Adopting a corpus-based methodology, this volume analyses phraseological patterns in nine European languages from a monolingual, bilingual and multilingual point of view, following a mostly Construction Grammar approach. At present, corpus-based constructional research represents an interesting and innovative field of phraseology with great relevance to translatology, foreign language didactics and lexicography.

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.

In fourteen thoughtful essays this book reports and reflects on the many changes that a digital workflow brings to the world of original texts and textual scholarship, and the effect on scholarly communication practices. The spread of digital technology across philology, linguistics and literary studies suggests that text scholarship is taking on a more laboratory-like image. The ability to sort, quantify, reproduce and report text through computation would seem to facilitate the exploration of text as another type of quantitative scientific data. However, developing this potential also highlights text analysis and text interpretation as two increasingly separated sub-tasks in the study of texts. The implied dual nature of interpretation as the traditional, valued mode of scholarly text comparison, combined with an increasingly widespread reliance on digital text analysis as scientific mode of inquiry raises the question as to whether the reflexive concepts that are central to interpretation - individualism, subjectivity - are affected by the anonymised, normative assumptions implied by formal categorisations of text as digital data.

This critical edition and lexicological analysis of the first of the two glossaries of Book 29 of Shem Tov ben Isaac's "Sefer ha-Shimmush" contains more than 700 entries and offfers an extensive overview of the formation of medieval medical terminology in the romance (Old Occitan and in part Old Catalan) and Hebrew languages, as well as within the Arabic and Latin tradition.

The comprehensive analysis of the segmental and metrical system of the Swiss German dialect of Thurgovian provides a significant contribution to both phonetic and phonological theory. Based on the author's original fieldwork and experimental investigations, it is the first in-depth study of this area, tracing it back also to its Old High German roots, particularly that of the dialect of Notker. Quantity alternations - notably word-initial long/short consonantal alternations - asymmetric neutralization of phonetic-phonological contrasts, stress and weight are most prominent among the theoretical issues on which Thurgovian phonology is brought to bear.

Languages are constantly changing. New words are added to the English language every year, either borrowed or coined, and there is often railing against the decline of the language by public figures. Some languages, such as French and Finnish, have academies to protect them against foreign imports. Yet languages are species-like constructs, which evolve naturally over time. Migration, imperialism, and globalization have blurred boundaries between many of them, producing new ones (such as creoles) and driving some to extinction. This book examines the processes by which languages change, from the macroecological perspective of competition and natural selection. In a series of chapters, Salikoko Mufwene examines such themes as:natural selection in language. the actuation question and the invisible hand that drives evolution multilingualism and language contact language birth and language death. the emergence of Creoles and Pidgins the varying impacts of colonization and globalization on language vitality. This comprehensive examination of the organic evolution of language will be essential reading for graduate and senior undergraduate students, and for researchers on the social dynamics of language variation and change, language vitality and death, and even the origins of linguistic diversity.

Almost all languages have some ways of categorizing nouns. Languages of South-East Asia have classifiers used with numerals, while most Indo-European languages have two or three genders. They can have a similar meaning and one can develop from the other. This book provides a comprehensive and original analysis of noun categorization devices all over the world. It will interest typologists, those working in the fields of morphosyntactic variation and lexical semantics, as well as anthropologists and all other scholars interested in the mechanisms of human cognition.

This book examines the evidence for the development of adnominal genitives (the knight's sword, the nun's priest's tale, etc.) in English. During the Middle English period the genitive inflection -es developed into the more clitic-like 's, but how, when, why, and over how long a time are unclear, and have been subject to considerable research and discussion. Cynthia L. Allen draws together her own and others' findings in areas such as case marking, the nature of syntactic and morphological change, and the role of processing and pragmatics in the construction of grammars and grammatical change.
Using evidence derived from a systematic examination of a wide range of texts, Dr Allen reviews the evidence for the nature of the possessive inflection in earlier stages of English and the relationship of the -es possessive to the 'his genitive. In doing so she shows that Middle English texts are more reliable witnesses to the grammar of Middle English than has sometimes been assumed. The texts may have been conservative, but their language, the author argues, is reasonable reflection of the spoken language, and where the written evidence runs counter to typological generalization about syntactic change it may be the latter, not the former, which is in need of qualification. While the book focuses on Middle English it also contains discussions of linguistic change before and since, and draws on comparative evidence from other languages, particularly Germanic languages such as Swedish and Dutch. This ground-breaking book will be of great interest to scholars and students of Middle English in particular and the history of English in general.

Beyond Grammaticalization and Discourse Markers offers a comprehensive account of the most promising new directions in the vast field of grammaticalization studies. From major theoretical issues to hardly addressed experimental questions, this volume explores new ways to expand, refine or even challenge current ideas on grammaticalization. All contributions, written by leading experts in the fields of grammaticalization and discourse markers, explore issues such as: the impact of Construction Grammar into language change; cyclicity as a driving force of change; the importance of positions and discourse units as predictors of grammaticalization; a renewed way of thinking about philological considerations, or the role of Experimental Pragmatics for hypothesis checking.

