This book discusses evolution of the human brain, the origin of speech and language. It covers past and present perspectives on the contentious issue of the acquisition of the language capacity. Divided into two parts, this insightful work covers several characteristics of the human brain including the language-specific network, the size of the human brain, its lateralization of functions and interhemispheric integration, in particular the phonological loop. Aboitiz argues that it is the phonological loop that allowed us to increase our vocal memory capacity and to generate a shared semantic space that gave rise to modern language. The second part examines the neuroanatomy of the monkey brain, vocal learning birds like parrots, emergent evidence of vocal learning capacities in mammals, mirror neurons, and the ecological and social context in which speech evolved in our early ancestors. This book's interdisciplinary topic will appeal to scholars of psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, biology and history.

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.

This collection brings together work from scholars across sociolinguistics, World Englishes and linguistic landscapes to reflect on developments and future directions in Irish English, building on the ground-breaking contributions of Jeffrey Kallen to the discipline. Taking their cue from Kallen's extensive body of work on Irish English, the 20 contributors critically examine advances in the field grounded in frameworks from variationist sociolinguistics and semiotic and border studies in linguistic landscapes. Chapters cover pragmatic, cognitive sociolinguistic, sociophonetic, historical and World Englishes perspectives, as well as two chapters which explore the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland through the lens of perceptual dialectology and linguistic landscape research. Taken together, the collection showcases the significant role Kallen has played in the growth of Irish English studies as a field in its own right and the impact of this work on a new wave of researchers in the field today and beyond. This volume will be of particular interest to scholars of varieties of English, variationist sociolinguistics and linguistic landscape research.

Like trigger warnings and gender-neutral bathrooms, pronouns spark debate, prompting new policies about what pronouns to use. More than a by-product of the culture wars, gender-neutral pronouns are, however, nothing new. Pioneering linguist Dennis Baron puts them in historical context, noting that Shakespeare used singular they, women invoked the generic use of he to assert the right to vote (while those opposed to women's rights asserted that he did not include she) and people have been coining new gender pronouns for centuries. An essential work in understanding how 21st century culture has evolved, What's Your Pronoun? chronicles the story of the role pronouns have played-and continue to play-in establishing both our rights and our identities.

This book presents a novel experimental approach to investigating the mental representation of linguistic alternatives. Combining theoretical and psycholinguistic questions concerning the nature of alternative sets, it sheds new light on the theory of focus and the cognitive mechanisms underlying the processing of alternatives. In a series of language comprehension experiments, the author shows that intonational focus and focus particles such as 'only' shape the representation of alternatives in a listener's mind in a fundamental way. This book is relevant to researchers interested in semantics, pragmatics, language processing and memory.

In a time when female scholars were rare in Japanese universities, Michiko Ogura completed an excellent doctorate in Old English syntax, then achieved a position at Chiba University, from which she obtained a year-long research fellowship in 1983-84 at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. During her career, Ogura has published major works on medieval English syntax, especially verbs. Professor Ogura retired at Chiba, then obtained a major research post at Keio University (2011-2015) and then a post at Tokyo Woman's Christian University, retiring in 2020. She obtained a D.Litt. from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poland in 2008. The international contributors to this volume offer these studies of medieval syntax in her honor, in token of many years of friendship and scholarship.

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.

Over the past few decades, the book series Linguistische Arbeiten [Linguistic Studies], comprising over 500 volumes, has made a significant contribution to the development of linguistic theory both in Germany and internationally. The series will continue to deliver new impulses for research and maintain the central insight of linguistics that progress can only be made in acquiring new knowledge about human languages both synchronically and diachronically by closely combining empirical and theoretical analyses. To this end, we invite submission of high-quality linguistic studies from all the central areas of general linguistics and the linguistics of individual languages which address topical questions, discuss new data and advance the development of linguistic theory.

Reports on joint work by researchers from different theoretical and linguistic backgrounds offer new insights on the interaction of linguistic code and context in language production and comprehension. This volume takes a genuinely cross-linguistic approach integrating theoretically well-founded contrastive descriptions with thorough empirical investigations. Authors answer questions on the topic of how we 'encode' complex thoughts into linguistic signals and how we interpret such signals in appropriate ways. Chapters combine on- and off-line empirical methods varying from large-scale corpus analyses over acceptability judgements, sentence completion studies and reading time experiments. The authors shed new light on the central questions related to our everyday use of language, especially the problem of how we construe meaning in and through language in general as well as through the means provided by particular languages.

