This collection of essays grew out of the workshop 'Existence: Semantics and Syntax', which was held at the University of Nancy 2 in September 2002. The workshop, organized by Ileana Comorovski and Claire Gardent, was supported by a grant from the Reseau de Sciences Cognitives du Grand Est ('Cognitive Science Network of the Greater East'), which is gratefully acknowledged. The ?rst e- tor wishes to thank Claire Gardent, Fred Landman, and Georges Rebuschi for encouraging her to pursue the publication of a volume based on papers presented at the workshop. Among those who participated in the workshop was Klaus von Heusinger, who joined Ileana Comorovski in editing this volume. Besides papers that developed out of presentations at the workshop, the volume contains invited contributions. We are grateful to Wayles Browne, Fred Landman, Paul Portner, and Georges Rebuschi for their help with reviewing some of the papers. Our thanks go also to a Springer reviewer for the careful reading of the book manuscript. We wish to thank all the participants in the workshop, not only those whose contributions appear in this volume, for making the workshop an int- active and constructive event. Ileana Comorovski Klaus von Heusinger vii ILEANA COMOROVSKI AND KLAUS VON HEUSINGER INTRODUCTION The notion of 'existence', which we take to have solid intuitive grounding, plays a central role in the interpretation of at least three types of linguistic constructions: copular clauses, existential sentences, and (in)de?nite noun phrases."

This volume contains a selection of papers which have been revised and extended for publication from two working groups held at conferences at Galway (1992) and Goteborg (1993) which celebrated the quincentenary of Columbus' discovery of America in 1492. The pre-Columbian period of language contact is covered by articles on Old Norse in the Faroes, Scotland and Ireland, the Shetland dialect and Norn, and placenames in Iceland and Greenland. The articles on the post-Columbian period are wide-ranging and cover, in the Scandinavian context, the Scandinavian emigration, American Swedish, American Finnish, Swedish-Spanish and various aspects of Norwegian in America and also in Spitzbergen; in the British colonial context, English dialects in New England, Scottish Gaelic in Nova Scotia and Scots in North America (Maryland, the Appalachians and Virginia); in the context of the later continental mass emigration, American Dutch, Texas German, Croatian and Italian. Two papers deal with reverse emigration, that of Sicilian and Calabrian dialects, and the special case of Krio in Sierra Leone."

This book introduces readers to the principles of a fairly new branch of psychology - positive psychology - and demonstrates how they can be applied in the context of second language acquisition in a natural environment and in instructed foreign language (FL) learning. It focuses both on the well-being and success of the learner and the professional and personal well-being of the teacher. Further, the book stresses the importance of the positive emotions and character strengths of those involved in the process of language learning and teaching, as well as the significant role played by enabling institutions such as school and, at the micro-level, individual FL classes.

This book provides an overview of the linguistic situation in Brunei, including a historical overview and a synopsis of the current education system. It investigates pronunciation, particularly the intelligibility of Brunei English and the vowels of Brunei Mandarin, and it also describes the acquisition of Malay grammar, Malay politeness strategies, the use of language online, language in the courts, a comparison of Malay and English newspapers, the language of shop signs, the status of Dusun, and lastly, English literature in Brunei.

In this volume, the author investigates and argues for, a particular answer to the question: What is the right way to logically analyze modalities from natural language within formal languages? The answer is: by formalizing modal expressions in terms of predicates. But, as in the case of truth, the most intuitive modal principles lead to paradox once the modal notions are conceived as predicates. The book discusses the philosophical interpretation of these modal paradoxes and argues that any satisfactory approach to modality will have to face the paradoxes independently of the grammatical category of the modal notion. By systematizing modal principles with respect to their joint consistency and inconsistency, Stern provides an overview of the options and limitations of the predicate approach to modality that may serve as a useful starting point for future work on predicate approaches to modality. Stern also develops a general strategy for constructing philosophically attractive theories of modal notions conceived as predicates. The idea is to characterize the modal predicate by appeal to its interaction with the truth predicate. This strategy is put to use by developing the modal theories Modal Friedman-Sheard and Modal Kripke-Feferman.