This book provides useful strategies for language learning, researching and the understanding of social factors that influence human behavior. It offers an account of how we use human, animal and plant fixed expressions every day and the cultural aspects hidden behind them. These fixed expressions include various linguistic vehicles, such as fruit, jokes and taboos that are related to speakers' use in the real world. The linguistic research in Mandarin Chinese, Hakka, German and English furthers our understanding of the cultural value and model of cognition embedded in life-form embodiment languages.

Present-day Dialectology does not treat dialectology as an isolated discipline. Instead, it discusses dialectological topics within the framework of present-day linguistics. The book contains papers which seek to confront recent phonological, morphologic, syntactic and semantic theory with dialectological data. In addition, it explores the link between dialectology on the one hand and sociolinguistics and the study of language contact on the other.

The concept of framing has been pivotal in research on social interaction among anthropologists, sociologists, psychologists, and linguists. This collection shows how the discourse analysis of frames can be applied to a range of social contexts. Tannen provides a seminal theoretical framework for conceptualizing the relationship between frames and schemas as well as a methodology for the discourse analysis of framing in interaction. Each chapter makes a unique theoretical contribution to frames theory while showing how discourse analysis can elucidate the linguistic means by which framing is accomplished in a particular interactional setting. Applied to such a wide range of contexts as a medical examination, psychotic discourse, gender differences in sermon performance, boys' "sportscasting" their own play, teasing among friends, a comparison of Japanese and American discussion groups, and sociolinguistic interviews, the discourse analysis of framing emerges here as a fruitful new avenue for interaction analysis.

In Tense and Text in Classical Arabic, Michal Marmorstein presents a new discourse-oriented analysis of the indicative tense system in Classical Arabic. Critical of commonly held assumptions regarding the binary structure of the tense system and the perfect-imperfect asymmetry, the author redefines the discussion by analysing the extended syntactic and textual environments in which the paradigm of the indicative forms is used.The study shows that the function of Classical Arabic tenses is determined by the interaction of their inherent grammatical meaning and the overall dialogic, narrative, or generic contexts in which they occur. It also demonstrates the particularizing effect of context, so that temporal and aspectual meanings are always more nuanced, delicate, and pragmatically motivated in actual discourse.

What is the relationship between spatial and temporal representations in language and cognition? What is the role of culture in this relationship? I enter this discussion by offering a community-based, cross-generational study on the community of speakers of as-Sani' Arabic, members of a Negev Desert Bedouin tribe in Israel. The book presents the results of ten years of fieldwork, the linguistic and cognitive profiles of three generations, and first-hand narration of a century of history, from nomadism to sedentarism, between conservation, resilience, and change. Linguistic and cognitive representations change with lifestyle, culture, and relationships with nature and landscape. Language changes more rapidly than cognitive structures, and the relationship between spatial and temporal representations is complex and multifaceted.

The starting point for any study of the Bible is the text of the Masora, as designed by the Masoretes. The ancient manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible contain thousands of Masora comments of two types: Masora Magna and Masora Prava. How does this complex defense mechanism, which contains counting of words and combinations from the Bible, work? Yosef Ofer, of Bar-Ilan University and the Academy of the Hebrew Language, presents the way in which the Masoretic comments preserve the Masoretic Text of the Bible throughout generations and all over the world, providing comprehensive information in a short and efficient manner. The book describes the important manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible, and the methods of the Masora in determining the biblical spelling and designing the forms of the parshiot and the biblical Songs. The effectiveness of Masoretic mechanisms and their degree of success in preserving the text is examined. A special explanation is offered for the phenomenon of qere and ketiv. The book discusses the place of the Masoretic text in the history of the Bible, the differences between the Babylonian Masora and that of Tiberias, the special status of the Aleppo Codex and the mystery surrounding it. Special attention is given to the comparison between the Aleppo Codex and the Leningrad Codex (B 19a). In addition, the book discusses the relationship between the Masora and other tangential domains: the grammar of the Hebrew language, the interpretation of the Bible, and the Halakha. The book is a necessary tool for anyone interested in the text of the Bible and its crystallization.

This is the first comprehensive treatment of the strategies employed in the world's languages to express predicative possession, as in "the boy has a bat." It presents the results of the author's fifteen-year research project on the subject. Predicative possession is the source of many grammaticalization paths - as in the English perfect tense formed from to have - and its typology is an important key to understanding the structural variety of the world's languages and how they change. Drawing on data from some 400 languages representing all the world's language families, most of which lack a close equivalent to the verb to have, Professor Stassen aims (a) to establish a typology of four basic types of predicative possession, (b) to discover and describe the processes by which standard constructions can be modified, and (c) to explore links between the typology of predicative possession and other typologies in order to reveal patterns of interdependence. He shows, for example, that the parameter of simultaneous sequencing - the way a language formally encodes a sequence like "John sang and Mary danced" - correlates with the way it encodes predicative possession. By means of this and other links the author sets up a single universal model in order to account for all morphosyntactic variation in predicative possession found in the languages of the world, including patterns of variation over time.
Predicative Possession will interest scholars and advanced students of language typology, diachronic linguistics, morphology and syntax.

