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.

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.

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 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.

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 Politics of Speech in Later Twentieth-Century Poetry: Local Tongues in Heaney, Brooks, Harrison, and Clifton argues that local speech became a central facet of English-language poetry in the second half of the twentieth century. It is based on a key observation about four major poets from both sides of the Atlantic: Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tony Harrison, and Lucille Clifton all respond to societal crises by arranging, reproducing, and reconceiving their particular versions of local speech in poetic form. The book's overarching claim is that "local tongues" in poetry have the capacity to bridge aesthetic and sociopolitical realms because nonstandard local speech declares its distinction from the status quo and binds people who have been subordinated by hierarchical social conditions, while harnessing those versions of speech into poetic structures can actively counter the very hierarchies that would degrade those languages. The diverse local tongues of these four poets marshaled into the forms of poetry situate them at once in literary tradition, in local contexts, and in prevailing social constructs.

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.

The disappearance of the French simple past has been hotly debated since the early 20th century. This volume offers an overview of its fortunes since French emerged as a language, provides a description of its distinctive features, and discusses the potential impact of its supposed demise on the whole French verb system. These assumptions are tested against a large corpus of contemporary texts. The study concludes that, despite the erosion of its meaning and its increasingly infrequent use, the simple past tense is still used by native speakers in various contexts, and no single substitute has yet emerged. Nevertheless, the simple past may be evolving into a stylistic marker, making it fertile ground for future cross-linguistic studies.

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.

Researchers have looked into the role of individual differences in second language learning and found that differences between learners in areas such as language aptitude, language learning motivation and exposure to the language influence second language learning. Most of this research concerned adults. Far fewer studies have addressed the role of individual differences in second language learning of young learners. As second language learning programmes tend to start earlier than before and children are nowadays frequently exposed to a foreign language in social settings such as online games and social media, studying the role of individual differences in young learners can contribute both to SLA-theories and to evidence-based L2 education. This book discusses recent findings concerning the role of individual differences in language learning in young learners. The chapters in the book concern different topics linked to internal individual differences such as language aptitude, motivation, attitude and external individual differences such as exposure and type of instruction, the relative contribution of internal and external factors to language learning, and the interplay between the two types of individual differences.