The topic of bilingualism has aroused considerable interest in research on language acquisition in recent decades. Researchers in various fields, such as developmental psychology and psycholinguistics, have investigated bilingual populations from different perspectives in order to understand better how bilingualism affects cognitive abilities like memory, perception, and metalinguistic awareness. Telling Stories in Two Languages contributes to the general upsurge in linguistically related studies of bilingual children. The book's particular and unique focus is narrative development in a bilingual and multicultural context. The book is particularly important in an increasingly pluralistic and multicultural United States, where there are large numbers of children from increasingly diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. Telling stories is important in the context of language and communication development because it is often by means of this activity that children develop the skill of presenting a series of events both in speech and writing. However, varying concepts of literacy exist in different societies, and literacy has different social and personal implications in different social and cultural contexts. In our schools, teachers are expected to teach what is relevant for students in the dominant cultural framework, but it would benefit those teachers greatly to have an understanding of important differences in, for example, narrative styles of different cultures. Bilingualism or even multilingualism is all around us. Even in the United States, where a single language is clearly predominant, there are hundreds of languages spoken. Speaking more than one language may not be typical, but is so common in modern times that it would be senseless to ignore its many implications. The study of narratives told by children in both English and Japanese that are presented in this book will provide an important point of reference for research aimed at teasing apart the relative contributions of linguistic abilities and cultural conceptions to bilingual children's narrative development.

This book traces the development of the ideal of sincerity from its origins in Anglo-Saxon monasteries to its eventual currency in fifteenth-century familiar letters. Beginning by positioning sincerity as an ideology at the intersection of historical pragmatics and the history of emotions, the author demonstrates how changes in the relationship between outward expression and inward emotions changed English language and literature. While the early chapters reveal that the notion of sincerity was a Christian intervention previously absent from Germanic culture, the latter part of the book provides more focused studies of contrition and love. In doing so, the author argues that under the rubric of courtesy these idealized emotions influenced English in terms of its everyday pragmatics and literary style. This fascinating volume will be of broad interest to scholars of medieval language, literature and culture.

A comprehensive analysis of current theory and research in the psychological, computational, and neural sciences elucidates the stuctures and processes of language and thought. Chapters discuss language comprehension and artificial intelligence, ARCS system for analogical retrieval, ACME model of analogical mapping, PAULINE, an artificial intelligence system for pragmatic language generation, a theory of understanding of spoken and written text, recent developments and effect of different modes of language representation on the efficiency of information processing. This book will be of interest to professionals and scholars in psychology, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science.

This volume presents the results of psycholinguistic research into various aspects of the grammar of quantification. The investigations involve children and adults, speakers of different languages, using a variety of experimental paradigms. A shared aspect of the studies is that they present their experimental results as evidence evaluating linguistic theories of quantification. Topics discussed include the interpretation of universal, comparative, and superlative quantifiers, quantifier spreading, scope interaction between pairs of quantifiers and between quantifiers and wh-phrases, distributivity and cumulativity, the interaction of quantifier interpretation with information structure, the disambiguating role of prosody, the functional overlap between universal quantification and perfectivity, and much more. The focus on experimental evidence makes this book essential reading for linguists (syntacticians, semanticists and pragmatists), psycholinguists and psychologists interested in quantification.

The present study explores the aesthetic productivity of idiomatic ambiguity in children's literature. Looking at the connection between context and understanding of idiomatic expressions in either their phrasal or their compositional reading, the study investigates how ambiguity is activated, if, how, and when it is perceived on the different levels of communication, and how literary texts use this ambiguity in playful ways.

A trailblazer in Native American linguistics and anthropology, Gladys Reichard (1893-1955) is one of America's least appreciated anthropologists. Her accomplishments were obscured in her lifetime by differences in intellectual approach and envy, as well as academic politics and the gender realities of her age. This biography offers the first full account of Reichard's life, her milieu, and, most importantly, her work - establishing, once and for all, her lasting significance in the history of anthropology. In her thirty-two years as the founder and head of Barnard College's groundbreaking anthropology department, Reichard taught that Native languages, written or unwritten, sacred or profane, offered Euro-Americans the least distorted views onto the inner life of North America's first peoples. This unique approach put her at odds with anthropologists such as Edward Sapir, leader of the structuralist movement in American linguistics. Similarly, Reichard's focus on Native psychology as revealed to her by Native artists and storytellers produced a dramatically different style of ethnography from that of Margaret Mead, who relied on western psychological archetypes to ""crack"" alien cultural codes, often at a distance. Despite intense pressure from her peers to conform to their theories, Reichard held firm to her humanitarian principles and methods; the result, as Nancy Mattina makes clear, was pathbreaking work in the ethnography of ritual and mythology; Wiyot, Coeur d'Alene, and Navajo linguistics; folk art, gender, and language - amplified by an exceptional career of teaching, editing, publishing, and mentoring. Drawing on Reichard's own writings and correspondence, this book provides an intimate picture of her small-town upbringing, the professional challenges she faced in male-centered institutions, and her quietly revolutionary contributions to anthropology. Gladys Reichard emerges as she lived and worked - a far-sighted, self-reliant humanist sustained in turbulent times by the generous, egalitarian spirit that called her yearly to the far corners of the American West.

