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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Historical & comparative linguistics
Why, when, and how did speakers of ancient Greek borrow words from Latin? Which words did they borrow? Who used Latin loanwords, and how? Who avoided them, and why? How many words were borrowed, and what kind of word? How long did the loanwords survive? Until now, attempts to answer such questions have been based on incomplete and often misleading evidence, but this study offers the first comprehensive collection of evidence from papyri, inscriptions, and literature from the fifth century BC to the sixth century AD. That collection – included in the book as a lexicon of Latin loanwords – is examined using insights from linguistic work on modern languages to provide new answers that often differ strikingly from earlier ones. The analysis is accessibly presented, and the lexicon offers a firm foundation for future work in this area.
The Skills of Document Use: From Text Comprehension to Web-Based Learning examines functional literacy from a psychological standpoint. It offers a comprehensive discussion of the cognitive skills involved in reading, comprehending, and making use of complex documents. Understanding such skills is important at times when printed and online information systems are being used more and more extensively for work, education, and personal development. It is also very important to understand how the Internet transforms the way we search, read, and comprehend documents. The core purpose of the book is to inform research scientists, students, and instructional designers about recent advances in the psychology of document comprehension. Whereas reading research has mostly focused on basic cognitive processes involved in simple comprehension tasks, this book extends the psychology of reading to more complex, real-life comprehension activities. The book draws a link between research areas usually separated: language psychology, on the one hand, and Web design, on the other hand. The work also attempts to bridge a gap between research in cognitive psychology and practical issues in the design and use of information systems. It invites the reader to a guided journey from theoretical models of text comprehension to concrete issues in the design and use of instructional technology. The book will be of interest to students specializing in psychology, language, communication, and publishing. It will also be useful to all those who are involved in the training of literacy skills, or in the design of information systems accessible to a wide audience.
Language and Region:
Affording hands-on practical experience of textual analysis, this book is essential reading for students of English language studies.
The multi-volume "Etymological Dictionary of Egyptian by Gabor
Takacs "promises to open a new chapter in Egyptian and Afro-Asiatic
comparative lingustics" (A. Dolgopolsky, in "Israel Oriental
Studies). The amount of material offered, the extensive treatment
of scholarly discussions on each item, and the insights into the
connections of Egyptian and the related Afro-Asiatic
(Semito-Hamitic) languages, including many new lexical parallels,
will make it an indispensable tool for comparative purposes and an
unchallenged starting point for every linguist in the field.
The Gothic Language: Grammar, Genetic Provenance and Typology, Readings, now in its second edition, is designed for students and scholars of the oldest known language with a sizeable corpus, belonging to the English, German, Dutch, and Scandinavian language clade. The Gothic language is seminal to the history of the study of each of these languages. Gothic grammar is a standard text in courses on Indo-European and general linguistics since Gothic serves as the prototype Germanic language in the study of historical comparative world language typologies. Particularly pan-Germanic is the innermost core of the grammar, the genetic phonology, which is reconstructed within the most recent approaches of laryngeal and glottalic theories. Most challenging to traditional viewpoints is the total novel restructuring of Gothic synchronic phonology via current theoretical approaches such as underspecification theory and optimality theory. While the Gothic inflectional morphology is rendered in full paradigmatic display, its understanding is enhanced by the application of underspecification theory and the use of inheritance networks, a computational linguistic concept. Brief "Syntactic Considerations" concluding the grammar present a network of head-driven phrase structures. This book also brings the reader into the ambience of the fourth-century Goths. Readings from the Wulfilian Bible, the extant eight pages of the Skeireins, together with a glossary, definitions of linguistic technical terms, a bibliography, and an index complete this volume.
Linguistic theory has recently experienced a shift in its conceptual approach from the formulation of descriptively adequate accounts of languages to the definition of principles and parameters claimed to reflect the initial structure of the language faculty, often termed Universal Grammar (UG). Linguistic experience is said to have the effect of guiding the child/linguist in fixing the unspecified parameters of U G to determine the grammar of his/her language. The study of anaphora has been of central concern as it addresses directly the innateness vs. experience issue. On the one hand, it is a part of all natural languages that is largely under determined by the data, and must therefore be included in the characterization of the initial state of the language faculty. On the other hand, although the principles that govern anaphora do not exhibit extreme variations across languages, a child/linguist must solve language specific issues for his/her language based on linguistic experience. This book examines a set of linguistic structures from both a theoretical and an experimental perspective. The purpose is to xv PREFACE xvi determine the roles of innateness and of experience in the devel opment of a child's theory of anaphora for his/her language."
