This volume showcases a range of different approaches to strangers and strangeness across medieval western Europe. It focuses on how communities responded to the arrival of strangers and to different ways in which individuals and groups were constructed as estranged. Further, it reflects on different forms of border-crossing, from lived experience to literary imagination and from specific journeys in precise contexts to the conceptualisation of the shift from life to death. In the range of its contributions - applying linguistic, historical, archaeological, architectural, archival, literary, and theological analyses - it seeks to bring together disciplines and geographical areas of study that are too often strangers to one another in medieval studies. Contributors are Sherif Abdelkarim, Anna Adamska, Adrien Carbonnet, Wim De Clercq, Florian Dolberg, Joshua S. Easterling, Susan Irvine, Marco Mostert, Richard North, James Plumtree, Euan McCartney Robson, Beatrice Saletti, Simon C. Thomson and Gerben Verbrugghe.

In this book, D. Robert Ladd focuses on problems with the one-dimensional idealization of language on which much linguistic theory is based. Strings of sequentially-ordered elements play an important role as theoretical abstractions in both phonology and syntax. Yet many well-known phonological phenomena (such as vowel harmony, ablaut morphology, and pitch features) are problematic for this one-dimensional idealization, and many attempts (such as autosegmental phonology) have been made to allow for these troublesome characteristics in our theories. The book deals with diverse aspects of these problematical non-sequential phenomena. The five main chapters cover distinctive features and autosegments, systematic phonetics, the definition of 'prosody', aspects of vocal paralinguistic communication and 'gradience', and duality of patterning. Each chapter reviews a wide range of relevant literature, generally going back to the beginnings of modern linguistics in the early twentieth century, and all of them can usefully be read as free-standing synthetic overviews of the issues they discuss. The final chapter suggests that phonological structure, sequential or otherwise, can be seen as a special case of the segmentation of continuous action into discrete events, and that research on this general topic within cognitive psychology is relevant to phonological theory. Professor Ladd's unique work makes a fundamental contribution to phonology and phonetics and to linguistic theory more generally. His book will interest all theoretical linguists and cognitive scientists concerned with understanding the relation between phonological representations and the speech signal.

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.

Professor Alexander V. Vovin's fruitful research has brought incomparable results to the fields of Asian linguistics and philology throughout the past four decades. In this volume, presented in honour of Professor Vovin's 60th birthday, twenty-two authors present new research regarding Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Khitan, Yakut, Mongolian, Chinese, Hachijo, Ikema Miyakoan, Ainu, Okinawan, Nivkh, Eskimo-Aleut and other languages. The chapters are both a tribute to his research and a summary of the latest developments in the field.

In Language and Meter, Dieter Gunkel and Olav Hackstein unite fifteen linguistic studies on a variety of poetic traditions, including the Homeric epics, the hieratic hymns of the Rgveda, the Gathas of the Avesta, early Latin and the Sabellic compositions, Germanic alliterative verse, Insular Celtic court poetry, and Tocharian metrical texts. The studies treat a broad range of topics, including the prehistory of the hexameter, the nature of Homeric formulae, the structure of Vedic verse, rhythm in the Gathas, and the relationship between Germanic and Celtic poetic traditions. The volume contributes to our understanding of the relationship between language and poetic form, and how they change over time.

Have you ever wondered what is really happening to minority languages of Northeast Asia and which efforts are being taken both by "westerners" and local people to preserve and promote them? Would you like to discover, uncover, and tackle deep linguistic questions of such small but highly important languages such as Khamnigan Mongol, Wutun, Sartul-Buryat, Tofan and Sakhalin Ainu, just to mention a few? Would you like to know how simple smart phone apps can help communities to preserve, love and use their native language? This book, containing a rich selection of contributions on various aspects of language endangerment, emic and etic approaches at language preservation, and contact-linguistics, is an important contribution to the Unesco's Indigenous Languages Decade, which has right now started (2022-2032).