How does a country find itself 'at war' over spelling? This book focuses on a crucial juncture in the post-communist history of the Czech Republic, when an orthographic commission with a moderate reformist agenda found itself the focus of enormous public controversy. Delving back into history, Bermel explores the Czech nation's long tradition of intervention and its association with the purity of the language, and how in the twentieth century an ascendant linguistic school - Prague Functionalism - developed into a progressive but centralizing ideology whose power base was inextricably linked to the communist regime. Bermel looks closely at the reforms of the 1990s and the heated public reaction to them. On the part of language regulators, he examines the ideology that underlay the reforms and the tactics employed on all sides to gain linguistic authority, while in dissecting the public reaction, he looks both at conscious arguments marshaled in favor of and against reform and at the use, conscious and subconscious, of metaphors about language. Of interest to faculty and students working in the area of language, cultural studies, and history, especially that of transitional and post-communist states, this volume is also relevant for those with a more general interest in language planning and language reform. The book is awarded with the "The George Blazyca Prize in East European Studies 2008".

This edited collection explores the processes of second language learning and teaching from a psycholinguistic perspective. Authored by leading experts in the field, the book includes studies focusing on theoretical, empirical and practical aspects of second and foreign language education. Part One offers contributions devoted to a range of learner-related factors, dealing with affective and cognitive variables, the process of reading and the acquisition of lexis. Part Two brings together papers related to teacher awareness of second language instruction that focus on conversational styles, fostering intercultural pragmatics, teacher job satisfaction, the development of instructional materials and challenges of teacher training in different contexts. It is of interest to researchers as well as graduate and postgraduate students seeking fresh inspirations for their own empirical investigations of the ways in which second and foreign languages are taught and learned.

Empirical and Analytical Advances in the Study of English Language Change continues the project of initiating and energizing the conversations among historians of the English language fostered by the series of conferences on studying the history of the English language (SHEL), begun in 2000 at UCLA. It follows in the footsteps of three high-profile SHEL-based collections of peer-reviewed research papers and point-counterpoint commentaries. In the current volume, the editors invited contributors to reflect upon their approaches and practices in undertaking historical studies, focusing particularly on the methods deployed in selecting and analyzing data. The essays in this volume represent interests in the study of linguistic change in English that range across different periods, genres, and aspects of the language and show different approaches and use of evidence to deal with the subject. They also represent the current state of research in the field and the nature of the debates in which scholars and historians engage as regards the nature of the evidence adduced in the explanation of change and the robustness of heuristics. The editors share a strong interest in examining the evidence that informs and grounds research in their fields at the same time as interrogating the heuristics employed by their colleagues for the histories they present. The contributions to the volume give expression to these interests. Contributors are: Richard Hogg (to whose memory the volume is dedicated), William Labov, Elizabeth Traugott, Rob Fulk, Thomas Cable, Jennifer Tran-Smith, Charles Li, Christina Fitzgerald, David Denison, Christopher Palmer, Don Chapman, Graeme Trousdale, Joan Beal, Connie Eble, Stefan Dollinger and Raymond Hickey. The volume is of interest to scholars and postgraduate and research students in the history of English, English philology, and (English) historical linguistics.

These are exciting times to be living in. It is just before Jesus Christ returns to be the King of kings and Lord of lords. There are many signs that point to this, and I discuss a few of them in this book.

I'm not going to tell you when this happens, because Jesus didn't know when he was here on earth. He said it was not for us to know. But I'm sure He knows now, as He sits at the right hand of God the Father.

One of the ways we know that the time is near is that knowledge has increased dramatically in the last fifty years. Ultimately it all points to God as the creator of the universe. We have the internet to dispense our knowledge, and it is pretty much worldwide. This is one of the ways that an imposter known as the Anti-Christ will take over a worldwide government that has been established and set up his own regime. Everyone will know this is their leader, because it will be broadcast by satellite.