Historical sociolinguistics has now established itself as a separate independent field of linguistic inquiry, and the impact of its theoretical and empirical advances are reflected in a thriving body of publications of various types. This volume adds to this flourishing array by presenting nine original studies by highly accomplished scholars holding a prominent reputation in the field. The overarching objective of the volume is to call attention to contemporary trends and innovative developments in the discipline and, more generally, to highlight current research on the relationship between sociolinguistics and historical linguistics, social motivations of language variation and change, and corpus-based studies. The overall interdisciplinary nature of the contributions, the variety of languages they examine and the range of themes they address are distinguishing features of the book, which also make it appealing to a wider readership. The general themes covered by the volume include how to define the historical and social dimensions in historical sociolinguistics research, historical second-language use and multilingualism, the role and relevance played by linguistic ideologies and attitudes in language choices, usage, policy (standardization and preservation), and language death. More specific topics addressed are the linguistic strategies employed to convey and defend religious ideology or to heighten the overall persuasiveness of the information provided. Controversial and/or under-researched issues are tackled, such as authorship and gender in the study of private documents, the regularization and standardization of English orthography, and the issue of speakers' awareness of the dissociation between spoken and written language. In addition, several contributions are methodologically linked by employing data from epistolary correspondence.

This book examines in detail the forms and functions of clause combination in English. Using a corpus linguistics methodology, it describes how the English clause system currently behaves, how it has developed over the history of the language, and how the features and properties of English clause combination have important theoretical and empirical significance. Adopting the cognitive-functional Adaptive Approach to grammar, it offers a series of interconnected studies that investigate how English clause combination interacts with the properties of coherence and cohesion in discourse across historical time, as well in contemporary language use. This work contributes to the ever-increasing common ground between corpus linguistics and cognitive-functional linguistics, producing new paths for interdisciplinary research.

This book presents an in-depth study of English as spoken in two major anglophone Caribbean territories, Jamaica and Trinidad. Based on data from the International Corpus of English, it focuses on variation at the morphological and syntactic level between the educated standard and more informal educated spoken usage. Dagmar Deuber combines quantitative analyses across several text categories with qualitative analyses of transcribed text passages that are grounded in interactional sociolinguistics and recent approaches to linguistic style and identity. The discussion is situated in the context of variation in the Caribbean and the wider context of world Englishes, and the sociolinguistic background of Jamaica and Trinidad is also explored. This volume will be of interest to students and researchers interested in the fields of sociolinguistics, world Englishes, and language contact.

This book investigates the history of national disunity in Germany since the end of the Second World War from a linguistic perspective: what was the role of language in the ideological conflicts of the Cold War and in the difficult process of rebuilding the German nation after 1990? In the first part of the book, Patrick Stevenson explores the ways in which the idea of 'the national language' contributed to the political tensions between the two German states and to the different social experiences of their citizens. He begins by showing how the modern linguistic conflict between east and west in Germany has its roots in a long tradition of debates on the relationship between language and national identity. He then describes the use of linguistic strategies to reinforce the development of a socialist state in the GDR and argues that they ultimately contributed to its demise. The second part considers the social and linguistic consequences of unification. The author discusses the challenges imposed on east Germans by the sudden formation of a single 'speech community' and examines how conflicting representations of easterners and westerners - for example, in personal interactions, the media, and advertising - have hindered progress towards national unity. German division and re-unification were crucial to the development of Europe in the second half of the twentieth century. This fascinating account of the relationship between language and social conflict in Germany throws new light on these events and raises important questions for the study of divided speech communities elsewhere. The book will interest sociolinguists, historians, sociologists, and political scientists.

Historical linguistic theory and practice consist of a large number of chronological "layers" that have been accepted in the course of time and have acquired a permanence of their own. These range from neogrammarian conceptualizations of sound change, analogy, and borrowing, to prosodic, lexical, morphological, and syntactic change, and to present-day views on rule change and the effects of language contact. To get a full grasp of the principles of historical linguistics it is therefore necessary to understand the nature of each of these "layers". This book is a major revision and reorganization of the earlier editions and adds entirely new chapters on morphological change and lexical change, as well as a detailed discussion of linguistic palaeontology and ideological responses to the findings of historical linguistics to this landmark publication.