This volume presents a synthesis of cognitive linguistic theory and research on first and second language acquistion, language processing, individual differences in linguistic knowledge, and on the role of multi-word chunks and low-level schemas in language production and comprehension. It highlights the tension between "linguists' grammars", which are strongly influenced by principles such as economy and elegance, and "speakers' grammars", which are often messy, less than fully general, and sometimes inconsistent, and argues that cognitive linguistics is an empirical science which combines study of real usage events and experiments which rigorously test specific hypotheses.

Brevity in conversation is a window to the workings of the mind. This book brings it into prominence as both a multifaceted topic of deep philosophical importance and a phenomenon that serves as a testing ground for theories in linguistics, psycholinguistics, and computer modeling. Brevity is achieved in a variety of ways. Speakers use elliptical constructions and exploit salient features of the conversational environment in a process of pragmatic enrichment so as to pack as much as possible into a few words. They take account of what has already been said in the current and previous conversations, and tailor their words to what they know about the beliefs and personalities of the people they're talking to. Most of the time they do all this with no obvious mental effort. The book, which brings together distinguished linguists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists, is the product of an interactive multidisciplinary research project that extended over four years. The questions dealt with concern how speakers secure understanding of what they mean when what they mean far outstrips the literal or compositional meanings of the sentences or sentence fragments that they use. Brevity sheds new light on economy in discourse. It will appeal to linguists, philosophers, and psychologists at advanced undergraduate level and above.

In this book, Michael Barlow describes ways in which corpus data can be used to provide insights into various aspects of grammar, taking a usage-based perspective. The book deals with both the practical and the theoretical aspects of using corpora for language analysis. Some of the topics covered include corpora and usage-based linguistics, collocations and constructions, categorisation in everyday language, blends, and discourse organisation. A couple of recurring themes in the volume are (i) the relationship between theory and data and (ii) the importance and consequences of looking at individual variation in language use.

A comprehensive and methodologically sophisticated history of Arabic lexicography, this book fills a serious gap in modern scholarship. Besides meticulously examining the factors that led to the emergence of lexicographical writing as of the second/eighth century, the work comprises detailed discussions of the aims, range, and approaches of the most important writings and writers of lexica specialized in specific topics and multi thematic thesauri, and the lexica arranged according to roots. The organisation of the book and the lists of works cited in the various genres make it easy for the reader to find his way through an enormous amount of material. From a broader perspective, the book highlights the relationship between Arabic lexicography and other areas of linguistic study, grammar in particular, and the centrality of Qur'an and poetry to lexicographical writing.

This book presents rich information on Romanian mythology and folklore, previously under-explored in Western scholarship, placing the source material within its historical context and drawing comparisons with European and Indo-European culture and mythological tradition. The author presents a detailed comparative study and argues that Romanian mythical motifs have roots in Indo-European heritage, by analyzing and comparing mythical motifs from the archaic cultures, Greek, Latin, Celtic, Sanskrit, and Persian, with written material and folkloric data that reflects the Indo-European culture. The book begins by outlining the history of the Getae-Dacians, beginning with Herodotus' description of their customs and beliefs in the supreme god Zamolxis, then moves to the Roman wars and the Romanization process, before turning to recent debates in linguistics and genetics regarding the provenance of a shared language, religion, and culture in Europe. The author then analyzes myth creation, its relation to rites, and its functions in society, before examining specific examples of motifs and themes from Romanian folk tales and songs. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of folklore studies, comparative mythology, linguistic anthropology, and European culture.

This volume examines relationships between native languages and Yiddish. It highlights the historical and sociolinguistic development of Turkic, Iranian, South Asian, Slavic, Greek, Balkan, Judezmo, Armenian, Georgian, and Basque languages. One of the main focuses is on the adopted post-medieval and pre-modern Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi homelands of Eastern Europe. The book emphasizes the role of ludic or playful modifications of a language's structures at the colloquial level as sources of linguistic change. And, it goes further to say that expressive language, linguistic iconicity, and etymological analysis can all complement and enrich each other.

