Approaches to Language, Culture and Cognition aims to bring cognitive linguistics and linguistic anthropology closer together, calling for further investigations of language and culture from cognitively-informed perspectives against the backdrop of the current trend of linguistic anthropology.

Talking Proper is a history of the rise and fall of the English accent as a badge of cultural, social, and class identity. Lynda Mugglestone traces the origins of the phenomenon in late eighteenth-century London, follows its history through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and charts its downfall during the era of New Labour. This is a witty, readable account of a fascinating subject, liberally spiced with quotations from English speech and writing over the past 250 years.

The grammar presents a full decription of Pali, the language used in the Theravada Buddhist canon, which is still alive in Ceylon and South-East Asia. The development of its phonological and morphological systems is traced in detail from Old Indic. Comprehensive references to comparable features and phenomena from other Middle Indic languages mean that this grammar can also be used to study the literature of Jainism.

This book explores pedagogical concepts, metaphors and images of non-white, non-western researchers and research students on the inter/nationalization of education. Specifically, this book draws on the intellectual resources of China and India to explore the pedagogical dynamics and dimensions of the localization/globalization of education with non-Western characteristics. It introduces theoretic-linguistic non-Western concepts from the Tamil, Sanskrit and Chinese languages for use in Western, English-only education and redefines the intellectual basis for internationalising education. Debating whether 'international education' is Western-centric in terms of its privileging and promotion of Euro-American theoretical knowledge, this book contends that the internationalisation of Western-centric education can benefit from the intellectual power and powerfully relevant theorising performed by non-Western international students. It formulates a democratic vision for the internationalisation of education, with the potential to create transnational solidarity and constitute a forum for mobilising debates about global knowledge and power structures. It also provides key tools to use non-Western theoretic-linguistic tools and modes of critique in research undertaken in Anglophone Western universities.

This is the first systematic attempt to trace the beginnings of modern literary Yiddish, an issue of great significance in the linguistic, literary, and social history of the Yiddish language. The eighteenth century marked the turning point in the history of literary Yiddish, a period of rapid linguistic assimilation to German and Dutch in the West and, by sharp contrast, the increasing cultural autonomy of Eastern European Jewry. Books printed in the West reflected the impact of New High German and contemporary Western Yiddish. Books published in Eastern Europe, the new centre for Yiddish printing, used Eastern Yiddish both for new works and for new editions of old Yiddish works. Dr Kerler examines hitherto neglected Yiddish books from the period in order to analyse the linguistic changes manifest in both the transition and shift from old to nascent Modern Literary Yiddish within the broader context of genre and literary traditions and in the framework of Yiddish dialectology, grammar, and sociolinguistics. Many of the grammatical norms of nineteenth and early twentieth-century literary Yiddish are shown to have their origins in the eighteenth century. A major work of linguistic scholarship, The Origins of Modern Literary Yiddish is an important contribution to the study of the crystallization process of literary languages, highlighting in the case of Yiddish the dynamics of emergence in the absence of the usual governmental support.

Traditionally, anaphor resolution focused on structural cues of the antecedent. Recently, the interaction between discourse factors and information structure affecting antecedent salience has been more thoroughly explored. This volume depicts selected peer-reviewed research papers that tackle issues in anaphor resolution from theoretical, empirical and experimental perspectives. These collected articles present a wide spectrum of cross-linguistic data (Dutch, German, Spanish, Turkish, Yurakare) and also offer new results from L1 and L2 acquisition studies. Data interpretation span from typological to psycholinguistic viewpoints and are related to recent developments in linguistic theory. One data analysis puts the issue of anaphor resolution in a historical context. The experimental findings are complemented by reviews of the current literature on the role of discourse units. This volume gives a comprehensive overview of the state of discussion how the interaction between information structure and contextual discourse affects salience. That's why it will be welcomed by all linguists and psycholinguists who are theoretically and / or experimentally investigating several aspects of anaphor resolution.

This volume brings together some of the most recent developments in the field of experimental pragmatics, specifically empirical approaches to theoretical issues in presupposition theory. It includes studies of the online processing of presupposed content; investigations of the interpretive properties of presuppositions in various linguistic contexts; comparative perspectives relative to other aspects of meaning, such as asserted content and implicatures; cross-linguistic comparisons of presupposition triggers; and perspectives from language acquisition. Taken together, these novel contributions provide a snapshot of state-of-the art developments in this area and will serve as a point of reference for numerous emerging avenues of future work. It makes for an ideal set of readings for advanced university courses on experimental studies of meaning and is a must-read for anyone interested in experimental research on meaning in natural language.