My advice is to read this book to decipher what the Bible says about these exciting times we are living in. As one of my favorite contemporary Christian music groups, Whiteheart, said in the title of one of their albums, "Read the book, don't wait for the movie."

A comprehensive investigation of notions of "time" in deuterocanonical and cognate literature, from the ancient Jewish up to the early Christian eras, requires further scholarship. The aim of this collection of articles is to contribute to a better understanding of "time" in deuterocanonical literature and pseudepigrapha, especially in Second Temple Judaism, and to provide criteria for concepts of time in wisdom literature, apocalypticism, Jewish and early Christian historiography and in Rabbinic religiosity. Essays in this volume, representing the proceedings of a conference of the "International Society for the Study of Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature" in July 2019 at Greifswald, discuss concepts and terminologies of "time", stemming from novellas like the book of Tobit, from exhortations for the wise like Ben Sira, from an apocalyptic time table in 4 Ezra, the book of Giants or Daniel, and early Christian and Rabbinic compositions. The volume consists of four chapters that represent different approaches or hermeneutics of "time:" I. Axial Ages: The Construction of Time as "History", II. The Construction of Time: Particular Reifications, III. Terms of Time and Space, IV. The Construction of Apocalyptic Time. Scholars and students of ancient Jewish and Christian religious history will find in this volume orientation with regard to an important but multifaceted and sometimes disparate topic.

The book provides strong evidence that research on the cognitive processes from arithmetic thought to algebraic thought should take into consideration the socio-cultural context. It is an important contribution to the literature on linguistic structure in comparative studies related to Chinese student mathematics learning.

This book not only makes a great contribution to research in mathematics education, the findings of this study also addressed insightful approaches and thoughts of understanding the development of algebraic thinking in cultural contexts for classroom teachers. Using written Chinese language from different theoretical references provided wonderful approaches for understanding student algebra cognitive development in a different way and calls educators for to pay special attention to an epistemological and linguistic view of algebraic development. The findings inform classroom teachers that the cultural context plays an important role in student learning mathematics. A typical analysis of the cognitive dimension involved in some in the historical and cultural contexts is a great resource for classroom teachers.

I really enjoyed reading this book and learned a lot from its compelling analysis.

Shuhua An, Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Program in Mathematics Education, California State University, Long Beach

In Introduction to Amazonian Quichua Language and Life: Grammar, Culture, and Discourse Patterns from Pastaza and Upper Napo Seakers, Janis B. Nuckolls and Tod D. Swanson discuss two varieties of Quichua, an indigenous Ecuadorian language. Drawing on their linguistic and anthropological knowledge, extensive fieldwork, and personal relationships with generations of speakers from Pastaza and Napo communities, the authors open a door into worlds of intimate meaning that knowledge of Quichua makes accessible. Nuckolls and Swanson link grammatical lessons with examples of naturally occurring discourse, traditional narratives, conversations, songs, and personal experiences to teach readers about the languages' structures and discourse patterns and speakers' sensory depictions, ecological aesthetics, and emotional perspectives.

With Psycholinguistics in its fifth decade of existence, the second edition of the Handbook of Psycholinguistics represents a comprehensive survey of psycholinguistic theory, research and methodology, with special emphasis on the very best empirical research conducted in the past decade. Thirty leading experts have been brought together to present the reader with both broad and detailed current issues in Language Production, Comprehension and Development.

The handbook is an indispensible single-source guide for professional researchers, graduate students, advanced undergraduates, university and college teachers, and other professionals in the fields of psycholinguistics, language comprehension, reading, neuropsychology of language, linguistics, language development, and computational modeling of language. It will also be a general reference for those in neighboring fields such as cognitive and developmental psychology and education.
*Provides a complete account of psycholinguistic theory, research, and methodology
*30 of the field's foremost experts have contributed to this edition
*An invaluable single-source reference