This monograph is a contribution to the documentation of the linguistic situation of the Kinnaur district in Himachal Pradesh (Indian Himalayas) which has been so far almost undescribed. The Sino-Tibetan languages Kinnauri and Navakat and the Indo-Aryan language Kinnauri Pahari, all spoken in Kinnaur, are described both individually and as parts of a multifaceted linguistic ecology that extends into the surrounding wider Himalayan region. The author combines traditional linguistic description and a quantitative computational procedure to disentangle genealogical and areal characteristics of the languages of Kinnaur.

This volume provides new insights on lying and (intentionally) misleading in and out of the courtroom, a timely topic for scholarship and society. Not all deceptive statements are lies; not every lie under oath amounts to perjury-but what are the relevant criteria? Taxonomies of falsehood based on illocutionary force, utterance context and speakers' intentions have been debated by linguists, moral philosophers, social psychologists and cognitive scientists. Legal scholars have examined the boundary between actual perjury and garden-variety lies. The fourteen previously unpublished essays in this book apply theoretical and empirical tools to delineate the landscape of falsehood, half-truth, perjury, and verbal manipulation, including puffery, bluffing, and bullshit. The papers in this collection address conceptual and ethical aspects of lying vs. misleading and the correlation of this opposition with the Gricean pragmatic distinction between what is said and what is implicated. The questions of truth and lies addressed in this volume have long engaged the attention of scholars in linguistics, philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, organizational research, and the law, and researchers from all these fields will find this book of interest.

Using the Principles and Parameters framework, Henry analyses various syntactic constructions in Belfast English, and compares them with their Standard English counterparts to gain insight into both English syntax and general syntactic theory. The study will also make linguistic data on Belfast English readily available for the first time.

The Bible is one of the books that has aroused the most interest throughout history to the present day. However, there is one topic that has mostly been neglected and which today constitutes one of the most emblematic elements of the visual culture in which we live immersed: the language of colour. Colour is present in the biblical text from its beginning to its end, but it has hardly been studied, and we appear to have forgotten that the detailed study of the colour terms in the Bible is essential to understanding the use and symbolism that the language of colour has acquired in the literature that has forged European culture and art. The objective of the present study is to provide the modern reader with the meaning of colour terms of the lexical families related to the green tonality in order to determine whether they denote only color and, if so, what is the coloration expressed, or whether, together with the chromatic denotation, another reality inseparable from colour underlies/along with the chromatic denotation, there is another underlying reality that is inseparable from colour. We will study the symbolism that/which underpins some of these colour terms, and which European culture has inherited. This lexicographical study requires a methodology that allows us to approach colour not in accordance with our modern and abstract concept of colour, but with the concept of the ancient civilations. This is why the concept of colour that emerges from each of the versions of the Bible is studied and compared with that found in theoretical reflection in both Greek and Latin. Colour thus emerges as a concrete reality, visible on the surface of objects, reflecting in many cases, not an intrinsic quality, but their state. This concept has a reflection in the biblical languages, since the terms of colour always describe an entity (in this sense one can say that they are embodied) and include within them a wide chromatic spectrum, that is, they are mostly polysemic. Structuralism through the componential analysis, although providing interesting contributions, had at the same time serious shortcomings when it came to the study of colour. These were addressed through the theoretical framework provided by cognitive linguistics and some of its tools such as: cognitive domains, metonymy and metaphor. Our study, then, is one of the first to apply some of the contributions of cognitive linguistics to lexicography in general, and particularly with reference to the Hebrew, Greek and Latin versions of the Bible. A further novel contribution of this research is that the meaning is expressed through a definition and not through a list of possible colour terms as happens in dictionaries or in studies referring to colour in antiquity. The definition allows us to delve deeper and discover new nuances that enrich the understanding of colour in the three great civilizations involved in our study: Israel, Greece and Rome.

In Pauline Language and the Pastoral Epistles Jermo van Nes questions the common assumption in New Testament scholarship that language variation is necessarily due to author variation. By using the so-called Pastoral Epistles (PE) as a test-case, Van Nes demonstrates by means of statistical linguistics that only one out of five of their major lexical and syntactic peculiarities differs significantly from other Pauline writings. Most of the PE's linguistic peculiarities are shown to differ considerably in the Corpus Paulinum, but modern studies in classics and linguistics suggest that factors other than author variation account equally if not better for this variation. Since all of these explanatory factors are compatible with current authorship hypotheses of the PE, Van Nes suggests to no longer use language as a criterion in debates about their authenticity.

The Old English Case System. Case and Argument Structure Constructions by Kirsten Middeke is a Construction Grammar account of Old English argument structure that integrates modern cognitive corpus linguistics and traditional philological work. This is the first major study on Old English morphosyntax from a constructional perspective, based on findings from various strands of theoretical linguistics, including generative approaches, constructionist accounts, quantitative linguistics, and many more. It argues for a new take on historical comparative syntax, a field which has been dormant for quite a while but might see a new boost through the ideas presented here.