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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Historical & comparative linguistics
The relationship between the individual and the community is at the core of sociolinguistic theorizing. To date, most longitudinal research has been conducted on the basis of trend studies, such as replications of cross-sectional studies, or comparisons between present-day cross-sectional data and 'legacy' data. While the past few years have seen an increasing interest in panel research, much of this work has been published in a variety of formats and languages and is thus not easily accessible. This edited volume brings together the major researchers in the field of panel research, highlighting connections and convergences across and between chapters, methods and findings with the aim of initiating a dialogue about best practices and ways forward in sociolinguistic panel studies. By providing, for the first time, a platform for key research on panel data in one coherent edition, this volume aims to shape the agenda in this increasingly vibrant field of research.
Frankfurt/M., Berlin, Bern, Bruxelles, New York, Oxford, Wien.
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.
Drawing on cutting-edge ideas from the biological and cognitive sciences, this book presents both an innovative neuro-computational model of language comprehension and a state-of-the-art review of current topics in neurolinguistics. It explores a range of newly-emerging topics in the biological study of language, building them into a framework which views language as grounded in endogenous neural oscillatory behaviour. This allows the author to formulate a number of hypotheses concerning the relationship between neurobiology and linguistic computation. Murphy also provides an extensive overview of recent theoretical and experimental work on the neurobiological basis of language, from which the reader will emerge up-to-date on major themes and debates. This lively overview of contemporary issues in theoretical linguistics, combined with a clear theory of how language is processed, is essential reading for scholars and students across a range of disciplines.
The adaptation of Late Latin grammars from the schools of the Roman Empire for use in a foreign Christian society culminated in the British Isles in the 7th and 8th centuries in the development of two distinct types of grammar designed respectively for elementary and for more advanced students. These works, whether they take the form of elaborate commentaries on the classical grammarians, or of simple collections of paradigms, reflect the reading and intellectual preoccupations of their authors, the first teachers in the West to face the problem of large-scale formal foreign-language teaching. The influence of the Insular grammarians extended far beyond their own time: their works, taken to the Continent by Irish and Anglo-Saxon missionaries, shaped both the latinity and the pedagogical technique of their pupils the Carolingians, and their influencein foreign-language teaching has persisted until our own time.
* Uniquely offers systematic, all-inclusive, comprehensive, detailed coverage that brings together psycholinguistics and SLA in their full breadth, empirical and theoretical. Competing handbooks focus on SLA, psycholinguistics, or bilingualism, while discussing the other field in part - but do not unite these areas with a psycholinguistic perspective on themes and topics in SLA the way this volume does, nor do they have the depth and breadth of this volume. It also takes a forward-looking approach to new contexts and applications of psycholinguistics in SLA, and sets the stage for future research. * Represents formal, functional, applied, educational, and methodological perspectives on SLA. The methods chapters are uniquely related to the content chapters, so that readers can identify the suitability and applicability of a method to research areas in SLA. * A unique reference for advanced students and scholars/researchers from a wide array of subjects who are highly interested in psycholinguistics and language learning/acquisition, evident in the journals publishing work in this area and proliferation of conferences: second language acquisition, applied linguistics, psycholinguistics, bilingualism/multilingualism, neurolinguistics, cognitive science, psychology, education, and educational linguistics. * Provides guidance both to newcomers and more experienced researchers in the field who turn to psycholinguistic methods to address their research questions. This handbook fills a gap in the market and will appeal to a broad audience of researchers and (graduate) students in the expanding fields of bilingualism, multilingualism, and SLA.
Historical Research on Spoken Language: Corpus Perspectives uses historical sources to discuss continuity and change in spoken language. Based on two corpora compiled using data from sociological and anthropological studies of Victorian London and 1930s Bolton, the author shows how historical spoken corpora can illuminate the nature of spoken language as well as the attitudes, values and behaviour of the specific community represented in a corpus. This book: demonstrates how spoken language can be examined using material collected before the advent of sophisticated recording equipment and large-scale computerised corpora; shows how other written sources such as diaries, letters and existing historical corpora can be used to analyse informal language use as far back as the fifteenth century; provides insight into the longevity and resilience of many spoken language features which are often regarded as vernacular or non-standard; comes with a companion website which gives full access to the Bolton Worktown Corpus. Historical Research on Spoken Language is key reading for researchers and students working in relevant areas.
