This book focuses on some of the most important issues in historical syntax. In a series of close examinations of languages from old Egyptian to modern Afrikaans, leading scholars present new work on Afro-Asiatic, Latin and Romance, Germanic, Albanian, Celtic, Indo-Iranian, and Japanese. The book revolves around the linked themes of parametric theory and the dynamics of language change. The former is a key element in the search for explanatory adequacy in historical syntax: if the notion of imperfect learning, for example, explains a large element of grammatical change, it is vital to understand how parameters are set in language acquisition and how they might have been set differently in previous generations. The authors test particular hypotheses against data from different times and places with the aim of understanding the relationship between language variation and the dynamics of change. Is it possible, for example, to reconcile the unidirectionality of change predominantly expressed in the phenomenon of "grammaticalization," with the multidirectionality predicted by generativist approaches? In terms of the richness of the data it examines, the broad range of languages it discusses, and the use it makes of linguistic theory this is an outstanding book, not least in the contribution it makes to the understanding of language change.

Split constructions are widespread in natural languages. The separation of the semantic restriction of a quantifier from that quantifier is a typical example of such a construction. This study addresses the problem that such discontinuous strings exhibit--namely, a number of locality constraints, including intervention effects. These are shown to follow from the interaction of a minimalist syntax with a semantics that directly assigns a model-theoretic interpretation to syntactic logical forms. The approach is shown to have wide empirical coverage and a conceptual simplicity. The book will be of interest to scholars and advanced students of syntax and semantics.

This book offers a new perspective on selected discourses and texts bearing on the evolution of a distinctively American tradition of free speech. The author's approach privileges fallacy theory, especially the fallacy of ad socordiam, in a key Congressional debate in 1789 and other forms of verbal manipulation in newspaper editorials during the War of 1812. He argues that in order to understand James Madison's role in the evolution of a broad conception of freedom of speech, it is imperative to examine the nature of the verbal attacks targeted at him. These attacks are documented, analyzed with the concept of aggravated impoliteness, and used to demonstrate that it was Madison's toleration of criticism, even in wartime, that provided a foundation for a broad conception of freedom of speech. This book will be of interest to both scholars and lay readers with an interest in the application of discourse analysis and historical pragmatics to political debates, argumentation theory and fallacy theory, and the evolution of the concept of freedom of speech in the early years of the United States.

A WORKBOOK to Help You Learn the Essentials of Biblical Greek So You Can Study the New Testament More Deeply The Greek for the Rest of Us Workbook is a companion to Greek for the Rest of Us, Third Edition (sold separately) by William D. Mounce. This workbook provides exercises to help readers practice and review, so they learn the essentials of biblical Greek more effectively and can study the New Testament more deeply. Greek for the Rest of Us, Third Edition 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. Readers using the Greek for the Rest of Us Workbook in conjunction with Greek for the Rest of Us, Third Edition 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 The Greek for the Rest Us Workbook will enhance your learning experience with exercises to help you practice and reinforce the concepts you are learning in Greek for the Rest of Us, Third Edition.

Oxford Textual Perspectives is a new series of informative and provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production, and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations of both canonical and less well-known works.
Living through Conquest is the first ever investigation of the political clout of English from the reign of Cnut to the earliest decades of the thirteenth century. It focuses on why and how the English language was used by kings and their courts and by leading churchmen and monastic institutions at key moments from 1020 to 1220. English became the language of choice of a usurper king; the language of collective endeavour for preachers and prelates; and the language of resistance and negotiation in the post-Conquest period. Analysing texts that are not widely known, such as Cnut's two Letters to the English of 1020 and 1027, Worcester's Confraternity Agreement, and the Eadwine Psalter, alongside canonical writers like AElfric and Wulfstan, Elaine Treharne demonstrates the ideological significance of the native vernacular and its social and cultural relevance alongside Latin, and later, French.
While many scholars to date have seen the period from 1060 to 1220 as a literary lacuna as far as English is concerned, this book demonstrates unequivocally that the hundreds of vernacular works surviving from this period attest to a lively and rich textual tradition. Living Through Conquest addresses the political concerns of English writers and their constructed audiences, and investigates the agenda of manuscript producers, from those whose books were very much in the vein of earlier English codices to those innovators who employed English precisely to demonstrate its contemporaneity in a multitude of contexts and for a variety of different audiences.

