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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Historical & comparative linguistics
This book is intended to make up-to-date information and opinion about Francophonie accessible to English-speaking readers, and to assess how well the international movement of French-speaking nations is placed to face the future. 'Francophonie' can be defined in three ways: as the development and distribution of the French language; as an international movement of nearly fifty countries and regions, similar to, but showing major differences from the Commonwealth; and as a set of cultural and political values which can be shared by other nations for which French is not the only or the main means of communication. Students of French, of international relations, of sociolinguistics and the sociology of language, of politics and economics, and those interested in questions of cultural and linguistic identity will find the book invaluable as a source of reference, as an assessment of the effectiveness of the Francophone approach to world problems, and as an evaluation of France's own role in Europe and Africa.
The contributors to this volume reference a shared, longitudinal corpus of spontaneous conversation elicited in natural settings from speakers with moderate to late moderate Alzheimer's Disease, utilizing other collections as appropriate, to analyze conversation, discourse and written text by and about Alzheimer's speech. Cross-disciplinary contributions from the USA, Canada, New Zealand and Germany, representing linguistics, gerontology, geriatric nursing, computer science, and communications disorders report on empirically-based investigations of social and pragmatic language competencies and strategies retained by AD patients which could ground communication enhancements or interventions.
This book explores the relationship between conversation analysis and applied linguistics, demonstrating how the analysis of institutional talk can contribute to professional practice. With a foreword by Paul Drew, the core of the collection brings together researchers from a wide range of applied areas, dealing with topics such as language impairment and speech therapy, medical general practice, retailing, cross-cultural training, radio journalism, higher education and language teaching and learning.
This book examines the impact of ancient DNA research and scientific evidence on our understanding of the emergence of Indo-European languages in prehistory. Offering cutting-edge contributions from an international team of scholars, it considers the driving forces behind the Indo-European migrations during the 3rd and 2nd millenia BC. The volume explores the rise of the world's first pastoral nomads the Yamnaya Culture in the Russian Pontic steppe including their social organization, expansions, and the transition from nomadism to semi-sedentism when entering Europe. It also traces the chariot conquest in the late Bronze Age and its impact on the expansion of the Indo-Iranian languages into Central Asia. In the final section, the volumes consider the development of hierarchical societies and the origins of slavery. A landmark synthesis of recent, exciting discoveries, the book also includes an extensive theoretical discussion regarding the integration of linguistics, genetics, and archaeology, and the importance of interdisciplinary research in the study of ancient migration.
Filling a gap in the literature currently available on the topic, this edited collection is the first examination of the interplay between urbanization, language variation and language change in fifteen major Arab cities. The Arab world presents very different types and degrees of urbanization, from well established old capital-cities such as Cairo to new emerging capital-cities such as Amman or Nouakchott, these in turn embedded in different types of national construction. It is these urban settings which raise questions concerning the dynamics of homogenization/differentiation and the processes of standardization due to the coexistence of competing linguistic models. Topics investigated include: History of settlement The linguistic impact of migration The emergence of new urban vernaculars Dialect convergence and divergence Code-switching, youth language and new urban culture Arabic in the Diaspora Arabic among non-Arab groups. Containing a broad selection of case studies from across the Arab world and featuring contributions from leading urban sociolinguistics and dialectologists, this book presents a fresh approach to our understanding of the interaction between language, society and space. As such, the book will appeal to the linguist as well as to the social scientist in general.
The Habsburg Empire often features in scholarship as a historical example of how language diversity and linguistic competence were essential to the functioning of the imperial state. Focusing critically on the urban-rural divide, on the importance of status for multilingual competence, on local governments, schools, the army and the urban public sphere, and on linguistic policies and practices in transition, this collective volume provides further evidence for both the merits of how language diversity was managed in Austria-Hungary and the problems and contradictions that surrounded those practices. The book includes contributions by Pieter M. Judson, Marta Verginella, Rok Stergar, Anamarija Lukic, Carl Bethke, Irina Marin, Agoston Berecz, Csilla Fedinec, Istvan Csernicsko, Matthaus Wehowski, Jan Fellerer, and Jeroen van Drunen.
The present study is the first large-scale investigation of the syntax of Old Japanese (mainly eighth-century Japanese). It gives a detailed account of complement clauses and related constructions in Old Japanese, based on an exhaustive investigation of the extant text corpus. The aim is twofold: first, to give a synchronic description of the types of complementation which are found in this period and of the system they are part of. Second, to address the diachronic issues of the origin of the Old Japanese complement system and more widely the pre-history of complementation in Japanese. Janick Wrona's study will be of interest to historical linguists and Japanologists alike.