Verbs denoting 'to give' have developed grammatical meanings in many languages of the world. The present study analyses the grammaticalization of give in causative and modal constructions in the closely related Slavic languages Russian, Polish and Czech. Adopting a corpus driven approach, it takes departure from a detailed analysis of the use of these constructions in large reference corpora. This synchronic approach is supplemented by an analysis of the use of these constructions in Old Church Slavonic and by diachronic corpus-based accounts of the developments in Czech and Polish. The study provides thorough descriptions of the syntax and semantics of causative constructions, ranging from permissive (letting someone do something) and reflexive permissive (letting something be done to oneself) to factitive causative (having something done by someone). It traces the development and synchronic status of modals that have developed out of reflexive permissives in Polish and Czech. General issues discussed in the study include polarity sensitivity in causatives, types of causee coding, the emergence of non-agreeing diathesis structures in Polish and the role of language contact with German.

Prominent researchers from the US, Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Spain contribute experimental reports on language development of children who are acquiring Spanish. The chapters cover a wide range of dimensions in acquisition: comprehension and production; monolingualism and bilingualism; typical development, children who are at risk and children with language disorders, phonology, semantics, and morphosyntax. These studies will inform linguistic theory development in clinical linguistics as well as offer insights on how language works in relation to cognitive functions that are associated with when children understand or use language. The unique data from child language offer perspectives that cannot be drawn from adult language. The first part is dedicated to the acquisition of Spanish as a first or second language by typically-developing children, the second part offers studies on children who are at risk of language delays, and the third part focuses on children with specific language impairment, disorders and syndromes.

The present volume presents scholarly study into Old French as it is practiced today, in all of its forms, within a variety of theoretical frameworks, from Optimality Theory to Minimalism to Discourse Analysis. Many of the chapters are corpus-based, reflecting a new trend in the field, as more electronic corpora become available. The chapters contribute to our understanding of both the synchronic state and diachronic evolution, not only of Old French, but of language in general. Its breadth is extensive in that contributors pursue research on a wide variety of topics in Old French focusing on the various subsystems of language. All examples are carefully glossed and the relevant characteristics of Old French are clearly explained, which makes it uniquely accessible to non-specialists and linguists at all levels of training. "

The essays of this volume employ diverse strategies for conceptualizing the history of English as at once chaotic and yet amenable to circumscribed analyses that incorporate a broad view of language change. Several of the world's leading scholars of the English language contribute to the overall perspective that an elaboration of linguistic, cultural, and social contexts and a renewed emphasis on the concrete historical conditions of language change are necessary to approach some long-standing obstacles in the study of the history of the English language. Designed for students, teachers, and scholars of the English language, Managing Chaos: Strategies for Identifying Change in English (SHEL III) presents studies on all periods of the English language in a variety of theoretical and methodological modes. Highlights include Anatoly Liberman's sweeping comparative revision of the history of palatalized and velarized consonants in English; William Kretzschmar's (et al.) wittily illuminating study of a suburban Atlanta, Georgia town that epitomizes the specific ways in which inter-regional linguistic variation can be maintained while local social factors drive dramatic change on an intra-regional level; Lesley Milroy's innovative analysis of recent unitary changes in global Englishes that cannot be accounted for by classic Labovian models that situate language change within small, close networks of speakers who mediate variation in face-to-face interactions, an observation that leads Milroy to propose two distinct but cross-influencing levels of social dynamics in language change. All of the essays of this volume include careful critiques of the construction of our present understanding of the history of English, thus marking the path behind while shining a light on the way ahead for the future of the discipline.

The New Cockney provides a sociolinguistic account of speech variation among adolescents in the 'traditional' East End of London. Embedded in its social context, it focuses on the interaction and social practices within a single community and highlights some of the possible mechanisms for language change.

Following the collapse of the former Yugoslavia, Croatian was declared to be a separate language, distinct from Serbian, and linguistic issues became highly politicized. This book examines the changing status and norms of the Croatian language and its relationship to Croatian national identity, focusing on the period after Croatian independence.

