Small Dictionaries and Curiosity tells a story which has not been told before, that of the first European wordlists of minority and unofficial languages and dialects, from the end of the Middle Ages to the early nineteenth century. These wordlists were collected by people who were curious about the unrecorded or little-known languages they heard around them. Between them, they document more than 40 language varieties, from a Basque-Icelandic pidgin of the North Atlantic to the Kalmyk language of the lower Volga. The book gives an account of about 90 of these dictionaries and wordlists, some of them single-page jottings and some of them full-sized printed books, paying attention to their content and their physical form alike. It explores the kinds of curiosity and imagination by which their makers were moved: the lover of all languages hearing new voices in an inn; the speaker of a dying language recording his linguistic memories; the patriot deploying his lexicographical findings in the service of an emerging nation. It offers an encounter with the diverse voices of the entirety of post-medieval Europe, turning away from the people of the courts and universities whose language was documented in big dictionaries to listen to people who did not speak the languages of power: the people of remote places and dying communities; the illiterate poor, settled or homeless; migrants from the edges of Europe and beyond.

First published in 1983. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

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.

Anglo-Saxons valued education yet understood how precarious it could be, alternately bolstered and undermined by fear, desire, and memory. They praised their teachers in official writing, but composed and translated scenes of instruction that revealed the emotional and cognitive complexity of learning. Irina Dumitrescu explores how early medieval writers used fictional representations of education to explore the relationship between teacher and student. These texts hint at the challenges of teaching and learning: curiosity, pride, forgetfulness, inattention, and despair. Still, these difficulties are understood to be part of the dynamic process of pedagogy, not simply a sign of its failure. The book demonstrates the enduring concern of Anglo-Saxon authors with learning throughout Old English and Latin poems, hagiographies, histories, and schoolbooks.

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.

An examination of what dialogues and direct speech in Old Norse literature can convey and mean, beyond their immediate face-value. The vast and diverse corpus of Old Norse literature preserves the language spoken not only by the Vikings, kings, and heroes of medieval Scandinavia but also by outlaws, missionaries, and farmers. Scholars have long recognized that the wealth of verbal exchanges in Old Norse sagas presents the modern reader with the opportunity to speak face-to-face, as it were, with these great voices of the past. However, despite the importance of verbal exchanges in the sagas, there has been no book-length study of discourse in Old Norse literature since 1935. This book meets the need for such a study by offering a literary analysis based on the adjacent field of pragmatic linguistics, which recognizes that speakers often rely upon cultural, situational, and interpersonal context to communicate their meaning. The resulting, context-dependent meaning often deviates from the base semantic and syntactical components of an utterance: speakers hedge, imply, deflect to save face, or obscure meaning to damage an opponent's self-worth. Saga writers, this book argues, were masters of this type of indirectness in speech. It aims therefore to unlock the depth and subtlety of discourse in Old Norse literature and to leave readers with an understanding of how principles of pragmatics were employed throughout the sagas. A wide body of Old Norse materials is examined, including some of the best examples of Íslendingasögur (sagas of Icelanders), such as Brennu-Njáls saga, Laxdœla saga, and Gísla saga Súrssonar, while also giving due attention to Konungasögur (kings' sagas), fornaldarsögur (legendary sagas), and other literature from the medieval North.

A collection of studies offering an up-to-date analysis of official policies to promote Catalan in a democratic framework in each of the main Spanish regions where it is spoken: Catalonia, Valencia and the Balearic Islands.

First published in 1982. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This volume provides an introduction to word and paradigm models of morphology and the general perspectives on linguistic morphology that they embody. The recent revitalization of these models is placed in the larger context of the intellectual lineage that extends from classical grammars to current information-theoretic and discriminative learning paradigms. The synthesis of this tradition outlined in the volume highlights leading ideas about the organization of morphological systems that are shared by word and paradigm approaches, along with strategies that have been developed to formalize these ideas, and ways in which the ideas have been validated by experimental methodologies. An extended comparison of contemporary word and paradigm variants isolates the central assumptions about morphological units and relations that distinguish implicational from realizational models and clarifies the relation of these models to morpheme-based accounts. Designed to be accessible to a wide readership, this book will serve both as an introduction to morphology and morphological theory from the word and paradigm perspective for non-specialists, and for morphologists, as a detailed account of the history of the ideas that underlie these models.