Whenever a new language is learned, a new culture is also learned. Swiderski provides instructive examples of language learning situations by describing multilingual events using more than twenty of the world's languages. All aspects of language learning from the physical environment of the classroom to the perceptions of events and emotions that languages express are considered. Australian aboriginal languages and Native American languages are analyzed to illustrate the world of differences of which English, Chinese, and Russian are also a part. The politics of language teaching and the effect of language policy in the classroom are brought out in concrete examples. This study will be of interest to language teachers and the general international community as well.
The aim of this book is two-fold: to offer a retrospective view on the past thirty years of research on aspectuality and temporality as well as to develop new perspectives on the future development of the field. Articles contain overviews of the development of the field and/or present the state of the art of current research, suggesting new and upcoming lines of research. An important theme throughout the book is typological variation, and the relevance of empirical data for theory formation. Together the articles in the book take a wide crosslinguistic scope including aspectual analyses of English, and two varieties of English: African American English and Colloquial Singapore English, Italian, French, Bulgarian, Czech, Mandarin Chinese, West-Greenlandic, Wakashan languages, and Nakh-Daghestanian languages. Audience: Scholars and students of aspectuality in semantics and at the syntax-semantics interface.
This book provides a wide-ranging review of urban problems and constitutes a major contribution to the mounting public debate that these problems are attracting. Many of the problems - of social and economic decay - are not new; indeed they are perennial problems of urban societies. As the complexities and interdependencies of modern life have increased, so has the resolve to combat the environmental and social ills to which these give rise. The particular focus of this volume is on the 'framework' of urban problems - the changing demographic, social and economic structure, the shortage of land and the transport needs of a highly complex industrial society. A mass of facts and figures are neatly and succinctly marshalled to provide a clear picture of the problems. Stress is laid on the essentially political nature of these problems and the alternative solutions. In essence, urban problems are problems of social injustice, of disadvantage and of lack of power. This book was first published in 1973.
Introduction, W.A. Robson PART ONE 1. The scope of the services and the responsible authorities in Greater London PART TWO 2. Services for the Old 3. Services for the physically handicapped 4. Services for the mentally handicapped 5. Services for the socially handicapped 6. Housing and the Welfare Services PART THREE 7. The reorganization of the services in the new london boroughs
The Extent of the Literal develops a strikingly new approach to metaphor and polysemy in their relation to the conceptual structure. In a straightforward narrative style, the author argues for a reconsideration of standard assumptions concerning the notion of literal meaning and its relation to conceptual structure. She draws on neurophysiological and psychological experimental data in support of a view in which polysemy belongs to the level of words but not to the level of concepts, and thus challenges some seminal work on metaphor and polysemy within cognitive linguistics, lexical semantics and analytical philosophy.
The role of orthography in reading and writing is not a new topic of inquiry. For example, in 1970 Venezky made a seminal contribution with The Structure of English Orthography in which he showed how both sequential redundancy (probable and permissible letter sequences) and rules of letter-sound correspondence contribute to orthographic structure. In 1972 Kavanagh and Mattingly edited Language by Eye and by Ear which contained important linguistic studies of the orthographic system. In 1980 Ehri introduced the concept of orthographic images, that is, the representation of written words in memory, and proposed that the image is created by an amalgamation of the word's orthographic and phonological In 1981 Taylor described the evolution of properties. orthographies in writing systems-from the earliest logographies for pictorial representation of ideas to syllabaries for phonetic representation of sounds to alphabets for phonemic representation of sounds. In 1985 Frith proposed a stage model for the role of orthographic knowledge in development of word recognition: Initially in the logographic stage a few words can be recognized on the basis of partial spelling information; in the alphabetic stage words are recognized on the basis of grapheme-phoneme correspondence; in the orthographic stage spelling units are recognized automatically without phonological mediation. In 1990 Adams applied connectionism to an analysis of the orthographic processing of skilled readers: letter patterns emerge from the association units linking individual letters.
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.
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.
Language and Region:
Affording hands-on practical experience of textual analysis, this book is essential reading for students of English language studies.
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.
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.
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.
Learn the Essentials of Biblical Greek So You Can Study the New Testament More Deeply This newly revised third edition of Greek for the Rest of Us by Greek instructor William Mounce is crash-course on "Greek for the rest of us" that acquaints the reader with the essentials of the language so they can study the New Testament more deeply. Readers will gain a sound knowledge of the fundamentals of Greek and learn how to use tools that will add muscle to their Bible studies. In Greek for the Rest of Us readers will learn to: Read and pronounce Greek words Learn the fundamentals of the Greek noun and verb system Conduct effective Greek word studies Learn the basics of Greek exegesis for biblical interpretation Understand why translations are different Read better commentaries Be comfortable using reverse and traditional interlinears Understand the information displayed by biblical software For anyone interested in seriously studying the New Testament, Greek for the Rest of Us is your gateway to learning the skills and tools you need to accomplish your goals. You can enhance your learning experience even more with the Greek for the Rest Us Workbook (sold separately) which contains exercises to help practice and reinforce the concepts you are learning in the main book.
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. |
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