In this volume, Ray Jackendoff and Jenny Audring embark on a major reconceptualization of linguistic theory as seen through the lens of morphology. Their approach, Relational Morphology, extends the Parallel Architecture developed by Jackendoff in Foundations of Language (2002), Simpler Syntax (2005), and Meaning and the Lexicon (2010). The framework integrates morphology into the overall architecture of language, enabling it to interact insightfully with phonology, syntax, semantics, and above all, the lexicon. The first part of the book situates morphology in the language faculty, and introduces a novel formalism that unifies the treatment of all morphological patterns, inflectional or derivational, systematic or marginal. Central to the theory is the lexicon, which both incorporates the rules of grammar and explicitly encodes relationships among words and among grammatical patterns. Part II puts the theory to the test, applying it to a wide range of familiar and less familiar morphological phenomena. Part III connects Relational Morphology with issues of language processing and language acquisition, and shows how its formal tools can be extended to a variety of linguistic and nonlinguistic phenomena outside morphology. The value of Relational Morphology thus lies not only in the fact that it can account for a range of morphological phenomena, but also in how it integrates linguistic theory, psycholinguistics, and human cognition.

This is the first full account of the making of John Jamieson's Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language. The dictionary was published in two volumes in 1808, with a two-volume Supplement following in 1825. Lists of Scots words had been compiled before, but Jamieson's was the first complete dictionary of the language. It was a landmark in the development of historical lexicography and was an inspiration for later lexicographers, including Sir James Murray, founding editor of the OED. Susan Rennie's account of Jamieson's work and the methods he developed interweaves biography, lexicography, and linguistic, social, and book history to present a rounded account of the man, his work, and his times. It is the first study to draw on Jamieson's correspondence and the surviving manuscript materials for the Dictionary and Supplement to reveal Jamieson's working methods and the important contributions made by Sir Walter Scott and others to his work.

Ever since Chomsky's Barriers, functional heads have been the privileged object of research in generative linguistics. But over the last two decades, two rival approaches have developed. The cartographic project, as represented by the collections in this Oxford series, considers evidence for a functional head in one language as evidence for it in universal grammar. On the other hand, minimalist accounts tend to consider structural economy as literally involving as few heads as possible. In the present volume, some of the most influential linguists who have participated in this long-lasting debate offer their recent work in short, self contained case studies. The contributions cover all the main layers of recently studied syntactic structure, including such major areas of empirical research such as grammaticalization and language change, standard and non-standard varieties, interface issues, and morphosyntax. Functional Heads attempts to map aspects of syntactic structure following the cartographic approach, and in doing so demonstrate that the differences between the cartographic approach and the minimalist approach are more apparent than substantial.

As the first volume of a two-volume set that reexamines nouns and verbs in Chinese, this book proposes the verbs-as-nouns theory, corroborated by discussions of the nature and relationship between nouns and verbs in Chinese. Seeking to break free from the shackles of Western linguistic paradigms largely based on Indo-European languages and to a great extent inappropriate for Chinese, this two-volume study revisits the nature of nouns and verbs and relevant linguistic categories in Chinese to unravel the different relationships between nouns and verbs in Chinese, English, and other languages. It argues that Chinese nouns and verbs are related inclusively rather than in the oppositional pattern found in Indo-European languages, with verbs included in nouns as a subcategory. Preliminary to the core discussion on the verbs-as-nouns framework, the author critically engages with the issues of word classes and nominalization, as well as problems with the analysis of Chinese grammar due to the noun-verb distinction. Through linguistic comparisons, following chapters look into noticeable differences between Chinese and English, the referential and predicative natures of nouns and verbs, the asymmetry of the two, and the referentiality of predicates in Chinese. The volume will be a must-read for linguists and students studying Chinese linguistics, Chinese grammar, and contrastive linguistics.