First published in 1982. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Statistics and hypothesis testing are routinely used in areas (such as linguistics) that are traditionally not mathematically intensive. In such fields, when faced with experimental data, many students and researchers tend to rely on commercial packages to carry out statistical data analysis, often without understanding the logic of the statistical tests they rely on. As a consequence, results are often misinterpreted, and users have difficulty in flexibly applying techniques relevant to their own research they use whatever they happen to have learned. A simple solution is to teach the fundamental ideas of statistical hypothesis testing without using too much mathematics.

This book provides a non-mathematical, simulation-based introduction to basic statistical concepts and encourages readers to try out the simulations themselves using the source code and data provided (the freely available programming language R is used throughout). Since the code presented in the text almost always requires the use of previously introduced programming constructs, diligent students also acquire basic programming abilities in R.

The book is intended for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in any discipline, although the focus is on linguistics, psychology, and cognitive science. It is designed for self-instruction, but it can also be used as a textbook for a first course on statistics. Earlier versions of the book have been used in undergraduate and graduate courses in Europe and the US.

Vasishth and Broe have written an attractive introduction to the foundations of statistics. It is concise, surprisingly comprehensive, self-contained and yet quite accessible. Highly recommended.

Harald Baayen, Professor of Linguistics, University of Alberta, Canada

By using the text students not only learn to do the specific things outlined in the book, they also gain a skill set that empowers them to explore new areas that lie beyond the book s coverage.

Colin Phillips, Professor of Linguistics, University of Maryland, USA

First published in 1981. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This study breaks new ground in describing how various linguistic and pragmatic mechanisms affect both the form of the narrative clause and the arrangement of the grammatical elements. The various possible forms that a narrative clause can take are classified in terms of their 'topic-comment' and 'focus-presupposition', and it is argued that the way in which these are articulated dictates the word order in the clause. The outcome of the study demonstrates that the traditional binary distinction between foreground and background, based purely on verb forms, is inadequate. A new model is offered showing how foregrounding is achieved by exploiting cognitive structures or by using specific evaluative devices.>

First published in 1981. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

This book traces the changes in argument alignment that have taken place in Aramaic during its 3000-year documented history. Eastern Aramaic dialects first developed tense-conditioned ergative alignment in the perfect, which later developed into a past perfective. However, while some modern dialects preserve a degree of ergative alignment, it has been eroded by movement towards semantic/Split-S alignment and by the use of separate marking for the patient, and some dialects have lost ergative alignment altogether. Thus an entire cycle of alignment change can be traced, something which had previously been considered unlikely. Eleanor Coghill examines evidence from ancient Aramaic texts, recent dialectal documentation, and cross-linguistic parallels to provide an account of the pathways through which these alignment changes took place. She argues that what became the ergative construction was originally limited mostly to verbs with an experiencer role, such as 'see' and 'hear', which could encode the experiencer with a dative. While this dative-experiencer scenario shows some formal similarities with other proposed explanations for alignment change, the data analysed in this book show that it is clearly distinct. The book draws important theoretical conclusions on the development of tense-conditioned alignment cross-linguistically, and provides a valuable basis for further research.

Safir's monograph develops a theory about the role of anaphora in the formulation of general syntax. He presents the following proposals: firstly, that the complementary distribution of forms that support anaphoric readings is not accidental; secondly, that dependent identity relations are always possible where they are not prohibited by a constraint; and lastly, that there are no parameters for ana phora - that all anaphora-specific principles are universal, and that the patterns of anaphora across languages arise entirely from lexical properties. The goal of this thoroughly comprehensive look at the phenomenon of anaphora is to fundametally redirect current thinking on the subject.

This is the very first book to investigate the field of phraseology from a learner corpus perspective, bringing together studies at the cutting edge of corpus-based research into phraseology and language learners. The chapters include learner-corpus-based studies of phraseological units in varieties of learner language differentiated in terms of task and/or learner variables, compared with each other or with one or more reference corpora; mixed-methods studies that combine learner corpus data with more experimental data types (e.g. eyetracking); and instruction-oriented studies that show how learner-corpus-based insights can be used to inform second language (L2) teaching and testing. The detailed analysis of a wide range of multiword units (collocations, lexical bundles, lexico-grammatical patterns) and extensive learner corpus data provide the reader with a comprehensive theoretical, methodological and applied perspective onto L2 use in a wide range of situations. The knowledge gained from these learner corpus studies has major implications for L2 theory and practice and will help to inform pedagogical assessment and practice.

