This book systematically investigates what follows about meaning in language if current views on the limited, or even redundant, role of linguistic semantics are taken to their radical conclusion. Focusing on conditionals, the book defends a wholly pragmatic, wholly inferential account of meaning - one which foregrounds a reasoning subject's individual state of mind. The topics discussed in the book include conceptual content, internalism and externalism, the semantics-pragmatics distinction, meaning holism and explicit versus implicit communication. These topics and the author's analysis of conditionals will allow the reader to engage with some traditional and current research in linguistics, philosophy and psychology.

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.

This book brings together an interdisciplinary group of academic researchers in order to examine how and to what extent the challenge of language revitalisation should be reassessed and reconceptualised to take account of our fast-changing social context. The period of four decades between 1980 and 2020 that straddled the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first is widely regarded as one that witnessed a series of fundamental social, economic and political transformations. Many societies have become increasingly individualistic, mobile and diverse in terms of ethnicity and identity; their economies have become increasingly interconnected; and their governance structures have become increasingly complex, incorporating a growing number of different levels and actors. In addition, rapid advancements with regard to automated, digital and communication technology have had a far-reaching impact on how people interact with each other and participate in society. The chapters in this book aim to advance an agenda of key questions that should concern those working in the field of language revitalisation over the coming years, and the volume will be of interest to students, scholars and policy-makers in related areas including sociolinguistics, education, sociology, geography, political science, law, economics, Celtic studies, and communication technology.

Increasingly, creolization is used to analyse cultural complexity, 'cosmopolitanism, hybridity, syncretism and mixture, prominent and growing characteristics of the global age. The Creolization Reader captures all these meanings. Attention to the creolizing world has enormous potential as a suggestive way of describing our complex world and the diverse societies in which we all now live. The Creolization Reader illuminates old creole societies and emerging cultures and identities in many parts of the world. Areas covered include Latin America, the Indian Ocean, the Caribbean, West, South and East Africa, the Pacific and the USA. Our authors provide an authoritative review, conspectus and critique of many aspects of creolization. This book is divided into five main sections covering the following key topics:

concepts and Theories

the Creolized World

popular Culture

kindred Concepts

the Creolizing World

Each section begins with a brief introduction summarizing the key arguments of the contributors, while the editors provide a provocative and comprehensive introduction to the debates provoked by creolization theory. The Creolization Reader is multi-disciplinary and includes 28 readings and original contributions drawn mainly from history, sociology, development studies, anthropology and cultural studies.

The auxiliary do (tun) is one of the most-discussed constructions in West Germanic. In German, there is a striking opposition between modern standard German, where the construction is virtually ungrammatical and considered to be "sub-standard" by most speakers, whilst, as this book shows, the construction is attested in all modern dialects as well as historic stages since 1350. In answering why auxiliary tun is ungrammatical in modern standard German, it is shown that the stigmatization of tun was caused by prescriptive grammarians in the 16th-18th century. Furthermore it is shown that the stigmatization of tun as "bad" German occurred in clearly discernible stages, from bad poetry (1550-1680), to bad written German (1680-1740) and finally to "bad" German in general (after 1740), thus providing evidence that the history of the standardization of German needs to take into account direct metalinguistic comments from prescriptive grammarians. The effectiveness of linguistic purism is also shown by evidence from two other constructions, namely polynegation and double perfect.

One of the controversial philosophical issues of recent years has been the question of the nature of logical and mathematical entities. Platonist or linguistic modes of explanation have become fashionable, whilst abstrac tionist and constructionist theories have ceased to be so. Beth and Piaget approach this problem in their book from two somewhat different points of view. Beth's approach is largely historico-critical, although he discusses the nature of heuristic thinking in mathematics, whilst that of Piaget is psycho-genetic. The major purpose of this introduction is to summarise some of the main points of their respective arguments. In the first part of this book Beth makes a detailed study of the history of philosophical thinking about mathematics, and draws our attention to the important role played by the Aristotelian methodology of the demon strative sciences. This, he tells us, is characterised by three postulates: (a) deductivity, (b) self-evidence, and (c) reality. The last postulate asserts that the primitive notions of a demonstrative science must have reference to a domain of real entities in order to have significance. On the Aristote lian view discursive reasoning plays a major role in mathematics, whilst pure intuition plays a somewhat subordinate one."