In Ten Lectures on Cognitive Linguistics and the Unification of Spoken and Signed Languages Sherman Wilcox suggests that rather than abstracting away from the material substance of language, linguists can discover the deep connections between signed and spoken languages by taking an embodied view. This embodied solution reveals the patterns and principles that unite languages across modalities. Using a multidisciplinary approach, Wilcox explores such issues as the how to apply cognitive grammar to the study of signed languages, the pervasive conceptual iconicity present throughout the lexicon and grammar of signed languages, the relation of language and gesture, the grammaticization of signs, the significance of motion for understanding language as a dynamic system, and the integration of cognitive neuroscience and cognitive linguistics.

Setting forth the state of the art, leading researchers present a survey on the fast-developing field of Connectionist Psycholinguistics: using connectionist or "neural" networks, which are inspired by brain architecture, to model empirical data on human language processing. Connectionist psycholinguistics has already had a substantial impact on the study of a wide range of aspects of language processing, ranging from inflectional morphology, to word recognition, to parsing and language production. Christiansen and Chater begin with an extended tutorial overview of Connectionist Psycholinguistics which is followed by the latest research by leading figures in each area of research. The book also focuses on the implications and prospects for connectionist models of language, not just for psycholinguistics, but also for computational and linguistic perspectives on natural language. The interdisciplinary approach will be relevant for, and accessible to psychologists, cognitive scientists, linguists, philosophers, and researchers in artificial intelligence.

In Where Metaphors Come From, Zoltan Koevecses proposes a metaphorical grounding that augments and refines conceptual metaphor theory according to which conceptual metaphors are based on our bodily experience. While this is certainly true in many cases of metaphor, the role of the body in metaphor creation can and should be reinterpreted, and, consequently, the body can be seen as just one of the several contexts from which metaphors can emerge (including the situational, discourse, and conceptual-cognitive contexts) - although perhaps the dominant or crucial one. Koevecses is a leader in CMT, and his argument in this book is more in line with what has been discovered about the nature of human cognition in recent years; namely, that human cognition is grounded in experience in multiple ways - embodiment, in a strict sense, being just one of them (see Barsalou, 2008; Gibbs, 2006; Pecher and Zwaan, 2005). In light of the present work, this is because cognition, including metaphorical cognition, is grounded in not only the body, but also in the situations in which people act and lead their lives, the discourses in which they are engaged at any time in communicating and interacting with each other, and the conceptual knowledge they have accumulated about the world in the course of their experience of it.

As we think and talk, rich arrays of mental spaces and connections between them are constructed unconsciously. Conceptual integration of mental spaces leads to new meaning, global insight, and compressions useful for memory and creativity. A powerful aspect of conceptual integration networks is the dynamic emergence of novel structure in all areas of human life (science, religion, art, ...). The emergence of complex metaphors creates our conceptualization of time. The same operations play a role in material culture generally. Technology evolves to produce cultural human artefacts such as watches, gauges, compasses, airplane cockpit displays, with structure specifically designed to match conceptual inputs and integrate with them into stable blended frames of perception and action that can be memorized, learned by new generations, and thus culturally transmitted.

This book presents a comprehensive and critical overview of historical phonology as it stands today. Scholars from around the world consider and advance research in every aspect of the field. In doing so they demonstrate the continuing vitality of one of the oldest sub-disciplines of linguistics. The book is divided into six parts. The first considers key current research questions, the early history of the field, and the structuralist context for work on sound change. The second examines evidence and methods, including phonological reconstruction, typology, and computational and quantitative approaches. Part III looks at types of phonological change, including stress, tone, and morphophonological change. Part IV explores a series of controversial aspects within the field, including the effects of first language acquisition, the mechanisms of lexical diffusion, and the role of individuals in innovation. Part V considers the main theoretical perspectives including those of evolutionary phonology and generative historical phonology. The final part examines sociolinguistic and exogenous factors in phonological change, including the study of change in real time, the role of second language acquisition, and loanword adaptation. The authors, who represent leading proponents of every theoretical perspective, consider phonological change over a wide range of the world's language families. The handbook is, in sum, a valuable resource for phonologists and historical linguists and a stimulating guide for their students.