Carol Myers-Scotton has edited a collection of essays that covers the choice of one style of English over another in everything from Bible translations to "surprise in poetry" to supervisor-worker interactions on the automobile assembly line. An important theme developed to varying degrees in these papers is the notion that speakers and writers, as rational actors, exploit the unmarked-marked opposition regarding audience expectations so as to convey messages of intentionality charged with social or psychological import.
This book is about philology and its relevance over time. The compilation foregrounds a multi-faceted field of research that has dealt with the relationship between language, literature and culture for over 2,000 years. The main thread of this volume, comprising ten scholarly essays, is to show that philology as an academic field and a scholarly perspective understood in its widest sense as the profound understanding of language, literature and culture does matter in the twenty-first century, that is to say, in our own time characterized by globalization and digitalization. The contributions reflect the many dimensions of philology and its plurality, interdisciplinarity and the humanities. The volume seeks to illustrate various ways of engaging with philology. Here lies the true nature of philology, and this is why it still matters. Contributors are Massimiliano Bampi, Maja Backvall, Jonas Carlquist, Odd Einar Haugen, Helge Jordheim, Karl G. Johansson, Lino Leonardi, Harry Loennroth, Outi Merisalo, Marita Akhoj Nielsen and Nestori Siponkoski.
This special issue samples the state of the art in research that attempts to describe the functional units that intervene between low-level perceptual processes and access to whole-word representations in long-term memory during visual word recognition. The different articles in this special issue cover various candidates for such processing units, defined in terms of orthographic, phonological, or morphological information. The most obvious candidate in terms of orthographic information is the individual letter. One article examines the way in which a word's component letters are combined in the correct order during early orthographic processing. At a slightly higher level of representation, several articles provide a focus on the role of syllabic representations in the processing of polysyllabic words, and examine the extent to which such syllabic representations are orthographic or phonological in nature. One article provides evidence concerning the role of interfixes in the processing of compound words, thus addressing the issue of how morphological representations exert their influence on the word recognition process. Altogether, the papers included in this special issue report a series of challenging findings that cannot be ignored by current computational models of visual word. Evidence is provided in favour of more flexible orthographic coding schemes that are typically used in models of visual word recognition. The syllabic effects that are reported call for a syllabic level of representation that is absent in the vast majority of computational models, and the effects of paradigmatic analogy in processing morphologically complex words should help limit the possible ways of representing morphological information in the visual word recognition system.
Ten leading scholars provide exacting research results and a
reliable and accessible introduction to the new field of optimality
theoretic pragmatics. The book includes a general introduction that
overviews the foundations of this new research paradigm. The book
is intended to satisfy the needs of students and professional
researchers interested in pragmatics and optimality theory, and
will be of particular interest to those exploring the interfaces of
formal pragmatics with grammar, semantics, philosophy of language,
information theory and cognitive psychology.
When I entered her shop, my friend turned to me and said: "Ara, che si dice?" ('Hey there, how you doing?'). This was not a full-fledged sentence in Italian, as she had thrown a little Sicilian word in - ara. It was a greeting, of course, but also a way of expressing her surprise at seeing me there, and a way of prompting me to start our conversation. The fact she used Sicilian had a clear meaning too: the vernacular indicates a shared social identity. In a nutshell, this book analyses the cases of Sicilian ara and mentri to understand the complexity of discourse markers: what functions they perform, how they evolve historically, and what their social meaning is in a bilingual speech community.
The Intertext series has been specifically designed to meet the needs of contemporary English Language Studies. Working with Texts: A Core Introduction to Language Analysis (second edition 2001) is the foundation text, which is complemented by a range of 'satellite titles. These provide students with hands-on practical experience of textual analysis through special topics, and can be used individually or in conjunction with Working with Texts. Language Change: examines the way external factors have influenced and are influencing language change, focusing on how changing social contexts are reflected in language use explores the attitudes, values and assumptions that shape the way we use language looks at how language change operates within different genres, such as problem pages, sports reports and recipes provides lively examples from everyday communication, including letters, emails, postcards and text messages includes a unit on how new words are formed and features a full glossary.
In this brisk and accessible history, sinologist Thomas O. Hollmann explains the development of the Chinese writing system and its importance in literature, religion, art, and other aspects of culture. Spanning the earliest epigraphs and oracle bones to writing and texting on computers and mobile phones today, Chinese Script is a wide-ranging and versatile introduction to the complexity and beauty of written text and calligraphy in the Chinese world. Hollmann delves into the origins of Chinese script and its social and political meanings across millennia of history. He recounts the social history of the writing system; written and printed texts; and the use of writing materials such as paper, silk, ink, brush, and printing techniques. The book sheds light on the changing role of literacy and education; the politics of orthographic reform; and the relationship of Chinese writing to non-Han Chinese languages and cultures. Hollmann explains the inherent complexity of Chinese script, demonstrating why written Chinese expresses meaning differently than oral language and the subtleties of the relationship between spoken word and written text. He explores calligraphy as an art, the early letter press, and other ways of visually representing Chinese languages. Chinese Script also provides handy illustrations of the concepts discussed, showing how ideographs function and ways to decipher them visually.