Oxford Textual Perspectives is a new series of informative and provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production, and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations of both canonical and less well-known works.
Living through Conquest is the first ever investigation of the political clout of English from the reign of Cnut to the earliest decades of the thirteenth century. It focuses on why and how the English language was used by kings and their courts and by leading churchmen and monastic institutions at key moments from 1020 to 1220. English became the language of choice of a usurper king; the language of collective endeavour for preachers and prelates; and the language of resistance and negotiation in the post-Conquest period. Analysing texts that are not widely known, such as Cnut's two Letters to the English of 1020 and 1027, Worcester's Confraternity Agreement, and the Eadwine Psalter, alongside canonical writers like AElfric and Wulfstan, Elaine Treharne demonstrates the ideological significance of the native vernacular and its social and cultural relevance alongside Latin, and later, French.
While many scholars to date have seen the period from 1060 to 1220 as a literary lacuna as far as English is concerned, this book demonstrates unequivocally that the hundreds of vernacular works surviving from this period attest to a lively and rich textual tradition. Living Through Conquest addresses the political concerns of English writers and their constructed audiences, and investigates the agenda of manuscript producers, from those whose books were very much in the vein of earlier English codices to those innovators who employed English precisely to demonstrate its contemporaneity in a multitude of contexts and for a variety of different audiences.

This book examines the operation of laws, rules, and principles in Indo-European, the language family which includes the Celtic, Germanic, Italic/Romance, and Baltic/Slavic subfamilies as well as the predominant languages of Greece, Iran, parts of Southern Asia, and ancient Anatolia. Laws and rules are crucial to Indo-European studies: they constrain the reconstructions and etymologies on which knowledge of the history and prehistory of Indo-European in particular and ancient languages more generally is based, and which allow processes of morphological change, semantic shift, and borrowing to be identified. But these laws and rules require constant reassessment in the light of new evidence, theory, and method. Through a series of case studies re-examining specific laws and rules in the Indo-European language family, this book explores the implications of new insights into language change andof increasing opportunities for attention to chronology and detail in the treatment of primary material. The languages and language families under consideration include Celtic, Germanic, Italic and Romance, Armenian, Greek, and Indo-Iranian languages as well as Proto-Indo-European. Laws and Rules in Indo-European brings together leading scholars from all over the world. It makes a valuable contribution to the understanding of the history of ancient languages and the reconstruction of their ancestors, as well as to research methods.

This book examines the grammatical changes that took place in the transition from Latin to the Romance languages. The emerging language underwent changes in three fundamental areas involving the noun phrase, verb phrase, and the sentence. The impact of the changes can be seen in the reduction of the Latin case system; the appearance of auxiliary verb structures to mark such categories tense, mood, and voice; and a shift towards greater rigidification of word order. The author considers how far these changes are interrelated and compares their various manifestations and pace of change across the different standard and non-standard varieties of Romance. He describes the historical background to the emergence of the Romance varieties and their Latin ancestry, considering in detail the richly documented diachronic variation exhibited by the Romance family.
Adam Ledgeway reviews the accounts and explanations that have been proposed within competing theoretical frameworks, and considers how far traditional ideas should be reinterpreted in light of recent theoretical developments. His wide-ranging account shows that the transition from Latin to Romance is not only of great intrinsic interest, but both provides a means of challenging linguistic orthodoxies and presents opportunities to shape new perspectives on language change, structure, and variation. His fascinating book will appeal equally to Romance linguists, Latinists, philologists, historical linguists, and syntacticians of all theoretical persuasions.

This volume studies the ways in which modernity has been conceived, practiced, and performed in Indian literatures from the 18th to 20th century. It brings together essays on writings in Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi, Bengali, Odia, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, and languages from Northeast India, which form a dialogical relationship with each other in this volume. The concurrence and contradictions emerging through these studies problematize the idea of modernity afresh. The book challenges the dominance of colonial modernity through socio-historical and cultural analysis of how modernity surfaces as a multifaceted phenomenon when contextualized in the multilingual ethos of India. It further tracks the complex ways in which modernism in India is tied to the harvests of modernity. It argues for the need to shift focus on the specific conditions that gave shape to multiple modernities within literatures produced from India. A versatile collection, the book incorporates engagements with not just long prose fiction but also lesser-known essays, research works, and short stories published in popular magazines. This unique work will be of interest to students and teachers of Indian writing in English, Indian literatures, and comparative literatures. It will be indispensable to scholars of South Asian studies, literary historians, linguists, and scholars of cultural studies across the globe.

