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Books > Language & Literature > Language & linguistics > Historical & comparative linguistics
This book summarizes more than four decades of research on imitation in infancy and its relation to early learning and sociocognitive development in typically and atypically developing children. The studies were carried out in a Scandinavian context and thus provide important cultural validation of the central developmental processes. The book is divided into three parts: Part one focuses on the social and cognitive aspects of imitation, discussing links to early parent-infant interaction, and developmental meaning. It addresses evidence for an imitative capacity at birth for typical and atypical infants. Also covered are early individual differences in imitation, the role of imitation as a social and cognitive learning mechanism in early development, and possible links between imitation and temperament. Part two presents unique longitudinal studies on early memory development using deferred imitation as the key method. It discusses the biological basis of memory and explores the idea that deferred imitation is an indicator of an infant's ability to understand intentions. Part three focuses on imitation in young children with autism and with Down syndrome. It examines the role of imitation as a "deficit" as well as a vehicle for change when used interactively in early interventions for children with autism. Imitation from Infancy Through Early Childhood is an essential resource for researchers, professors, and graduate students as well as clinicians and other professionals in developmental psychology, cognitive development, psycholinguistics, child psychiatry, and developmental neuroscience.
Latin names - frequently unpronounceable, all too often wrong and always a tiny puzzle to unravel - have been annoying the layman since they first became formalised as scientific terms in the eighteenth century. Why on earth has the entirely land-loving Eastern Mole been named Scalopus aquaticus, or the Oxford Ragwort been called Senecio squalidus - 'dirty old man'? What were naturalists thinking when they called a beetle Agra katewinsletae, a genus of fish Batman, and a Trilobite Han solo? Why is zoology replete with names such as Chloris chloris chloris (the greenfinch), and Gorilla gorilla gorilla (a species of, well gorilla)? The Naming of the Shrew will unveil these mysteries, exploring the history, celebrating their poetic nature and revealing how naturalists sometimes get things so terribly wrong. With wonderfully witty style and captivating narrative, this book will make you see Latin names in a whole new light.
The recent evolution of western societies has been characterized by
an increasing emphasis on information and communication. As the
amount of available information increases, however, the user --
worker, student, citizen -- faces a new problem: selecting and
accessing relevant information. More than ever it is crucial to
find efficient ways for users to interact with information systems
in a way that prevents them from being overwhelmed or simply
missing their targets. As a result, hypertext systems have been
developed as a means of facilitating the interactions between
readers and text. In hypertext, information is organized as a
network in which nodes are text chunks (e.g., lists of items,
paragraphs, pages) and links are relationships between the nodes
(e.g., semantic associations, expansions, definitions, examples --
virtually any kind of relation that can be imagined between two
text passages). Unfortunately, the many ways in which these
hypertext interfaces can be designed has caused a complexity that
extends far beyond the processing abilities of regular users.
Therefore, it has become widely recognized that a more rational
approach based on a thorough analysis of information users' needs,
capacities, capabilities, and skills is needed. This volume seeks
to meet that need.
This in-depth yet student-friendly introduction to Koine Greek provides a full grounding in Greek grammar, while starting to build skill in the use of exegetical tools. The approach, informed by twenty-five years of classroom teaching, emphasizes reading Greek for comprehension as opposed to merely translating it. The workbook is integrated into the textbook, with exercises appearing within each chapter rather than pushed to the end or located in a separate book. This enables students to practice concepts as they encounter them in the chapter--ideal for distance learning or studying beyond the traditional classroom. The book covers not only New Testament Greek but also the wider range of Bible-related Greek (LXX and other Koine texts). It introduces students to reference tools for biblical Greek, includes tips on learning, and is supplemented by robust web-based resources through Baker Academic's Textbook eSources. Resources for students include flash cards and audio files. Resources for professors include a test bank and an instructor's manual.
Writing Systems and Phonetics provides students with a critical understanding of the writing systems of the world. Beginning by exploring the spelling of English, including how it arose and how it works today, the book goes on to address over 60 major languages from around the globe and includes detailed descriptions and worked examples of writing systems which foreground the phonetics of these languages. Key areas covered include: the use of the Latin alphabet in and beyond Europe; writing systems of the eastern Mediterranean, Greek and its Cyrillic offshoot, Arabic and Hebrew; languages in south and south-east Asia, including Hindi, Tamil, Burmese and Thai, as well as in east Asia, including Chinese, Japanese and Korean; reflections on ancient languages such as Sumerian, Egyptian, Linear B and Mayan; a final chapter which sets out a typology of writing systems. All of the languages covered are contextualised by authentic illustrations, including road signs, personal names and tables, to demonstrate how theoretical research can be applied to the real world. Taking a unique geographical focus that guides the reader on a journey across time and continents, this book offers an engaging introduction for students approaching for the first time the phonetics of writing systems, their typology and the origins of scripts.
