Literature serves many purposes, and one of them certainly proves to be to convey messages, wisdom, and instruction, and this across languages, religions, and cultures. Beyond that, as the contributors to this volume underscore, people have always endeavored to reach out to their community members, that is, to build community, to learn from each other, and to teach. Hence, this volume explores the meaning of communication, translation, and community building based on the medium of language. While all these aspects have already been discussed in many different venues, the contributors endeavor to explore a host of heretofore less considered historical, religious, literary, political, and linguistic sources. While the dominant focus tends to rest on conflicts, hostility, and animosity in the pre-modern age, here the emphasis rests on communication with its myriad of challenges and potentials for establishing a community. As the various studies illustrate, a close reading of communicative issues opens profound perspectives regarding human relationships and hence the social context. This understanding invites intensive collaboration between medical historians, literary scholars, translation experts, and specialists on religious conflicts and discourses. We also learn how much language carries tremendous cultural and social meaning and determines in a most sensitive manner the interactions among people in a communicative and community-based fashion.

Through constant exposure to adult input in interaction, children's language gradually develops into rich linguistic constructions containing multiple cross-modal elements subtly used together for communicative functions. Sensorimotor schemas provide the "grounding" of language in experience and lead to children's access to the symbolic function. With the emergence of vocal or signed productions, gestures do not disappear but remain functional and diversify in form and function as children become skilled adult multimodal conversationalists. This volume examines the role of gesture over the human lifespan in its complex interaction with speech and sign. Gesture is explored in the different stages before, during, and after language has fully developed and a special focus is placed on the role of gesture in language learning and cognitive development. Specific chapters are devoted to the use of gesture in atypical populations. CONTENTS Contributors Aliyah Morgenstern and Susan Goldin-Meadow 1 Introduction to Gesture in Language Part I: An Emblematic Gesture: Pointing Kensy Cooperrider and Kate Mesh 2 Pointing in Gesture and Sign Aliyah Morgenstern 3 Early Pointing Gestures Part II: Gesture Before Speech Meredith L. Rowe, Ran Wei, and Virginia C. Salo 4 Early Gesture Predicts Later Language Development Olga Capirci, Maria Cristina Caselli, and Virginia Volterra 5 Interaction Among Modalities and Within Development Part III: Gesture With Speech During Language Learning Eve V. Clark and Barbara F. Kelly 6 Constructing a System of Communication With Gestures and Words Pauline Beaupoil-Hourdel 7 Embodying Language Complexity: Co-Speech Gestures Between Age 3 and 4 Casey Hall, Elizabeth Wakefield, and Susan Goldin-Meadow 8 Gesture Can Facilitate Children's Learning and Generalization of Verbs Part IV: Gesture After Speech Is Mastered Jean-Marc Colletta 9 On the Codevelopment of Gesture and Monologic Discourse in Children Susan Wagner Cook 10 Understanding How Gestures Are Produced and Perceived Tilbe Goeksun, Demet OEzer, and Seda AkbIyik 11 Gesture in the Aging Brain Part V: Gesture With More Than One Language Elena Nicoladis and Lisa Smithson 12 Gesture in Bilingual Language Acquisition Marianne Gullberg 13 Bimodal Convergence: How Languages Interact in Multicompetent Language Users' Speech and Gestures Gale Stam and Marion Tellier 14 Gesture Helps Second and Foreign Language Learning and Teaching Aliyah Morgenstern and Susan Goldin-Meadow Afterword: Gesture as Part of Language or Partner to Language Across the Lifespan Index About the Editors

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.

Verbs of mental states or activity constitute a subject of considerable interest to both Cognitive Linguistics and Linguistic Typology. They promise to open a window on the invisible workings of the mind, while at the same time displaying a wide variety of historical sources across languages. In this book Michael Fortescue presents an innovative approach to the semantics and diachronic source of cognitive verbs across a representative array of the world's languages. The relationship among the cognitive verbs of individual languages is essentially one of metonymy, and the book investigates in detail the specific metonymic relationships involved, as revealed largely by the polysemous spread of word meanings. The data is projected against a circular 'map' of interrelated cognitive categories.

In this book, Akos Bertalan Apatoczky offers a complete reconstruction of the Chinese-Mongol vocabulary of the 17th century comprehensive Chinese military work called Lulongsai lue ( , LLSL), a document of key importance containing one of the last Sino-Mongol glossaries without proper critical reconstruction until now. The work has resulted in a clarification of the earlier sources the compilers of LLSL used in the bilingual part. The author argues that contrary to what scholars have thought of it until now, the linguistic corpus of the glossary is not homogeneous and does not represent a single linguistic status; it does, however, shed some light on chronological and philological questions concerning the earlier works incorporated in it.

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.