Although the interest in the concept of partitivity has continuously increased in the last decades and has given rise to considerable advances in research, the fine-grained morpho-syntactic and semantic variation displayed by partitive elements across European languages is far from being well-described, let alone well-understood. There are two main obstacles to this: on the one hand, theoretical linguistics and typological linguistics are fragmented in different methodological approaches that hinder the full sharing of cross-theoretic advances; on the other hand, partitive elements have been analyzed in restricted linguistic environments, which would benefit from a broader perspective. The aim of the PARTE project, from which this volume stems, is precisely to bring together linguists of different theoretical approaches using different methodologies to address this notion in its many facets. This volume focuses on Partitive Determiners, Partitive Pronouns and Partitive Case in European languages, their emergence and spread in diachrony, their acquisition by L2 speakers, and their syntax and interpretation. The volume is the first to provide such an encompassing insight into the notion of partitivity.

This interdisciplinary volume looks at one of the central cultural practices within the Jewish experience: translation. With contributions from literary and cultural scholars, historians, and scholars of religion, the book considers different aspects of Jewish translation, starting from the early translations of the Torah, to the modern Jewish experience of migration, state-building and life in the Diaspora. The volume addresses the question of how Jews have used translation to pursue different cultural and political agendas, such as Jewish nationalism, the development of Yiddish as a literary language, and the collection of Holocaust testimonies. It also addresses how non-Jews have translated elements of the Judaic tradition to create an image of the Other. Covering a wide span of contexts, including religion, literature, photography, music and folk practices, and featuring an interview section with authors and translators, the volume will be of interest not only to scholars of Jewish studies, translation and cultural studies, but also a wider interested audience.

All human speech has expression. It is part of the 'humanness' of speech, and is a quality listeners expect to find. Without expression, speech sounds lifeless and artificial. Remove expression, and what's left is the bare bones of the intended message, but none of the feelings which surround the message. The purpose of this book is to present research examining expressive content in speech with a view to simulating expression in computer speech. Human beings communicate expressively with each other in conversation: now in the computer age there is a perceived eed for machines to communicate expressively with humans in dialogue.

In this interdisciplinary discussion on mental models, researchers from various areas in cognitive science tackle the following questions: What is a mental model? What are the prospects and limitations in applying the mental model notion in cognitive science? How can the ideas on the nature of mental models and their mode of operation be empirically substantiated? The primary goal of the research group was to work out a definition of mental models that embraces the overall use of this construct in cognitive science as well as the more specific conceptions used in particular research domains such as cognitive linguistics. Theoretical claims about the properties of mental models were discussed and their tenability evaluated against the empirical evidence.

The volume is divided into three parts. Fundamental aspects of mental models are presented in the first section, the following part contains contributions to the function of mental models in discourse processing, and finally problems of mental models in reasoning and problem solving are outlined.

This book presents in a single volume a comprehensive history of the language sciences, from ancient times through to the twentieth century. While there has been a concentration on those traditions that have the greatest international relevance, a particular effort has been made to go beyond traditional Eurocentric accounts, and to cover a broad geographical spread. For the twentieth century a section has been devoted to the various trends, schools, and theoretical framework developed in Europe, North America and Australasia over the past seventy years. There has also been a concentration on those approaches in linguistic theory which can be expected to have some direct relevance to work being done at the beginning of the twenty-first century or those of which a knowledge is needed for the full understanding of the history of linguistic sciences through the last half of this century. The last section of this book reviews the applications of some of these findings. Based on the foundation provided by the award winning "Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics" this volume provides an excellent focal point of reference for anyone interested in the history of the language sciences.

This book presents a corpus-based investigation of verbal projection in detective stories and their translations. Adopting both diachronic and synchronic approaches to compare two different Chinese translations, the book is one of the first attempts to conduct a comprehensive lexico-grammatical, logico-semantic and rhetorical, as well as contextual analysis of verbal projection in the Chinese context, especially the classical Chinese language context. Further, it studies the differences and similarities of different translators' choices from both diachronic and synchronic perspectives. Given its scope, the book is relevant for all those interested in functional linguistics, translation studies and detective stories.

This book attempts to discuss selected but thorny issues of humor research that form the major stumbling blocks as well as challenges in humor studies at large and thus merit insightful discussion. Any discourse is action, so the text-creation process is always set in a non-verbal context, built of a social and communicative situation, and against the background of relevant culture. On the other hand, humor scholars claim that humorous discourse has its special, essential features that distinguish it from other discourses. The pragmatic solution to the issue of potential circularity of humor defined in terms of discourse and discourse in terms of humor seems only feasible, and thus there is a need to discuss the structure and mechanisms of humorous texts and humorous performances. The chapters in the present volume, contributed by leading scholars in the field of humor studies, address the issues from various theoretical perspectives, from contextual semantics through General Theory of Verbal Humor, cognitive linguistics, discourse studies, sociolinguistics, to Ontological Semantic Theory of Humor, providing an excellent overview of the field to novices and experts alike.

The integration of traditional and modern linguistics as well as diachrony and synchrony is the hallmark of an influential trend in contemporary research on language. It is documented in the present collection of 21 new papers on the history and structure of the sounds and other (sub-) systems of human languages, sharing the common reference point of Theo Vennemann, a leading figure in the above-mentioned trend, whom the authors want to honor with this Festschrift.