This book presents a set of contributions to the current flow of psycholinguistic research, with new and challenging data gathered from Spanish that may illuminate issues about the generality of language processing models. Although it is possible to find a considerable amount of papers on psycholinguistic research with the Spanish language published in English-speaking journals, unfortunately, the scientific community does not have access to an overview of psycholinguistics in Spain. This book overcomes these limitations because it brings together state-of-the-art descriptions of the research and theory of the different subareas of psycholinguistics currently being studied in Spain. Spanish, the third most widely-used language in the world, differs from English in a number of important respects. Since English has been predominant in psycholinguistic research, contrasting properties of Spanish may help to test the generality of language processing mechanisms and to refine their description. The set of contrasting features considered in this book includes acoustical and syllabic transparency, shallow orthography, a much richer morphology, flexibility in word order, less variability in intonational contours, and the existence of null pronominal subjects for inflected verbs. There are also interesting contrasts in the frequency of different linguistic units, whose impact on language processing is also evaluated. One of the main lines of argument throughout this book deals with the tension between universality and variation as a way of characterizing the functioning of language capacities and processes. The variety of topics covered by this book ranges from one end of the spectrum of language related behavior to the other: speech perception, lexical access in word recognition, relations between phonological and orthographic representations, sentence processing, discourse comprehension, and language production. All chapters focus on questions of general interest within each topic, and in most cases they appeal to one particular feature of the Spanish language that is relevant for a given question. Most chapters show the indisputable importance of crosslinguistic research in psycholinguistics to improve understanding on whether universal cognitive mechanisms and language specific routines underlie the ability of understanding and producing language.
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.
Ancient Greek is commonly considered a 'synthetic' or 'inflectional' language, that is, a language with a high morpheme-per-word ratio. Nevertheless, already at the earliest stages of the language one finds traces of multi-word 'periphrastic' constructions similar to those in the modern European languages, as in , 'it was happening', or *s , 'he has dishonoured'. Verbal Periphrasis in Ancient Greek offers a systematic investigation of periphrastic constructions with the verbs 'to be' and 'to have' based on an extensive corpus of texts, ranging from the eighth century BC to the eighth century AD. It clarifies the notions of 'verbal periphrasis' and 'adjectival periphrasis' from a theoretical point of view, and offers a broad introduction to a selection of recent advancements in linguistics. It includes a diachronic analysis which investigates constructions in all three main aspectual domains-perfect aspect, imperfective aspect, and perfective aspect-combining a qualitative with a quantitative approach. In doing so, the volume presents a substantial contribution to our understanding of the ancient Greek verbal system and its development over time.
Idioms have always aroused the curiosity of linguists and there is
a long tradition in the study of idioms, especially within the
fields of lexicology and lexicography. Without denying the
importance of this tradition, this volume presents an overview of
recent idiom research outside the immediate domain of
lexicology/lexicography. The chapters address the status of idioms
in recent formal and experimental linguistic theorizing.
Interdisciplinary in scope, the contributions are written by
psycholinguists and theoretical and computational linguists who
take mutual advantage of progress in all disciplines. Linguists
supply the facts and analyses psycholinguists base their models and
experiments on; psycholinguists in turn confront linguistic models
with psycholinguistic findings. Computational linguists build
natural language processing systems on the basis of models and
frameworks provided by theoretical linguists and, sometimes
psycholinguists, and set up large corpora to test linguistic
hypotheses. Besides the fascination for idioms that make up such a
large part of our knowledge of language, interdisciplinarity is one
of the attractions of investigations in idiomatic language and
language processing.
CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE SOCIOLOGY OF LANGUAGE brings to students, researchers and practitioners in all of the social and language-related sciences carefully selected book-length publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It approaches the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches, theoretical and empirical, supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of linguists, language teachers of all interests, sociologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians etc. to the development of the sociology of language.
Every day, the human awakes to a new world, a new dawn and a new cascade of nonverbal communication. It may be the pleasant scent of a rose, the soft touch of a loved one, the sight of sun rays on a bedroom floor or the excited chatter of a child. Whatever form it takes, your environment and all who inhabit it send nonverbal signals all day long - even while they sleep. The Routledge Dictionary of Nonverbal Communication celebrates this communication, examining a very wide selection of nonverbal behaviors, actions and signals to provide the reader with an informed insight on the world around them and its messages. Compiled in the form of a dictionary, the book is presented as a series of chapters with alphabetical entries, ranging from attractiveness to zeitgeist. The book aims to provide the reader with a clear understanding of some of the relevant discourse on particular topics while also making it practical and easy to read. It draws on a wide selection of discourse from fields such as neuroscience, psychology, anthropology and psychiatry. The dictionary will be an essential companion for anyone wishing to understand nonverbal communication. It will also be especially useful for those working in the field of nonverbal communication.