The volume comprises papers that were presented at the 14th European conference on "Formal Description of Slavic Languages 10.5" at Masaryk University in Brno, Czech Republic. The conference focuses on formal approaches to Slavic phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. The present contributions describe interesting data patterns found in Slavic languages and analyze them from the perspective of formal grammar, including generative syntax, Distributed Morphology, formal semantics and others.
This book advances research on grammatical change and shows the breadth and liveliness of the field. Leading international scholars report and reflect on the latest research into the nature and outcomes of all aspects of syntactic change including grammaticalization, variation, complementation, syntactic movement, determiner-phrase syntax, pronominal systems, case systems, negation, and alignment. The authors deploy a variety of generative frameworks, including minimalist and optimality theoretic, and bring these to bear on a wide range of languages: among the latter are typologically distinct examples from Germanic, Romance, Slavic, Greek, Korean and Japanese, Austronesian, Celtic, and Nahuatl. They draw on sociolinguistic evidence where appropriate. Taken as a whole, the volume provides a stimulating overview of key current issues in the investigation of the origins, nature, and outcome of syntactic change.
This volume reflects the results of a workshop on the investigation of specialized discourse in a diachronic perspective, held within the 15th European Symposium on Language for Special Purposes ('New Trends in Specialized Discourse', Bergamo 2005). The articles deal with developments from the late medieval period to the present day, and the book encompasses studies in which the long-established tradition of domain-specific English is highlighted. The fields of contributions range from scientific to legal to political and business discourse. Special attention is given to argumentation, in an attempt to assess the time-depth of typical rhetorical strategies. Some methodological innovations are introduced in corpus linguistics. Numerous contributions bring new materials to scholarly discussion, as recently released or in-progress 'second-generation' corpora are used as data. Recent changes in present-day legal and scientific writing are also discussed as they witness fast adaptation to new requirements, due to the advent and growing familiarity of new technologies, international law and changes in academia.
Agrammatic aphasia (agrammatism), resulting from brain damage to regions of the brain involved in language processing, affects grammatical aspects of language. Therefore, research examining language breakdown (and recovery) patterns in agrammatism is of great interest and importance to linguists, neurolinguists, neuropsychologists, neurologists, psycholinguists and speech and language pathologists from all over the world. Research in agrammatism, studied across languages and from different perspectives, provides information about the grammatical structures that are affected by brain damage, their nature, and how language (and the brain) recovers from brain damage. The chapters in this book focus on the symptoms that arise in agrammatic aphasia at the lexical, morphological and sentence level and address these impairments from neurolinguistic, neuropsychological and neurological perspectives. Special attention is given to methods for assessment and treatment of agrammatism and to the neurobiological changes that can result from the treatments. Perspectives on Agrammatism provides an up-to-date overview of research that has been done over the past two decades. With contributions from the most influential aphasiologists from Europe and the United States, it provides an indispensable reference for students and academics in the field of language disorders.
The chapters in this book elucidate the nature of semi-fixed formulaic sequences; how the meaning of formulaic expressions can change over time; how readers interpret formulaic expressions in first and second languages; how modern and postmodern authors use traditional genres and tales to challenging effect; and how formulaic patterns involving particular words can underlie the texture and meanings of entire novels. Together, the contributions to this collection provide a convincing reassessment of the potential creativity of the formulaic in a variety of linguistic and literary contexts. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of English Studies. Chapter 1 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 3.0 license. https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tandfbis/rt-files/docs/Open+Access+Chapters/9781138721579_oachapter1.pdf
This volume offers qualitative as well as corpus-based quantitative studies on three domains of grammatical variation in the British Isles. All studies draw heavily on the Freiburg English Dialect Corpus (FRED), a computerized corpus for predominantly British English dialects comprising some 2.5 million words. Besides an account of FRED and the advantages which a functional-typological framework offers for the study of dialect grammar, the volume includes the following three substantial studies. Tanja Herrmann's study is the first systematic cross-regional study of relativization strategies for Scotland, Northern Ireland, and four major dialect areas in England. In her research design Hermann has included a number of issues crucial in typological research on relative clauses, above all the Noun Phrase Accessibility Hierarchy. Lukas Pietsch investigates the so-called Northern Subject Rule, a special agreement phenomenon known from Northern England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. His study is primarily based on the Northern Ireland Transcribed Corpus of Speech, but also on the FRED and SED data (Survey of English Dialects) for the North of England. Susanne Wagner is concerned with the phenomenon of pronominal gender, focussing especially on the typologically rather unique semantic gender system in the dialects of Southwest England. This volume will be of interest to dialectologists, sociolinguists, typologists, historical linguists, grammarians, and anyone interested in the structure of spontaneous spoken English.