This book is the first comparative study of English, German, French, Russian and Hungarian anti-proverbs based on well-known proverbs. Proverbs are by no means fossilized texts but are adaptable to different times and changed values. While anti-proverbs can be considered as variants of older proverbs, they can also become new proverbs reflecting a more modern worldview. Anti-proverbs are therefore a lingo-cultural phenomenon that deserves the attention of cultural and literary historians, folklorists, linguists, and general readers interested in language and wordplay.

The book investigates historical patterns of vowel diphthongization, assimilation and dissimilation induced by consonants - mostly (alveolo)palatals - in Romance. Compiling data from dialectal descriptions, old documentary sources and experimental phonetic studies, it explains why certain vowels undergo raising assimilation before (alveolo)palatal consonants more than others. It also suggests that in French, Francoprovencal, Occitan, Rhaetoromance and dialects from northern Italy, mid low vowel diphthongization before (alveolo)palatal consonants started out with the formation of non-canonical falling diphthongs through off-glide insertion, from which rising diphthongs could emerge at a later date (e.g., Upper Engadinian OCTO 'eight' > [oc] > [o(a )c] > [wac]). Both diphthongal types, rather than canonical falling diphthongs with a palatal off-glide, could also give rise to high vowels (dialectal French [li] < LECTU, [fuj] < FOLIA). This same Gallo-Romance diphthongization process operated in Catalan ([yit], [ fuya]). In Spanish, on the other hand, mid low vowels followed by highly constrained (alveolo)palatals became too close to undergo the diphthongization process ([ let o], [ oxa]).

This book is the first comprehensive, research-based description of the development, structure, and use of Welsh English, a contact-induced variety of English spoken in the British Isles. Present-day accents and dialects of Welsh English are the combined outcome of historical language shift from Welsh to English, continued bilingualism, intense contacts between Wales and England, and multicultural immigration. As a result, Welsh English is a distinctive, regionally and sociolinguistically diverse variety, whose status is not easily categorized. In addition to existing research, the present volume utilizes a wide range of spoken corpus data gathered from across Wales in order to describe the phonology, lexis, and grammar of the variety. It includes discussion of sociolinguistic and cultural contexts, and of ongoing change in Welsh English. The place that Welsh English occupies in relation to other Englishes in the Inner and Outer Circles is also analysed. The book is accessible to the non-specialist, but of particular use to scholars, teachers, and students interested in English in Wales, Britain, and the world. It provides an unparelleled resource on this long-standing and vibrant variety.

At the end of the Republic, religious, legal, and literary knowledge began to take the form of a 'Roman heritage', as broadly defined as it was indefinite. Caesar, like Cicero, thought that language, along with political institutions and laws, constituted the fundamental feature which defined the identity of a people. So, as with statutes, libraries, and the calendar, he intended to fix general laws in the sphere of language with his treatise De analogia in order to establish a solid foundation for Latina language whose evolution was driven by the need to preserve heritage and by confrontations with the linguistic habits of the allies of Rome. In this volume Garcea brings together for the first time the fragments of Caesar's De analogia with a complete translation and commentary. Contextualising the text and its quotation by Pliny in his Dubius sermo, Charisius, Priscian, and other Latin grammarians Garcea, presents the issues raised by means of comparison with the texts of Caesar's interlocutors-principally Cicero, Varro, Nigidius Figulus, and Philodemus of Gadara. The study of all these sources, most of which have never been translated into a modern language, fills a gap in the representation of the history of linguistic development in the classical period-ultimately portraying how in republican Rome, there was still no clear distinction between the different subdivisions of learning.

National and transnational debates in Britain and Germany surrounding the meaning of the word "conservative" continue to have far-reaching political consequences. After 1945, even while the term was an accepted part of the political vocabulary of Great Britain, in the Federal Republic of Germany their young democracy was conflicted due to anti-democratic instability. The Guardians of Concepts analyzes the historical changes in the political languages of conservatism in the United Kingdom and the Federal Republic of Germany between 1945 and the early 1980s which plagued intellectuals, politicians, and entire parties. As one of the most difficult concepts in both the political and historiographical vocabulary of the German language, conservatism's analysis takes a linguistically focused path through comprehensive and transnational connection of intellectual history with the history of politics, which are subjects that are otherwise commonly addressed separately from each other.