This book provides a snapshot of the field of language acquisition at the beginning of the 21st Century. It represents the multiplicity of approaches that characterize the field and provides a review of current topics and debates, as well as addressing some of the connections between sub-fields and possible future directions for research.

"Genre, Relevance and Global Coherence" seeks to explain how discourse types or genre may influence the addressee's inferential processes in identifying the communicator's intention. It examines global coherence-based accounts as well as proposals based on Gricean pragmatics, arguing that the key to a solution lies in the interplay of the cognitive and communicative principles of relevance proposed by Sperber & Wilson. It unravels intricate relations between cognitive mechanisms, communicative principles and expectations of relevance in complex ostensive stimuli such as texts.

The future of English linguistics as envisaged by the editors of Topics in English Linguistics lies in empirical studies which integrate work in English linguistics into general and theoretical linguistics on the one hand, and comparative linguistics on the other. The TiEL series features volumes that present interesting new data and analyses, and above all fresh approaches that contribute to the overall aim of the series, which is to further outstanding research in English linguistics.

Brivic argues that James Joyce's fiction anticipated Jacques Lacan's idea that the perceivable world is made of language and that Joyce, Lacan, and Zižek all carry forward a psychological and linguistic groundwork for social reform.

Ten years ago, a group of researchers investigating the processing of morphological information met in the south of France to discuss how morphology affects word recognition, perception and production from a cross-linguistic perspective. This special issue is the fourth volume to expose the results of this on-going research effort.

The volume begins with a comprehensive review of the nature of morphological priming, followed by a series of experimental papers that examine morphological processing in a variety of languages such as English, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Chinese, and Spanish. The parallel monitoring of morphological processing in reading, speech perception and production, using a wide array of experimental methods such as masked priming, long-term priming, the monitoring of eye movements, and the recording of electrophysiological activity, provides converging evidence regarding the nature of morphemic representations in the various languages.

The cross-linguistic perspective that characterizes the research effort of the present volume, as well as the previous ones, is used to investigate whether there are qualitative differences in the principles of lexical organization and lexical processing in different alphabetic orthographies that arise from qualitative differences in morphological structure.

This book describes the current psycholinguistic research being conducted internationally on better understanding second language (L2) writing. It is based on an experimental research tradition arising from recent progress made in methodology, technology and theory in both native and second language writing. It is unique in that it is specifically geared to better understanding L2 writing and how it relates to L1 writing research in the psycholinguistic tradition.

Open publication> The Languages and Linguistics of Europe: A Comprehensive Guide is part of the multi-volume reference work on the languages and linguistics of the continents of the world. The book supplies profiles of the language families of Europe, including the sign languages. It also discusses the areal typology, paying attention to the Standard Average European, Balkan, Baltic and Mediterranean convergence areas. Separate chapters deal with the old and new minority languages and with non-standard varieties. A major focus is language politics and policies, including discussions of the special status of English, the relation between language and the church, language and the school, and standardization. The history of European linguistics is another focus as is the history of multilingual European 'empires' and their dissolution. The volume is especially geared towards a graduate and advanced undergraduate readership. It has been designed such that it can be used, as a whole or in parts, as a textbook, the first of its kind, for graduate programmes with a focus on the linguistic (and linguistics) landscape of Europe.

This volume examines linguistics, language acquisition, and language variation, emphasizing their implications for teacher education and language education. A majority of the essays consider issues in second language acquisition, dealing specifically with learners and instructors, or concentrating on the larger social and societal context in which learning and acquisition occur.

Topics highlighted include the current and often controversial debate over bilingual education, language variation, and the past, present, and future role of linguistics in language pedagogy.

Most treatments of speech deal with descriptions of sounds and how they are made. This book goes further: the idea is to develop a framework for a fully explanatory theory of speech production integrating with speech perception. Emphasis is placed on the difference between static models (primarily descriptive) and dynamic models that attempt to show how the basic linguistics and phonetics are related in an actual human speaker/listener.

