The volume Questions in Discourse - Vol. 2 Pragmatics collects original research on the role of questions in understanding text structure and discourse pragmatics. The in-depth studies discuss the effects of focus, questions and givenness in unalternative semantics, as well as the role of scalar particles, question-answer pairs and prosody from the perspective of Questions under Discussion. Two contributions compare the discourse-structuring potential of Questions under Discussion and rhetorical relations, whereas another adds a perspective from inquisitive semantics. Some contributions also look at understudied languages. Together, the contributions allow for a better understanding of question-related pragmatic and discourse-semantic phenomena, and they offer new perspectives on the structure of texts and discourses.

This book is a general introduction to the structures of the different medieval Romance vernaculars most commonly known as Old or Medieval Spanish, as preserved in texts from Spain from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries. After discussing general methodological questions concerning the description and analysis of an earlier historical stage of a modern language, the individual chapters in the first part of the book describe the orthography, phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, and vocabulary of medieval Hispano-Romance. Steven N. Dworkin offers the first systematic description of the language in English, and compares its structures with those found in the modern variety. In the second part of the book, the features of medieval Hispano-Romance are exemplified in an anthology of selected texts, one from each of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, accompanied by linguistic commentary. The volume will be of interest to scholars and students of Romance linguistics, Spanish historical linguistics, and Spanish medieval literary and cultural studies.

In a series of cross-cultural investigations of word meaning, Cliff Goddard and Anna Wierzbicka examine key expressions from different domains of the lexicon - concrete, abstract, physical, sensory, emotional, and social. They focus on complex and culturally important words in a range of languages that includes English, Russian, Polish, French, Warlpiri and Malay. Some are basic like men, women, and children or abstract nouns like trauma and violence; others describe qualities such as hot, hard, and rough, emotions like happiness and sadness, or feelings like pain. This fascinating book is for everyone interested in the relations between meaning, culture, ideas, and words. They ground their discussions in real examples from different cultures and draw on work ranging from Leibniz, Locke, and Bentham, to popular works such as autobiographies and memoirs, and the Dalai Lama on happiness. The book opens with a review of the neglected status of lexical semantics in linguistics. The authors consider a range of analytical issues including lexical polysemy, semantic change, the relationship between lexical and grammatical semantics, and the concepts of semantic molecules and templates. Their fascinating book is for everyone interested in the relations between meaning, culture, ideas, and words.

The Aramaic texts among the Dead Sea Scrolls are among the most important discoveries for the history of Aramaic and for the background of early Judaism and Christianity. They constitute a “missing link” between Biblical Aramaic and the later Aramaic of the targums and midrashic literature. Among them are the oldest texts we have of the Book of Enoch and Tobit, as well as the earliest Aramaic translation of a portion of Scripture, the Targum of Job. Other previously unknown texts such as the Genesis Apocryphon and the Aramaic Levi Document have opened up many new avenues of research on the literature of early Judaism, and the dialect itself is chronologically the one nearest to the origins of Christianity. Now, for the first time, there is a comprehensive dictionary of all the Aramaic texts from the 11 Qumran caves, from a noted specialist in Qumran Aramaic. It is the first dictionary in any language devoted solely to this important Aramaic corpus and contains a wealth of detail, including definitions, extensive citations of the sources, discussions of difficult passages, revised readings, and a bibliography. It will be an indispensable resource to anyone interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls, the literature of early Judaism and Christianity, and the Aramaic language.

In The Genitive Case in Dutch and German: A Study of Morphosyntactic Change in Codified Languages, Alan K. Scott offers an account of the tension that exists between morphosyntactic change and codification, focusing on the effect that codification has had on the genitive case and alternative constructions in both languages. On the basis of usage data from a wide variety of registers, from the 16th century to the present day, Alan K. Scott demonstrates that codification has preserved obsolescent morphological genitive constructions in Dutch and German while suppressing their potential replacements, and shows that, despite its association with norm-conformant language, the genitive is used to a surprisingly large extent in informal early modern Dutch and modern German sources.

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.

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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.

Reflects a consensus that the investigation of words in the mind offers a unique opportunity to understand both human language ability and general human cognition. Brings together key perspectives on the fundamental nature of the representation and processing of words in the mind.
This thematic volume covers a wide range of views on the fundamental nature of representation and processing of words in the mind and a range of views on the investigative techniques that are most likely to reveal that nature.
*Provides an overview of issues and developments in the field
*Uncovers the processses of word recognition
*Develops new models of lexical processing

This monograph presents the first comprehensive diachronic account of copular and passive verb constructions in Old and Middle English. The mysterious loss of the high-frequency verb weorthan 'become' is explained as a casualty of changing word order in narrative during Middle English. The merger of is 'is' and bith 'shall be, is generally' into a single suppletive verb is related to the development of a general analytic future shall be. The co-occurrence of multiple changes led to become and wax crossing a threshold of similarity with existing copulas, from which they analogically adopted full productivity in one fell swoop. In explaining each of these changes, the book goes beyond the level of the verb and its complements, drawing attention to analogical networks and the importance of a verb's embeddedness in clausal and textual environments. Using a radically usage-based approach, treating syntax as emerging from (changing) frequencies, Peter Petre draws attention to general principles of constructional change, including but not limited to grammaticalization and lexicalization. He proposes novel parallelisms between linguistic and ecological evolution. Going beyond the view of language change as propagating only in social interaction, Petre explains how each individual's mental grammar can be seen as a dynamic ecosystem with hierarchical environments (clausal niches, textual habitats). In this view, the interconnectedness of seemingly unrelated changes, itself resulting from cognitive economy principles, is arguably more decisive in lexical change than is functional competition.