With its 1.5 million words Blur is the biggest electronic corpus of nonstandard English. The present study describes the stages in the design, the compilation, and the editing of Blur and attempts to gauge its linguistic profit. This is done both from a theoretical perspective - blues poetry vs. natural speech, representativeness, validity - and from an analytical perspective in particular qualitative, quantitative, and comparative analyses of morphological, morphosyntactic, and syntactic features. The findings indicate that Blur provides an outstandingly rich and reliable documentation of the vernaculars spoken by African Americans between the Civil War and World War II. The more than 1,000 illustrative examples presented throughout this study attest to the correctness of this statement.

The scattered research history of the Old Frisian runic inscriptions dating to the early Medieval period (ca. AD 400-1000) calls for a comprehensive and systematic reprocessing of these objects within their socio-cultural context and against the backdrop of the Old English Runic tradition. This book presents an annotated edition of 24 inscriptions found in the modern-day Netherlands, England and Germany. It provides the reader with an introduction to runological methodology, a linguistic commentary on the features attested in the inscriptions, and a detailed catalogue which outlines the find history of each object and summarizes previous and new interpretations supplemented by pictures and drawings. This book additionally explores the question of Frisian identity and an independent Frisian runic writing tradition and its relation to the contemporary Anglo-Saxon runic culture. In its entirety, this work provides a rich basis for future research in the field of runic writing around the North Sea and may therefore be of interest to scholars of historical linguistics and early Medieval history and archaeology.

This book systematically examines the linguistic features and socio-cultural issues of 'Hong Kong English'. The author focuses on authentic data taken from the International Corpus of English (the Hong Kong component) and the Corpus of Global Web-based English to track the ways in which the English language in Hong Kong has been adapted by its users. She also analyses the emergence of new forms and structures in its grammar and discourse. While the phonetic and phonological aspects of this variety of English have been well documented, its grammatical peculiarities and social language use have been hitherto neglected. This book offers original insights into the grammatical and pragmatic/discoursal features of Hong Kong English and will therefore be of interest to those working in fields such as World Englishes and corpus linguistics.

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This book explores the usage patterns of a group of adversative and concessive conjunctions in English texts written by Chinese EFL learners and their native speaker counterparts. Focusing on probability profiles and systemic potentials, the study encompasses three stages and combines the strengths of two research methods - the corpus-based approach and text-based analysis - to examine the conjunctions under the theoretical framework of systemic functional linguistics and rhetorical structure theory. Starting with an overview of seventeen conjunctions across two corpora in terms of overall frequency, positional distribution and distribution of semantic categories, the book then offers a more detailed discussion of three individual conjunctions, highlighting the interconnections between 1) syntactic positions and co-occurrence patterns and 2) semantic relations encoded by these conjunctions. Lastly, it presents a case study of one full-length text taken from the learner corpus, applying rhetorical structure theory to provide new insights into the relevance of adversative and concessive relations to text structure. This comprehensive, in-depth analysis is both diagnostic and pedagogically informative.

This book discusses evolution of the human brain, the origin of speech and language. It covers past and present perspectives on the contentious issue of the acquisition of the language capacity. Divided into two parts, this insightful work covers several characteristics of the human brain including the language-specific network, the size of the human brain, its lateralization of functions and interhemispheric integration, in particular the phonological loop. Aboitiz argues that it is the phonological loop that allowed us to increase our vocal memory capacity and to generate a shared semantic space that gave rise to modern language. The second part examines the neuroanatomy of the monkey brain, vocal learning birds like parrots, emergent evidence of vocal learning capacities in mammals, mirror neurons, and the ecological and social context in which speech evolved in our early ancestors. This book's interdisciplinary topic will appeal to scholars of psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, biology and history.

Designed as a contribution to contrastive linguistics, the present volume brings up-to-date the comparison of German with its closest neighbour, Dutch, and other Germanic relatives like English, Afrikaans, and the Scandinavian languages. It takes its inspiration from the idea of a "Germanic Sandwich", i.e. the hypothesis that sets of genetically related languages diverge in systematic ways in diverse domains of the linguistic system. Its contributions set out to test this approach against new phenomena or data from synchronic, diachronic and, for the first time in a Sandwich-related volume, psycholinguistic perspectives. With topics ranging from nickname formation to the IPP (aka 'Ersatzinfinitiv'), from the grammaticalisation of the definite article to /s/-retraction, and from the role of verb-second order in the acquisition of L2 English to the psycholinguistics of gender, the volume appeals to students and specialists in modern and historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, translation studies, language pedagogy and cognitive science, providing a wealth of fresh insights into the relationships of German with its closest relatives while highlighting the potential inherent in the integration of different methodological traditions.