The book is an invitation to a genealogical understanding of the ideological and discursive processes that have emerged out of the regulation of linguistic minorities issues within an international context and, more precisely, at the United Nations. It highlights the contradictions, limits and possibilities in the elaboration of international measures within the universalist framework of human rights. The book also emphasizes the paradoxes between national interests and the elaboration of an international community - paradoxes in which minority issues fundamentally question the homogeneity of the state. It shows that despite the shift from national spaces to international ones, the fears of nation-states for linguistic minorities remain. Finally, the book reveals the importance of the reproduction of the interests of nation-states within an international organization and the reproduction of power through the legal management and regulation of minority rights in general, and those of linguistic minorities in particular. Through its presentation of the history of the United Nations, its vision of the protection of linguistic minorities, the underlying ideologies that have emerged, as well as the limits and possibilities of action, the book contributes to a better understanding of the complexity of the protection of linguistic minorities and the role of language ideologies within an international context.

Time is the most fundamental category of human cognition and action, and all human languages have developed many devices to express it. These include verbal categories, such as tense and aspect, but also adverbials, particles, and principles of discourse organisation. This book is intended as a tutorial for the study of how time is expressed in natural languages. Its chapters take the reader through a number of foundational issues, such as the various notions of time and the various means to express it; other chapters are devoted to more specific questions, such as the acquisition of time, its modelling in formal semantics and in computational linguistics, or how its expression can be empirically investigated.

This book examines the alternation between accusative-dative and dative-accusative order in Old Florentine clitic clusters and its decline in favor of the latter. Based on an exhaustive analysis of data collected from medieval Florentine and Tuscan texts we offer a novel analysis of the rise of the variable order, the transition from one order to the other, and the demise of the alternation that relies primarily on iconicity and analogy. The book employs exophoric pragmatic iconicity, a language-external iconic relationship based on similarity between linguistic structure and the speaker/writer's conceptualization of reality, and endophoric iconicity, a language-internal iconic relationship where the iconic ground is construed between linguistic signs and structures. Analogy is viewed as a productive process that generalizes patterns or extends grammatical rules to formally similar structures, and obtains the form of the analogical relationship between the masculine singular definite article and the third person singular accusative clitic, which shared the same phonotactically constrained distribution patterns. The data indicate that exophoric pragamatic iconicity exploits and maintains the alternation, whereas endophoric iconicity and analogy conspire to end it.

This monograph on biblical linguistics is a highly specialized, pragmatic investigation of the controversial question of 'foregrounding' - the deviation from some norm or convention - in Old Testament narratives. The author presents and examines the two main sources of pragmatic foregrounding: events or states deviating from well-established schemata, structures of reader expectation that can be manipulated by the narrator to highlight specific 'chunks' of discourse; and evaluative devices, which are used by the narrator to indicate to the reader the point of the story and direct its interpretation. Cotrozzi critiques the particular evaluative device known as the 'historic present', a narrative strategy that employs the present tense to describe past event. He tests two main theories that support this device by using a cross-linguistic model of the historical present drawing upon a variety of languages. Cotrozzi ultimately refutes these theories with a thorough examination and detailed refutation. He concludes with a study of a particular Hebraic verb as a particular marker of represented perception, a technique whereby the character's perceptions are expressed directly from its point of view. Over the last 30 years this pioneering series has established an unrivaled reputation for cutting-edge international scholarship in Biblical Studies and has attracted leading authors and editors in the field. The series takes many original and creative approaches to its subjects, including innovative work from historical and theological perspectives, social-scientific and literary theory, and more recent developments in cultural studies and reception history.

This monograph is a detailed linguistic analysis of the discourse of German nationalism, colonialism and Anti-Semitism using a methodological framework devised by Ruth Wodak et al., the Discourse Historical Approach. It pays particular attention to the discourse strategies, argumentation topoi and metaphors used by a selection of representative authors of both political propaganda and fiction. The study shows how the analysis of linguistic and social behaviour and the connection between them sheds light on the nature and effects of human behaviour, and on the motives and reasoning behind human actions. Within the context of nationalism and prejudiced behaviours, the construction in discourse of individual and group 'self-images' and the discursive means of contrasting these with 'other-images' is of major significance