The Oceanic Languages form a closed subgroup within one of the world 's largest language families, Austronesian. There are between 1000 and 1500 Austronesian languages (estimates vary), with so much structural diversity that they are best handled in two volumes, one on the Oceanic and one on the non-Oceanic Austronesian languages. This division is clear and the grammar sketches in this volume provide a cross-section through the structural diversity of the Oceanic languages which is not available elsewhere. Much of the material is drawn from data collected by the authors and has not been previously published. The volume contains five background chapters: The Oceanic Languages, Sociolinguistic Background, Typological Overview, Proto-Oceanic and Internal Subgrouping. In addition, the volume presents forty-three grammar sketches, selected from the five hundred Oceanic languages spread across a region embracing eastern Indonesia, Melanesia, Polynesia, and Micronesia.
The German comparative philologist Friedrich Max Muller (1823-1900) was one of the most influential scholars in Victorian Britain. Muller travelled to Britain in 1846 in order to prepare a translation of the Rig Veda. This research visit would turn into a lifelong stay after Muller was appointed as Taylor Professor of Modern Languages at Oxford in 1854. Muller's activities in this position would exert a profound influence on British intellectual life during the second half of the nineteenth-century: his book-length essay on Comparative Mythology (1856) inspired evolutionist thinkers such as Herbert Spencer and Edward Burnett Tylor and made philology into one of the master sciences at mid-century; his debates with Charles Darwin and his followers on the origin of language constituted a significant component of religiously informed reactions to Darwin's ideas about human descent; his arguments concerning the interdependence of language and thought influenced fields such as psychology, neurology, paediatrics and education until the end of the nineteenth century; his theories concerning an 'Aryan' language that purportedly predated Sanskrit and ancient Greek led to controversial debates on the relations between language, religion and race in the Indian subcontinent and beyond; and his monumental 50-volume edition of the Sacred Books of the East helped to lay the foundations for the study of comparative religion. Muller's interlocutors and readers included people as various as Alexander von Humboldt, Darwin, George Eliot, Matthew Arnold, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ferdinand de Saussure, Ernst Cassirer, Mohandas K. Gandhi and Jarwaharlal Nehru. This volume offers the most comprehensive and interdisciplinary assessment of Muller's career to date. Arising from a conference held at the German Historical Institute in London in 2015, it brings together papers by an international group of experts in German studies, German and British history, linguistics, philosophy, English literary studies, and religious studies in order to examine the many facets of Muller's scholarship. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Publications of the English Goethe Society.
The 'correct' use of English has been the subject of vigorous debate in recent years. But what defines 'correctness' in our use of language? And how has this altered over time? In this authoritative survey of the history of the English language, the author examines how linguistic traditions have changed and developed over the centuries to produce the language that we are familiar with today.Taking present-day usage as its starting point, the book uses a topic-based approach to explore the historical development of vocabulary, grammar, syntax, sounds and spellings, thus providing both a firm sense of the structure of the language and an outline of its history.
Watkins demonstrates the continuity of poetic formulae in Indo-European languages from Old Hittite to medieval Irish. Using the comparative method, he shows how traditional poetic formulae of considerable complexity can be reconstructed as far back as the original common languages, thus revealing the antiquity and tenacity of the poetic tradition.
This book collates the most up to date evidence from behavioural, brain imagery and stroke-patient studies, to discuss the ways in which cognitive and neural processes are responsible for language processing. Divided into six sections, the edited volume presents arguments from evolutionist, developmental, behavioural and neurobiological perspectives, all of which point to a strong relationship between action and language. It provides a scientific basis for a new theoretical approach to language evolution, acquisition and use in humans, whilst at the same time assessing current debates on motor system's contribution to the emergence of language acquisition, perception and production. The chapters have been written by internationally acknowledged researchers from a variety of disciplines, and as such this book will be of great interest to academics, students and professionals in the areas of cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, neuroscience, psycholinguistics and philosophy.
Approaches to Conflict: Theoretical, Interpersonal, and Discursive Dynamics aims to investigate the role of communication and emotions in conflict contexts. In addition to the fundamental importance of communication in various aspects of conflict, this volume offers a prominent position to the inherent part played by the effects of a wide range of emotions. This multi-disciplinary project draws from communication studies and media, public relations, philosophy, psychology and neuroscience, linguistics, business studies, political science, literature, and cultural studies.