Ivan N. Petrov's The Development of the Bulgarian Literary Language: From Incunabula to First Grammars, Late Fifteenth-Early Seventeenth Century examines the history of the first printed Cyrillic books and their role in the development of the Bulgarian literary language. In the literary culture of the Southern Slavs, especially the Bulgarians, the period that began at the end of the fifteenth century and covered the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is often seen as a foreshadowing of the pre-national era of modern times. In particular, the centuries-old manuscript tradition was gradually replaced by the Cyrillic printed book, which-after the incunabula of Krakow and Montenegro-was published in such centers as Targoviste, Prague, Venice, Serbian monasteries, Vilnius, Moscow, Zabludow, Lviv, Ostroh, and many others. Petrov shows how the study of old Slavic prints is closely linked to the processes that determined the emergence of modern literary languages in the Slavia Orthodoxa area, including the influence of the liturgical Church Slavonic language shared by the Orthodox Slavs, which was increasingly standardized and codified at that time. The perspective of a language historian brings new light to the complex and multidimensional issues of this important transitional period of Slavic history and culture.
In a systematic presentation of Johnson's views on language, Johnson on Language: An Introduction addresses the problems inherent in the formation of style, as Johnson saw them, but also contains a detailed discussion of his opinions concerning the proper responsibilities of the lexicographer. The wide-ranging discussion takes in the linguistic controversies of classical antiquity, the resumption and elaboration of various classical ideas in the Renaissance period, and the way in which Johnson's own ideas have been shaped by his reading of important documents of these eras.
A revival of interest in morphology has occurred during recent years. The Yearbook of Morphology series, published since 1988, has proven to be an eminent support for this upswing of morphological research, since it contains articles on topics which are central in the current theoretical debates which are frequently referred to. The Yearbook of Morphology 1999 focuses on diachronic morphology, and shows, in a number of articles by renowned specialists, how complicated morphological systems develop in the course of time. In addition, this volume deals with a number of hotly debated issues in theoretical morphology: its interaction with phonology (including Optimality Theory), the relation between inflection and word formation, and the formal modeling of inflectional systems. A special feature of this volume is an article on morphology in sign language, a very new and exciting area of research in linguistics. The relevant evidence comes from a wide variety of languages, amongst which Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages are prominent. Audience: Theoretical, descriptive, and historical linguists, morphologists, phonologists, and psycholinguists will find this book of interest.
Foundations of Bilingual Memory provides a valuable update to the field of bilingual memory and offers a new psychological perspective on how the bilingual mind encodes, stores, and retrieves information. This volume emphasizes theoretical issues, such as classic memory approaches, Compound-Coordinate Bilingualism, Bilingual Dual Coding Theory, and Working Memory, about which relatively little has been written in the bilingual domain. Also covered are: * The neuropsychology of bilingual memory * Applied issues (such as false memories and bilingualism, emotion and memory) * Empirical findings in support of the uniqueness of the different memory systems of the bilingual individual * Connectionist models of bilingualism The volume represents the first book of its kind, in stressing a memory perspective with regards to bilingual speakers. It can serve as an advanced text for both undergraduate and graduate level students and it will be of great interest to the growing number of bilingual teachers and university classes interested in understanding the bilingual mind, as well as in preparing teachers to work with the bilingual individual.
American lexicography has a distinguished and familiar tradition. Elwyn (1859) is intended as a corrective response to the excessive identification of Americanisms, but in fact represents what one might term the 'traditionalist' position. Fallows (1883) is significant as a treatment of Americanisms and Briticisms for a general audience. Norton (1890) is a specific application to American political life.
Part of the series on American English from 1781 to 1921, Volume VIII includes a guide to the phonetics of American English with the purpose to provide a rational method of examining pronunciation, the most important of the practical aspects of speech. Also included is American English (1921) that reflects the progressive development of the author's ideas on the subject over a forty-year period. It consists of a critical discussion of works on Americanisms, a list of 'exotic' or supposed Americanisms which appear in the primary collections of Americanisms, a list of 'real' Americanisms which do not appear in those works, a list of misunderstood Americanisms, and finally a bibliography.
Available individually, or as part of the eight-volume set "American English: 1781-1921." For a complete list of volume titles in this set, see list for "American English: 1781-1921" [ISBN: 0-415-27964-X].
Available individually, or as part of the eight-volume set "American English: 1781-1921." For a complete list of volume titles in this set, see list for "American English: 1781-1921" [ISBN: 0-415-27964-X]. |
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