The Routledge Handbook of Variationist Approaches to Spanish provides an up-to-date overview of the latest research examining sociolinguistic approaches to analyzing variation in Spanish. Divided into three sections, the book includes the most current research conducted in Spanish variationist sociolinguistics. This comprehensive volume covers phonological, morphosyntactic, social, and lexical variation in Spanish. Each section is further divided into subsections focusing on specific areas of language variation, highlighting the most salient and current developments in each subfield of Hispanic sociolinguistics. As such, this Handbook delves further into the details of topics relating to variation and change in Spanish than previous publications, with a focus on the symbolic sociolinguistic value of specific phenomena in the field. Encouraging readers to think critically about language variation, this book will be of interest to advanced undergraduate and graduate students, as well as researchers seeking to explore lesser-known areas of Hispanic sociolinguistics. The Routledge Handbook of Variationist Approaches to Spanish will be a welcome addition to specialists and students in the fields of linguistics, Hispanic linguistics, sociolinguistics, and linguistic anthropology.

En La Historia de la lengua, la dialectologia y el concepto de cambio linguistico en el pensamiento de Eugenio Coseriu se estudia el pensamiento del linguista rumano desde el punto de vista historico. El analisis tiene como punto de partida la tesis basica de Sincronia, diacronia e historia, a saber, el hecho de que el cambio linguistico ha sido, a lo largo de la historia de la linguistica, un pseudoproblema y, en consecuencia, ha habido una serie de consecuencias en la reflexion en torno a esta ciencia. A partir de ahi se dan dos tipos de trabajos. Por un lado, los que tienen un caracter sobre todo teorico, que puede llegar a convertirse en aportaciones al conocimiento sobre la historia de la linguistica. Por otro lado, hay varios estudios sobre la repercusion de la dialectologia en el desarrollo de la historia de las lenguas, especificamente el espanol.

Grammar and Conceptualization documents some major developments in the theory of cognitive grammar during the last decade. By further articulating the framework and showing its application to numerous domains of linguistic structure, this book substantiates the claim that lexicon, morphology, and syntax form a gradation consisting of assemblies of symbolic structures (form-meaning pairings).

This collection explicates one of the core ideas underpinning Minimalist theory - explanation via simplification - and its role in shaping some of the latest developments within this framework, specifically the simplest Merge hypothesis and the reduction of syntactic phenomena to third factor considerations. Bringing together recent papers on the topic by Epstein, Kitahara, and Seely, with one by Epstein, Seely and Obata, and one by Kitahara, the book begins with an introduction which situates the papers in a cohesive overview of some of the latest research on Minimalism, as facilitated by current theoretical developments. The volume integrates a historical overview of evolutions in Merge, starting with Chomsky's (pre-Merge) Aspects model up to current theoretical models, including a primer of Chomsky's most recent theory of Merge based on the concept of Workspace. The Minimalist notions of "perfection" and "simplification" are also outlined, providing clearly explicated coverage of key technical concepts within the framework as applied to grammatical phenomena. Taken as a whole, the collection both introduces and advances Minimalist theory for students and scholars in linguistics and related sub-disciplines of psychology, philosophy, and cognitive science, as well as offering new directions for future research for researchers in these fields.

This book sheds new light on the nature of gerunds in English, utilizing data from very large electronic corpora in order to compare pairs of patterns viewed as constructions. It serves as a contribution to the study of complementation, an under-researched area of investigation which bridges observations at the intersection of lexico-grammar, syntax and semantics. As a result, the reader develops their understanding of the meaning and use of each pattern within the system of English predicate complementation as it has evolved in recent times. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of English linguistics, especially English grammar.

Patrice Larroque hypothesizes that early blues singers may have been influenced by the trochaic rhythm of English. English is stressed and timed, which means that there is a regular beat to the language, just like there is a beat in a blues song. This regular beat falls on important words in the sentence and unimportant ones do not get stressed. They are "squeezed" between the salient words to keep the rhythm. The apparent contradiction between the fundamentally trochaic rhythm of spoken English and the syncopated ternary rhythm of blues may be resolved as the stressed syllables of the trochee (a stressed-unstressed sequence) is naturally lengthened and assumes the role of one strongly and one weakly stressed syllable in a ternary rhythm. The book suggests investigating the rhythm of English and the rhythm of blues in order to show how the linguistic rhythm of a culture can be reflected in the rhythm of its music.

The study of text cohesion and coherence has been a topic of heated discussion in Linguistics since the 1990s. Western linguists have developed two major theoretical frameworks to describe the relationship between the two concepts: one posits that cohesive devices are important means to ensure cohesion; the other argues that coherence does not rely on cohesion. Yet neither has complete explanatory power over reality; nor can they solve real-life problems. This title proposes a creative, concrete, and highly operational theoretical model that unites cohesion and coherence using authentic English or Chinese examples. The authors clarify the concepts of coherence and expand the scope of the research by focusing on a variety of internal and external factors, such as psycho-cognitive and socio-cultural factors. Moreover, the authors propose that the new theoretical paradigm can be applied to a range of other disciplines, including translation and foreign language teaching. This title has been one of the most cited works on cohesion and coherence in China. Students and scholars of discourse analysis, linguistics, and language education will find this an invaluable reference.