Originally published in 1978, The Process of Question Answering examines a phenomenon that relies on many realms of human cognition: language comprehension, memory retrieval, and language generation. Problems in computational question answering assume a new perspective when question answering is viewed as a problem in natural language processing. A theory of human question answering must necessarily entail a theory of human memory organization and theories of the cognitive processes that access and manipulate information in memory. This book describes question answering as a particular task in information processing. The theoretical models described here have been built on a formulation of general theories in natural language processing: theories about language that were developed without the specific problem of question answering in mind. By requiring programmers to be concerned with the precise form of information in memory, and the precise operations manipulating that information, they can uncover significant problems that would otherwise be overlooked. An early insight into artificial intelligence, today this reissue can be enjoyed in its historical context.
What are the points of contact between the study of language and the study of history? What are the possibilities for collaboration between linguists and historians, and what prevents it? This volume, the proceedings of an international conference held at the University of Bristol in April 2009, presents twenty-two articles by linguists and historians, exploring the relationship between the fields theoretically, conceptually and in practice. Contributions focus on a variety of European and American languages, in historical periods from the Middle Ages to the present day. Key themes at the intersection of these two disciplines are the standardization and classification of languages, the social and demographic history of medieval and early modern Europe, the study of language and history 'from below', and the function of language in modern politics. The value of interdisciplinary collaboration is demonstrated in a wide-ranging set of case studies, on topics including language contact in Northern and Central Europe, the relationship between peninsular and transatlantic Spanish, and new approaches to the recent histories of Nicaragua, Luxembourg and Bulgaria. The volume seeks out the interdependencies between the two fields and asks why exchanges between linguists and historians remain the exception rather than the rule.
In 1938 tyranny attained unprecedented power: the Nazis annexed Austria and the Sudetenland, the Soviet purge reached its peak and the persecution of the Jews escalated into the horror of Kristallnacht. Nabokov frequently engaged with the subject of totalitarianism, but in 1938, on the eve of the Second World War, he responded to the political situation with an intensity unmatched at any other time in his career, writing three stories, a play and a novel, each warning of the danger of leaving tyranny unopposed. Offering fresh insights into all of Nabokov's works of 1938, this book focuses on a major new reading of The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, revealing that Nabokov's seemingly non-political novel contains a hidden subtext of espionage and totalitarian tyranny. Drawing on the popular British authors he admired as a boy, Nabokov weaves a covert narrative reminiscent of a Sherlock Holmes story, in which Sebastian Knight, a latter-day Scarlet Pimpernel, uncovers a world of Wellsian scientific misadventure that foreshadows the Holocaust. The Real Life of Sebastian Knight emerges as an antitotalitarian masterpiece, in which the "absolute solution" is both a dire prediction of the future and Nabokov's artistic answer to the problem of the time.
Informed by multi-cultural, multidisciplinary perspectives, The Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature offers a new exploration of the earliest writing in Britain and Ireland, from the end of the Roman Empire to the mid-twelfth century. Beginning with an account of writing itself, as well as of scripts and manuscript art, subsequent chapters examine the earliest texts from England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales, and the tremendous breadth of Anglo-Latin literature. Chapters on English learning and literature in the ninth century and the later formation of English poetry and prose also convey the profound cultural confidence of the period. Providing a discussion of essential texts, including Beowulf and the writings of Bede, this History captures the sheer inventiveness and vitality of early medieval literary culture through topics as diverse as the literature of English law, liturgical and devotional writing, the workings of science and the history of women's writing.
Language can be seen as a therapeutic tool to the visually impaired. The author explores the psycho-linguistic therapy "Touching the World" which is rooted within two areas. The mental one pivots on emotional openness and balance, gained through the sandtray therapy, controlled breathing practice, the Brain Linkage Method, and the edu-kinaesthetic area. The linguistic layer offers a two-pathed differentiation. Lexical and grammar fields are taught through the Re-charged Direct Method, enriched with sand and water experiments, based on tactile-audible perception. The author's suggestions to explore language as a therapy tool show how deeply the possibilities and discoveries are hidden in a language teaching-learning process.
From abdabs to zit From pillock (14th century) to couch potato (20th century) From She'll be apples (Australia) to the pits (USA) This new collection brings together some 5,000 contemporary slang expressions originating in all parts of the English-speaking world. It gives clear and concise definitions of each word, supplemented by examples of their use and information about where and when they came into being. This entertaining reference work will be of use to students of English at all levels and a source of fascination to word-lovers throughout the world. |
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