Routledge Introductions to Applied Linguistics is a series of introductory level textbooks covering the core topics in Applied Linguistics, primarily designed for those beginning postgraduate studies, or taking an introductory MA course as well as advanced undergraduates. Titles in the series are also ideal for language professionals returning to academic study.

The books take an innovative 'practice to theory' approach, with a 'back-to-front' structure. This leads the reader from real-world problems and issues, through a discussion of intervention and how to engage with these concerns, before finally relating these practical issues to theoretical foundations. Additional features include tasks with commentaries, a glossary of key terms, and an annotated further reading section.

In this book Philip Seargeant surveys varieties of English existing within the world today, and the debates and controversies surrounding its present forms, functions and status in diverse world contexts. It examines how English has evolved to become a global language and looks at the political and cultural history that has influenced this evolution.

Beginning with a discussion of real-life challenges relating to world Englishes that are faced by language professionals particularly in the contexts of language education and language planning the book explores and illustrates the ways in which the actual use and management of English, as well as the beliefs and ideologies associated with it, play an increasingly important role in contemporary globalized society.

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 seeks to answer the questions: why do grammars change, and why is the rate of such change so variable? A principal focus is on changes in English between the Anglo-Saxon and early modern periods. The author frames his analysis in a comparative framework with extended discussions of language change in a wide range of other Indo-European languages. He deploys Chomsky's minimalist framework in a fruitful marriage of comparative and theoretical linguistics within an argument that will be accessible to practitioners in both fields.

Dialect, Culture, and Society in Eastern Arabia is a three-volume study of the Arabic dialects spoken in Bahrain by its older generation in the mid-1970s, and the socio-cultural factors that produced them. Volume 1: Glossary, published in 2001, lists all the dialectal vocabulary, with extensive contextual exemplification, and cross-referenced to other lexica, which occurred in the complete set of texts recorded during fieldwork. Volume 2: Ethnographic Texts presents a selection of these texts, transcribed, annotated and translated, and with detailed background essays, covering major aspects of the pre-oil culture of the Gulf and the initial stages of the transition to the modern era: pearl diving, agriculture, communal relations, marriage, childhood, domestic life, work. Excerpts from local dialect poems concerned with these subjects are also included. Volume 3: Phonology, Morphology, Syntax, Style is based on an extensive archive of recorded material, gathered for its ethnographic as well as its purely linguistic interest.

The volume Questions in Discourse - Vol. 1 Semantics contains a comprehensive overview of the semantic analysis of questions and their role in structuring discourse, next to a series of in-depth contributions on individual aspects of question meanings. The expert contributions offer novel accounts of semantic phenomena such as negation and biased questions, question embedding, exhaustivity, disjunction in alternative questions, and superlative quantification particles in questions. Some accounts are modelled in the framework of inquisitive semantics, whereas others employ alternative semantics, and yet others point to the discourse-structuring potential of marked questions. All contributions are easily accessible against the background of the general introduction. Together, they give an excellent overview of current trends in question semantics.

The task of reconstructing the reinforced demonstrative paradigm for early Nordic has been called "impossible" by the eminent Einar Haugen. In The History of the Reinforced Demonstrative in Nordic, Eric T. Lander aims to accomplish exactly this, by way of an exhaustive study of the pronoun's attestations in the Viking Age runic inscriptions, which are the earliest forms of this item to be recorded in Scandinavia. The detailed picture of regional variation that emerges is then used to inform reconstructions of the paradigm from Proto-Nordic to Common Nordic. The book represents the first serious attempt in historical-comparative linguistics to grapple with the morphological development of the North-West Germanic reinforced demonstrative since the work of 19th-century scholars like Sophus Bugge.

This volume brings different perspectives to bear on the the architecture of the mind and the relationship between language and cognition. It considers how information is linked in the mind between different cognitive and expressive levels - so that people can, for example, talk about what they see and act upon what they hear - and how these linkages are and need to be constrained. It focuses in particular on the perception and representation of spatial structure. In the opening chapter, the editors address the general issues underlying current research and set each chapter in context. The book is then divided into four parts. The first two discuss the properties of the conceptual to syntactic structure interface and the conceptual to spatial structure interface. Part three examines constraints on the lexical interface and the different kinds of cognitive information in word representations. Part four considers how the neural architecture of the brain constrains mapping relations between different kinds of cognitive information. The authors are psychologists and linguists.

The Idea of Writing is an exploration of the versatility of writing systems. This volume, the second in a series, is specifically concerned with the problems and possibilities of adapting a writing system to another language. Writing is studied as it is used across linguistic and cultural borders from ancient Egyptian, Cuneiform and Korean writing to Japanese, Kharosthi and Near Eastern scripts. This collection of articles aims to highlight the complexity of writing systems rather than to provide a first introduction. The different academic traditions in which these writing systems have been studied use linguistic, socio-historical and philological approaches that give complementary insights of the complex phenomena.