This book outlines a system of phonological features that is minimally sufficient to distinguish all consonants and vowels in the languages of the world. The extensive evidence is drawn from datasets with a combined total of about 1000 sound inventories. The interpretation of phonetic transcriptions from different languages is a long-standing problem. In this book, San Duanmu proposes a solution that relies on the notion of contrast: X and Y are different sounds if and only if they contrast in some language. He focuses on a simple procedure to interpret empirical data: for each phonetic dimension, all inventories are searched in order to determine the maximal number of contrasts required. In addition, every unusual feature or extra degree of contrast is re-examined to confirm its validity. The resulting feature system is surprisingly simple: fewer features are needed than previously proposed, and for each feature, a two-way contrast is sufficient. Nevertheless, the proposal is reliable in that the notion of contrast is uncontroversial, the procedure is explicit, and the result is repeatable. The book also offers discussion of non-contrastive differences between languages, sound classes, and complex sounds such as affricates, consonant-glide units, consonant-liquid units, contour tones, pre-nasalized stops, clicks, ejectives, and implosives.

Children in the Marshall Islands do many things that adults do not. They walk around half naked. They carry and eat food in public without offering it to others. They talk about things they see rather than hiding uncomfortable truths. They explicitly refuse to give. Why do they do these things? Many think these behaviors are a natural result of children's innate immaturity. But Elise Berman argues that children are actually taught to do things that adults avoid: to be rude, inappropriate, and immature. Before children learn to be adults, they learn to be different from them. Berman's main theoretical claim therefore is also a novel one: age emerges through interaction and is a social production. In Talking Like Children, Berman analyzes a variety of interactions in the Marshall Islands, all broadly based around exchange: adoption negotiations, efforts to ask for or avoid giving away food, contentious debates about supposed child abuse. In these dramas both large and small, age differences emerge through the decisions people make, the emotions they feel, and the power they gain. Berman's research includes a range of methods - participant observation, video and audio recordings, interviews, children's drawings - that yield a significant corpus of data including over 80 hours of recorded naturalistic social interaction. Presented as a series of captivating stories, Talking Like Children is an intimate analysis of speech and interaction that shows what age means. Like gender and race, age differences are both culturally produced and socially important. The differences between Marshallese children and adults give both groups the ability to manipulate social life in distinct but often complementary ways. These differences produce culture itself. Talking Like Children establishes age as a foundational social variable and a central concern of anthropological and linguistic research.

In this outstanding collection of new work, the methods and theories of formal syntax are focussed on grammatical variation and change. The editors open the volume with an extensive and accessible introduction to the ideas and techniques deployed in the book and the phenomena and issues on which they are brought to bear. Seventeen chapters follow, divided into two parts, the first concerned with grammaticalization and the second with parametric variation. These show what the application of contemporary theories of syntax and language variation can reveal about syntactic change and variation and the processes of parametric change which lie behind them. They also demonstrate the value of testing and constructing synchronic theories on the basis of historical data. The analyses range over many languages and language families, including Germanic, Romance, Greek, and Chinese.
This book will interest scholars and students of grammatical change and theory at graduate level and above

The book provides an overview of EU competition law with a focus on the main developments in Italy, Spain, Greece, Poland and Croatia and offers an in-depth analysis of the role of language, translation and multilingualism in its implementation and interpretation. The first part of the book focuses on the main developments in EU competition law in action, which includes legislation, case law and praxis. This part can be divided into two subparts: the private enforcement of EU competition law, and the cooperation among enforcers, i.e. the EU Commission, the national competition authorities and the national courts. Language is of paramount importance in the enforcement of EU competition law, and as such, the second part highlights legal linguistic skills, showcasing the advantages and the challenges of multilingualism, especially in the context of the predominant use of English as the EU drafting and vehicular language. The volume brings together contributions prepared and presented as part of the EU-funded research project "Training Action for Legal Practitioners: Linguistic Skills and Translation in EU Competition Law".