Quantification is central to human experience (cf. Aristotle's Organon): the most basic aspects of human life and reasoning involve quantity assessment. This study sheds lights on a highly frequent way to express quantification in Spanish, viz. the binominal quantifier (e.g. un aluvionN1 de llamadasN2 'a flood of calls') which assesses the quantity of N2 in terms of N1. This volume offers a corpus-based, cognitive-functional analysis of binominal quantifiers (BQ) in Spanish. The first part is dedicated to the development of BQs and starts from the assumption that BQs are cross-linguistically involved in grammaticalization. This monograph frames the history of BQs in Spanish in terms of constructional levels of change and highlights the complex interplay between analogical thinking and conceptual persistence. The second part motivates both the ample variation in the paradigm of quantifying nouns and their combinatorial pattern by the very same mechanism of conceptually-driven analogy. The study thus yields an innovative functional model of BQs in Spanish, in synchrony and in diachrony, with major implications for reference grammars and theory building.

In recent years research on comparative typology has led to reveal regularities and to formulate new constraints upon variation for a broad range of phenomena. As the amount of typological research increased, a growing interest arose for the implications that findings in the typological field might have on second language acquisition. Written by experts in the field of typology and/or second language acquisition, this volume addresses theoretical and empirical issues on structural domains such as relative clauses and possessive constructions as well as pragmatic considerations on information organization in learners productions.

This book presents a novel experimental approach to investigating the mental representation of linguistic alternatives. Combining theoretical and psycholinguistic questions concerning the nature of alternative sets, it sheds new light on the theory of focus and the cognitive mechanisms underlying the processing of alternatives. In a series of language comprehension experiments, the author shows that intonational focus and focus particles such as 'only' shape the representation of alternatives in a listener's mind in a fundamental way. This book is relevant to researchers interested in semantics, pragmatics, language processing and memory.

This study presents an overview of the management of language in Singapore. It focuses on the use of language as a resource and as a means of furthering national cohesion. The relative positions of the two major languages, Chinese and English, are traced from colonial times to this century, with reference to education, literature, and the emergence of distinctive local speech varieties. Major government interventions in the form of the Speak Mandarin Campaign and the Speak Good English Movement are discussed against a background of ongoing changes to the education system. A major theme is the influence of Lee Kuan Yew on language policy. Another is the need to strike a balance between the concerns of the different speech communities, and the significance of this balance for the future.

On the basis of synchronic and diachronic data analysis, the volume takes a close look at the synchronic layers of binominal size noun and type noun uses (a bunch/a load of X; a sort of X; a Y type of X) and reconsiders the framework of grammaticalization in view of issues raised by the phrases under discussion. As a result, a construction grammar-approach to grammaticalization is developed which does justice to the syntagmatic lexical, or collocational, reclustering observed in the data within an eclectic cognitive-functional approach.

Assertion is a term frequently used in linguistics and philosophy but rarely defined. This in-depth study surveys and synthesizes a range of philosophical, linguistic and psychological literature on the topic, and then presents a detailed account of the cognitive processes involved in the interpretation of assertions.

This book presents new perspectives on the study of Aspect and Modality in Chinese Historical Linguistics. Based on the international Workshop on Aspect and Modality in Chinese, the book includes the latest research findings in the field to make them available not only to specialists in Classical and Buddhist Chinese, but also to researchers and students of general linguistics and of the universals of language. It also discusses different aspects of the AM (Aspect-Modality) and the TAM (Tense-Aspect-Modality) system of Chinese. It provides a comprehensive overview of both of the universally related systems of aspect and modality. The first part of the book focuses on aspectual features of Chinese; these include basic studies on the syntactic representation of the aspectual structure of the verb phrase in Archaic Chinese, the aspectual function of different object constructions and their development, temporal features of the verb phrase, and the aspectual functions of no minalization processes. The second part includes articles highlighting different aspects of the modal system or the interplay between tense, aspect and modality in Chinese, including a survey on the history of studies on modality in Chinese and the modal and temporal aspectual/markers indicating future meanings, a specialized study on modal deontic verbs in the Buddhist Vinaya texts, the modal function of rhetorical questions in Buddhist Chinese, and a study on the diachronic development of the aspectual and modal system in Chinese.