This book offers a fresh look at the status of the scribe in society, his training, practices, and work in the biblical world. What was the scribe's role in these societies? Were there rival scribal schools? What was their role in daily life? How many scripts and languages did they grasp? Did they master political and religious rhetoric? Did they travel or share foreign traditions, cultures, and beliefs? Were scribes redactors, or simply copyists? What was their influence on the redaction of the Bible? How did they relate to the political and religious powers of their day? Did they possess any authority themselves? These are the questions that were tackled during an international conference held at the University of Strasbourg on June 17-19, 2019. The conference served as the basis for this publication, which includes fifteen articles covering a wide geographical and chronological range, from Late Bronze Age royal scribes to refugees in Masada at the end of the Second Temple period.

English Lexicogenesis investigates the processes by which novel words are coined in English, and how they are variously discarded or adopted, and frequently then adapted. Gary Miller looks at the roles of affixation, compounding, clipping, and blending in the history of lexicogenesis, including processes taking place right now. The first four chapters consider English morphology and the recent types of word formation in English: the first introduces the morphological terminology used in the work and the book's theoretical perspectives; chapter 2 discusses productivity and constraints on derivations; chapter 3 describes the basic typology of English compounds; and chapter 4 considers the role of particles in word formation and recent construct types specific to English. Chapters 5 and 6 focus respectively on analogical and imaginative aspects of neologistic creation and the roles of metaphor and metonymy. In chapters 7 and 8 the author considers the influence of folk etymology and tabu, and the cycle of loss of expressivity and its renewal. After outlining the phonological structure of words and its role in word abridgements, he examines the acoustic and perceptual motivation of word forms. He then devotes four chapters to aspects and functions of truncation and to reduplicative and conjunctive formations. In the final chapter he looks at the relationship between core and expressive morphology and the role of punning and other forms of language play, before summarizing his arguments and findings and setting out avenues for future research.

Secret Manipulations is the first comprehensive study of African register variation, polylectality, and derived languages. Focusing on a specific form of language change-deliberate manipulations of a language by its speakers-it provides a new approach to local language ideologies and concepts of grammar and metalinguistic knowledge.
Anne Storch concentrates on case studies from Nigeria, Uganda, Sudan, the African diaspora, and 16th century Europe. In these cases, language manipulation varies with social and cultural contexts, and is almost always done in secret. At the same time, this manipulation can be an act of subversion and an expression of power, and it is often central to the construction of social norms, as it constructs oppositions and gives marginalized people a chance to articulate themselves. This volume illustrates how manipulated languages are constructed, how they are used, and how they wield power.

In "A Russian-Yakut-Ewenki Trilingual Dictionary" by N.V. Sljunin, Jose Andres Alonso de la Fuente offers the philological edition of a very early twentieth-century source of two indigenous languages from Siberia. This edition includes the facsimile of the original handwritten document. Whereas specialists have known about the existence of Sljunin's Yakut data by indirect references to it in at least one standard dictionary, there was no available information regarding Sljunin's Ewenki data. Furthermore, careful linguistic analysis reveals that the Ewenki variety reflected in Sljunin's dictionary may have already dissapeared.

This book presents the first systematic linguistic study of Zenodotus' variant readings, showing that he used a version of Homer older than the one used by Aristarchus a century later. Several clues point to the fact that Zenodotus' version belongs to a tradition that was already distinct from that which eventually yielded the vulgate (that is, the Homer we know). In particular, his version largely pre-dates the Sophists' reflections on language, rhetorics and style, and the grammatical theories of Alexandrian scholars. The finding presented in this book should encourage not only historical linguists, but also philologists and classicists to revise the communis opinio and attentively consider Zenodotus' readings in their research.

This book contributes to opening up disciplinary knowledge and offering connections between different approaches to language in contemporary linguistics. Rather than focusing on a particular single methodology or theoretical assumption, the volume presents part of the wealth of linguistic knowledge as an intertwined project, which combines numerous practices, positionalities and perspectives. The editors believe together with the contributors to this volume that it is a crucial and timely task to emphasize the relevance of linguistic knowledge on power, hospitality, social class, marginalization, mobility, history, secrecy, the structures of discourse, and the construction of meaning, as knowledge that needs to be brought together - as it is brought together in personal discussions, conversations and encounters. To work along traces of linguistic connectivity, marginalized narratives, in and on lesser studied (often stigmatized) language practices and to shed light on the tasks of linguistics in making diverse knowledges transparent-this offers spaces for critical discussion on the ethics of linguistics, its challenges, contributions and tasks. These are the approaches that are characteristic for the work of Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, to whom this book is dedicated.

In Foreigners and Egyptians in the Late Egyptian Stories Camilla Di Biase-Dyson applies systemic functional linguistics, literary theory and New Historicist approaches to four of the Late Egyptian Stories and shows how language was exploited to establish the narrative roles of literary protagonists. The analysis reveals the shifting power dynamics between the Doomed Prince and his foreign wife and the parody in the depiction of the Hyksos ruler Apophis and his Theban counterpart Seqenenre. It also sheds light on the weight of history in the sketch of the Rebel of Joppa and the general Djehuty and explains the interplay of social expectations in the encounters between the envoy Wenamun and the Levantine princes with whom he seeks to trade. "Overall, Di Biase-Dyson's monograph is an original interdisciplinary examination of an exciting corpus of ancient literary texts." Nikolaos Lazaridis, Journal of Near Eastern Studies