherokee Narratives spans the spectrum of genres, including humor, religion, origin myths, trickster tales, historical accounts, and stories about the Eastern Cherokee language. These stories capture the voices of tribal elders and form a living record of the Cherokee Nation and Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians' oral tradition. Each narrative appears in four different formats: the first is interlinear, with each line shown in the Cherokee syllabary, a corresponding roman orthography, and a free English translation; the second format consists of a morpheme-by-morpheme analysis of each word; and the third and fourth formats present the entire narrative in the Cherokee syllabary and in a free English translation. The narratives and their linguistic analysis are a rich source of information for those who wish to deepen their knowledge of the Cherokee syllabary, as well as for students of Cherokee history and culture. By enabling readers at all skill levels to use and reconstruct the Cherokee language, this collection of tales will sustain the life and promote the survival of Cherokee for generations to come.

This volume presents a comprehensive study of Arabic morpho-phonology with its basics and intricacies, by making available a wide range of material from the 8th century A.D. until our days and exploring the main topics that arise. It uses as its point of departure an unused source: the end of the 13th century Marah al-arwah by Ah mad b. 'ali Mas'ud, which is critically edited and provided with an introduction, an English translation and an extensive commentary. It offers an analysis of many grammatical theories, paradigms, qur'anical citations, verses of poetry, dialectal variants and Semitic words and concludes with various indices that make the enormous body of information easily accessible.

Meaning change in grammaticalization has been variously described in terms of decreasing semantic weight and increasing generality, abstraction, (inter)subjectivity or discourse orientation. The author shows that all these trends are subsumed by the notion of scope increase along a precise hierarchy of semantic and pragmatic layers of grammatical organization such as endorsed by Functional Discourse Grammar. The scope-increase hypothesis is immune from the exceptions and veritable counterexamples to all the aforementioned generalizations and has the decisive advantage of being more objectively measurable, given its direct bearing on actual linguistic structure. The extremely rare exceptions to this generalization are also addressed and found to always result from a type of change independent from grammaticalization - the merger of two separate speech acts.

This volume descibes, in up-to-date terminology and authoritative interpretation, the field of neurolinguistics, the science concerned with the neural mechanisms underlying the comprehension, production and abstract knowledge of spoken, signed or written language. An edited anthology of 165 articles from the award-winning Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics 2nd edition, Encyclopedia of Neuroscience 4th Edition and Encyclopedia of the Neorological Sciences and Neurological Disorders, it provides the most comprehensive one-volume reference solution for scientists working with language and the brain ever published.

This ambitious study of all proper names in the Chanson de Roland is based for the first time on a systematic survey of the whole geographical and historical literature from antiquity to after 1100 for the Geographica, and on working through (almost) the entire documentary tradition of France and its neighbouring regions from 778 to the early 12th century for the personal names. The overall result is clear: the surviving song is more tightly and profoundly structured, even in smaller scenes, than generally assumed, it is also richer in depicting reality, and it has a very long prehistory, which can be traced in outline, albeit with decreasing certainty, (almost) back to the Frankish defeat of 778. Here are some individual results: for the first time, a detailed (and ultimately simple!) explanation not only of the 'pagan' catalogue of peoples, but also of the overarching structure of Baligant's empire, the organisation of North Africa, the corpus of the Twelve Anti-Pairs as well as the 'pagan' gods are given, and individual names such as Bramimunde and Jurfaret, toponyms such as Marbrise and Marbrose are explained. From Roland's Spanish conquests (v. 196-200), the course of the elapsed set anz toz pleins is reconstructed. Even the names of the weapons prove to be a small structured group, in that they are very discreetly adapted to their respective 'pagan' or Christian owner. On the Christian side, the small list of relics in Roland's sword is also carefully devised, not least in what is left out: a relic of the Lord; this is reserved for Charlemagne's Joiuse. The author explains for example, why from the archangel triad only Michael and Gabriel descend to the dying Roland, whereas 'the' angel Cherubin descends in Rafael's place. Munjoie requires extensive discussion, because here a (hitherto insufficiently recorded) toponym has been secondarily charged by the poet with traditional theological associations. The term Ter(e) major is attested for the first time in reality, namely in the late 11th century in Norman usage. For the core of France, the fourth cornerstone - along with Besancon, Wissant and Mont-Saint-Michel - is Xanten, and its centre is Aachen. The poet's artful equilibration of Charles's ten eschieles and their leaders is traced. The "Capetian barrier" emerges as a basic fact of epic geography. Approximatively, the last quarter of the study is devoted to the prehistory of the song, going backwards in time: still quite clearly visible is an Angevin Song of Roland from around 1050, in which Marsilie, Olivier, Roland, Ganelon, Turpin and Naimes already have roles similar to those in the preserved Song. Behind it, between about 970 and shortly after 1000, is the Girart de Vienne from the Middle Rhone, already recognised by Aebischer, with the newly invented Olivier contra Roland. Finally, in faint outlines, an oldest attainable, also Middle Rhone adaptation of the Roland material from shortly after 870 emerges. For the Chanson de Roland, Gaston Paris and Joseph Bedier were thus each right on the main point that was close to their hearts: the surviving song has both the thoroughly sophisticated structure of great art that Bedier recognised in it, and the imposingly long prehistory that Paris conjectured.