This is the first full study of how people refer to entities in natural discourse. It contributes to the understanding of both linguistic diversity and the cognitive underpinnings of language and it provides a framework for further research in both fields. Andrej Kibrik focuses on the way specific entities are mentioned in natural discourse, during which about every third word usually depends on referential choice. He considers reference as an overt representation of underlying cognitive processes and combines a theoretically-oriented cognitive approach with empirically-based cross-linguistic analysis. He begins by introducing the cognitive approach to discourse analysis and by examining the relationship between discourse studies and linguistic typology. He discusses reference as a linguistic phenomenon, in connection with the traditional notions of deixis, anaphora, givenness, and topicality, and describes the way his theoretical approach is centered on notions of referent activation in working memory. He argues that the speaker is responsible for the shape of discourse and that referential expressions should be understood as choices made by speakers rather than as puzzles to be solved by addressees.
Kibrik examines the cross-linguistic aspects of reference and the typology of referential devices, including referring expressions per se, such as free and bound pronouns, and referential aids that help to tell apart the concurrently activated entities. This discussion is based on the data from about 200 languages from around the world. He then proposes a comprehensive model of referential choice, in which he draws on concepts from cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience, and applies this to Russian and English. He also draws together his empirical analyses in order to examine what light his analysis of discourse can shed on the way information is processed in working memory. In the final part of the book Andrej Kibrik offers a wider perspective, including deixis, referential aspects of gesticulation and signed languages.
This pioneering work will interest linguists and cognitive scientists interested in discourse, reference, typology, and the operations of working memory in linguistic communication.

This book addresses the changing contemporary language worlds in three major contexts. It first discusses how the language landscape maps of cities are changing as a result of increased migration, globalization and global media. These features are evident in place names and place name changes as well as the densities and frequencies of language spoken and used in texts. The second section discusses how the state itself is responding to both indigenous and heritage groups desiring to be included and represented in the state's political landscapes and also expressions of art and culture. In the third section, the authors address a number of cutting-edge theses that are emerging in the linguistic geography and political words. These include the importance of gender, anthropogenetic discourse, the preservation of endangered languages and challenges to a state's official language policy. Through including authors from nine different countries, who are writing about issues in twelve countries and their overlapping interests in language mapping, language usage and policy and visual representations, this book provides inspiring research into future topics at local, national, regional and international scales.

This book presents a comprehensive picture of reflexive pronouns from both a theoretical and experimental perspective, using the well-researched languages of English, German, Dutch, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. In order to understand the data from varying theoretical perspectives, the book considers selected syntactic and pragmatic analyses based on their current importance in the field. The volume consequently introduces the Emergentist Reflexivity Approach, which is a novel theoretical synthesis incorporating a sentence and pragmatic processor that accounts for reflexive pronoun behaviour in these six languages. Moreover, in support of this model a vast array of experimental literature is considered, including first and second language acquisition, bilingual, psycholinguistic, neurolinguistic and clinical studies. It is through both the intuitive and experimental data linguistic theorizing relies upon that brings out the strengths of the modelling adopted here, paving new avenues for future research. In sum, this volume unites a diverse array of the literature that currently sits largely divorced between the theoretical and experimental realms, and when put together a better understanding of reflexive pronouns under the auspices of the Emergentist Reflexivity Approach is forged.

This book presents empirical research of grammatical collocations of the type: verb and the prepositions "of" and "to". It is based on comparisons of English and Czech sentences containing verbs and prepositions that are followed by the object. The author creates English-Czech verbal prepositional counterparts and groups on the grounds of the similar semantic, syntactic features. She identifies the features that are the same for each verb group and generalizes them. The book determines trends and tendencies for verbs when they collocate with a certain preposition.

Existing accounts of Australian Aboriginal English do not investigate the significant degree of variation found across the continent. This book presents the first description of English spoken on Croker Island, Northern Territory, Australia, in terms of its history, linguistic features and connections to local Aboriginal languages. It demonstrates that English on Croker Island shows an extremely high degree of intra- and inter-speaker variation and embedding in a longstanding multilingual contact situation, both of which challenge existing models of variation and language contact. These results have significant ramifications for how variation is modelled, for our understanding of how postcolonial Englishes develop, as well as for the dynamics of complex contact situations. The book also puts English on Croker Island into a typological context of World Englishes by establishing a profile according to the parameters of the World Atlas of Varieties of English (WAVE). It is of interest to academics interested in Australian Aboriginal English, language contact, World Englishes and Australian Aboriginal languages.