This book reflects on key questions of enduring interest on the nature of syntax, bringing together Grant Goodall's previous publications and new work exploring how syntactic representations are structured and the affordances of experimental techniques in studying them. The volume sheds light on central issues in the theory of syntax while also elucidating the methods of data collection which inform them. Featuring Goodall's previous studies of linguistic phenomena in English, Spanish, and Chinese, and complemented by a new introduction and material specific to this volume, the book is divided into four sections around fundamental strands of syntactic theory. The four parts explore the dimensionality of syntactic representations; the relationship between syntactic structure and predicate-argument structure; interactions between subjects and wh-phrases in questions; and more detailed investigations of wh-dependencies but from a more overtly experimental perspective. Taken together, the volume reinforces the connections between these different aspects of syntax by highlighting their respective roles in defining what syntactic objects look like and how the grammar operates on them. This book will be a valuable resource for scholars in linguistics, particularly those with an interest in syntax, psycholinguistics, and Romance linguistics.

Master-Servant Childhood offers a new understanding of childhood in the Middle Ages as a form of master-servant relation embedded in an ancient sense of time as a correspondence between earthly change and eternal order. It challenges the misnomer that children were 'little adults' in the Middle Ages and corrects the prevalent misconceptions that childhood was unimportant, unrecognized or disregarded. The book argues for the value of studying childhood as a structure of thought and feeling and as an important avenue for exploring large scale historical changes in our sense of what it is to be and become human.

"Greenberg's survey of the earlier history of typology is without rivals, a must read for every linguist who is curious about the intellectual roots of current typology. This wouldn't be a work by Greenberg if it didn't go far beyond simple historiography, providing a highly original and readable framework for understanding the earlier efforts." Prof. Dr. Martin Haspelmath, Max-Planck-Institut fur Evolutionare Anthropologie

Language is of central importance in children's development and vital for their success at school and in the world beyond. Designed for the many professionals involved in encouraging language development, Early Language Development, originally published in 1990, will enable them to get to grips with the practical issues of helping children with language difficulties. John Harris provides an invaluable summary of recent research on language development and how it relates to the practical concerns of language assessment and language teaching. Readers are given a clear account of the ways in which research has expanded our understanding of just what language is and how this has led to different approaches to language assessment. Various theories of language development are summarised and discussed in terms of their implications for language teaching. Dr Harris also describes different ways of encouraging language development and explains how teachers and therapists can overcome the special problems faced by children with particular difficulties, such as visual impairment, hearing impairment, general learning difficulties, and environmental deprivation. With its emphasis on the relevance of research-based knowledge to practical concerns, the book provides a useful bridge between the world of research and practice. It will be of particular interest to teachers of young children, speech therapists, and child psychologists, as well as to students taking courses on child development, and to parents of young children.

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.

The study offers an analysis of three grammatical constructions specifically employed in direct performance of directive speech acts in Polish. Constructions of this type have not yet been widely analyzed, as research pertaining to the relation between the grammatical structure of an utterance and its pragmatic effects has focused mainly on indirect speech acts. The study combines a discussion of a wide range of corpus examples with a detailed analysis of hand-picked examples situated in specific contexts. The aim is to show how the grammatical make-up of a construction functions with contextual factors to bring about a range of pragmatic effects pertaining to the speakers' interaction and their interpersonal relation. The framework of the study is the theory of cognitive grammar.

This book asserts that language is a signaling system rather than a code, based in part on such research as the finding that 5-year-old English and Dutch children use pronouns correctly in their own utterances, but often fail to interpret these forms correctly when used by someone else.

Emphasizing the unique and sometimes competing demands of listener and speaker, the author examines resulting asymmetries between production and comprehension. The text offers examples of the interpretation of word order and pronouns by listeners, and word order freezing and referential choice by speakers. It is explored why the usual symmetry breaks down in children but also sometimes in adults.

Gathering contemporary insights from theoretical linguistic research, psycholinguistic studies and computational modeling, "Asymmetries between Language Production and Comprehension "presents a unified explanation of this phenomenon.

""Through a lucid, comprehensive review of acquisition studies on reference-related phenomena, Petra Hendriks builds a striking case for the pervasiveness of asymmetries in comprehension/production. In her view, listeners systematically misunderstand what they hear, and speakers systematically fail to prevent such misunderstandings. She argues that linguistic theory should take stock of current psycholinguistic and developmental evidence on optionality and ambiguity, and recognize language as a signaling system. The arguments are compelling yet controversial: grammar does not specify a one-to-one correspondence between form and meaning; and the demands of the mapping task differ for listeners and speakers. Her proposal is formalized within optimality theory, but researchers working outside this framework will still find it of great interest. In the language-as-code vs. language-as-signal debate, Hendriks puts the ball firmly in the other court." "Ana Perez-Leroux, University of Toronto, Canada

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