Ever since Darwin, the world has been struggling with the mystery of human diversity. As the historian Peter Bowler has written, an evolutionary interpretation of the history of life on the earth must inevitably extend itself to include the origins of the human race. But this has proved to be a difficult and controversial task. Understanding human origins means accounting not only for the obvious differences between people and cultures around the world, but also for the unity of "Homo sapiens" as a single biological species. As Stephen Jay Gould has said, flexibility is the hallmark of human evolution. Because so much of who we are is learned rather than genetically predetermined, a satisfactory understanding of human evolution--to use old parlance--must account both for the human body and the human soul.

At any single moment of time, it is always possible to find instances where people seem to live in their own world, speak in their own distinctive ways, and have their own exclusive cultural traits and practices. Over the course of time, however, it is not so easy to find places where these dimensions of our diversity stay together. The essays in this collection show why we must stop thinking that race, language, and culture go together, and why we should be wary of the commonsense beliefs that human races exist and that people who speak different languages come from fundamentally different biological lineages.

Trade schools, universities, and programs for international students have begun to experiment with Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) as a viable pedagogy for instruction, as the pedagogy of CLIL increasingly gains recognition as a practical form of language and content education in Europe and beyond, and its application in instructional settings becomes more diverse. Corresponding with CLIL's growth, this book focuses on foreign language use during peer interactions in a new CLIL setting. It particularly concentrates on how to conduct research when the focus is on learner interactions. The theoretical background, research methods, and research instruments are explained in a brief and understandable manner. This book is intended for those interested in CLIL and peer interactions and includes a framework and ideas for investigating new CLIL contexts in a practical manner allowing undergraduate and graduate students to conduct their own research in these settings.

One we've learned it as children few of us think much of the alphabet and its familiar sing-song order. And yet the order if the alphabet, that simple knowledge that we take for granted, plays a major role in our adult lives. From the school register to the telephone book, from dictionaries and encyclopaedias to library shelves, our lives are ordered from A to Z. Long before Google searches, this magical system of organization gave us the ability to sift through centuries of thought, knowledge and literature, allowing us to sort, to file, and to find the information we have, and to locate the information we need.

In A Place for Everything, acclaimed historian Judith Flanders draws our attention to both the neglected ubiquity of the alphabet and the long, complex history of its rise to prominence. For, while the order of the alphabet itself became fixed very soon after letters were first invented, their ability to sort and store and organize proved far less obvious. To many of our forebears, the idea of of organizing things by the random chance of the alphabet rather than by established systems of hierarchy or typology lay somewhere between unthinkable and disrespectful.

A Place for Everything fascinatingly lays out the gradual triumph of alphabetical order, from its possible earliest days as a sorting tool in the Great Library of Alexandria in the third century BCE, to its current decline in prominence in our digital age of Wikipedia and Google. Along the way, the reader is enlightened and entertained with a wonderful cast of unknown facts, characters and stories from the great collector Robert Cotton, who denominated his manuscripts with the names of the busts of the Roman emperors surmounting his book cases, to the unassuming sixteenth- century London bookseller who ushered in a revolution by listing his authors by 'sirname' first.

The Routledge Handbook of Language Contact provides an overview of the state of the art of current research in contact linguistics. Presenting contact linguistics as an established field of investigation in its own right and featuring 26 chapters, this handbook brings together a broad range of approaches to contact linguistics, including: experimental and observational approaches and formal theories; a focus on social and cognitive factors that impact the outcome of language contact situations and bilingual language processing; the emergence of new languages and speech varieties in contact situations, and contact linguistic phenomena in urban speech and linguistic landscapes. With contributions from an international range of leading and emerging scholars in their fields, the four sections of this text deal with methodological and theoretical approaches, the factors that condition and shape language contact, the impact of language contact on individuals, and language change, repertoires and formation. This handbook is an essential reference for anyone with an interest in language contact in particular regions of the world, including Anatolia, Eastern Polynesia, the Balkans, Asia, Melanesia, North America, and West Africa.

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.

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks, as well as studies that provide new insights by approaching language from an interdisciplinary perspective. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.

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.