One of the liveliest forums for sharing psychological, linguistic,
philosophical, and computer science perspectives on
psycholinguistics has been the annual meeting of the CUNY Sentence
Processing Conference. Documenting the state of the art in several
important approaches to sentence processing, this volume consists
of selected papers that had been presented at the Sixth CUNY
Conference. The editors not only present the main themes that ran
through the conference but also honor the breadth of the
presentations from disciplines including linguistics, experimental
psychology, and computer science. The variety of sentence
processing topics examined includes:
This volume is a direct result of the International Symposium on
Japanese Sentence Processing held at Duke University. The symposium
provided the first opportunity for researchers in three
disciplinary areas from both Japan and the United States to
participate in a conference where they could discuss issues
concerning Japanese syntactic processing. The goals of the
symposium were three-fold:
Many regional languages across the world are threatened by modernization and urbanization whilst the universal and rapid rise of migration has created new and unprecedented forms of multilingualism. Aspects of education, national policies and attitudes towards minority languages are documented.
The "Bilingual New Testament, English - Spanish" is derived from
the 1901 American Standard Version and the 1909 Biblia Reina Valera
translations.
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.
Containing around 17,000 headwords and detailed phonetic descriptions, this book makes available for the first time the material gathered by the historic "Survey of English Dialects," fully alphabetized. A separate section provides a systematic analysis of the syntactic patterns of various dialects. The book is an indispensable tool for dialectologists worldwide.
This volume represents the culmination of an extensive research project that studied the development of linguistic form/function relations in narrative discourse. It is unique in the extent of data which it analyzes-more than 250 texts from children and adults speaking five different languages-and in its crosslinguistic, typological focus. It is the first book to address the issue of how the structural properties and rhetorical preferences of different native languages-English, German, Spanish, Hebrew, and Turkish-impinge on narrative abilities across different phases of development. The work of Berman and Slobin and their colleagues provides insight into the interplay between shared, possibly universal, patterns in the developing ability to create well-constructed, globally organized narratives among preschoolers Contact Susan Barker at (201) 258-2282 for more information. from three years of age compared with school children and adults, contrasted against the impact of typological and rhetorical features of particular native languages on how speakers express these abilities in the process of "relating events in narrative." This volume also makes a special contribution to the field of language acquisition and development by providing detailed analyses of how linguistic forms come to be used in the service of narrative functions, such as the expression of temporal relations of simultaneity and retrospection, perspective-taking on events, and textual connectivity. To present this information, the authors prepared in-depth analyses of a wide range of linguistic systems, including tense-aspect marking, passive and middle voice, locative and directional predications, connectivity markers,null subjects, and relative clause constructions. In contrast to most work in the field of language acquisition, this book focuses on developments in the use of these early forms in extended discourse-beyond the initial phase of early language development. The book offers a pioneering approach to the interactions between form and function in the development and use of language, from a typological linguistic perspective. The study is based on a large crosslinguistic corpus of narratives, elicited from preschool, school-age, and adult subjects. All of the narratives were elicited by the same picture storybook, Frog, Where Are You?, by Mercer Mayer. (An appendix lists related studies using the same storybook in 50 languages.) The findings illuminate both universal and language-specific patterns of development, providing new insights into questions of language and thought.
Building on the success of previous editions, Focus on Grammar 5th Edition continues to leverage its successful four-step approach that lets learners move from comprehension to communication within a clear and consistent structure. Centred on thematic instruction, Focus on Grammar combines comprehensive grammar coverage with abundant practice, critical thinking skills, and ongoing assessment, helping students communicate confidently, accurately, and fluently in everyday situations. The 5th Edition continues to incorporate the findings of corpus linguistics in grammar notes, charts, and practice activities, while never losing sight of what is pedagogically sound and useful.
In Methods in Latin Computational Linguistics, Barbara McGillivray presents some of the most significant methodological foundations of the emerging field of Latin Computational Linguistics. The reader will find an overview of the computational resources and tools available for Latin and three corpus case studies covering morpho-syntactic and lexical-semantic aspects of Latin verb valency, as well as quantitative diachronic explorations of the argument realization of Latin prefixed verbs. The computational models and the multivariate data analysis techniques employed are explained with a detailed but accessible language. Barbara McGillivray convincingly shows the challenges and opportunities of combining computational methods and historical language data, and contributes to driving the technological change that is affecting Historical Linguistics and the Humanities.
Research in cognitive psychology has contributed much to our understanding of reading and spelling. Most of this work has concentrated on the processes used by literate adults to comprehend and produce written language, but there is a growing interest in applying cognitive theories to the development of literacy, and to the understanfing of disorders of reading and writing. Such disorders may be acquired as a consequence of a brain injury to a previously literate adult, or may be developmental, occurring in otherwise normal children.; This textbook attempts to present this work to a non-specialist audience. Though written primarily with students of psychology and education in mind, it is accessible also to parents and teachers.; The broad organization of the first edition is retained. The book opens with a consideration of the history and nature of writing, then moves on to deal with the nature of skilled reading. Other chapters deal with: the different ways that brain injury in adulthood can disrupt the mature reading skill the "acquired dyslexias"; spelling and writing processes, both in skilled writers and in patients with "acquired dysgraphia"; the way children develop the skills of reading and writing; and developmental reading and writing problems. |
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