This volume presents a historical-sociolinguistic description and analysis of Maritime Polynesian Pidgin. It offers linguistic and sociohistorical substantiation for a regional Eastern Polynesian-based pidgin, and challenges conventional Eurocentric assumptions about early colonial contact in the eastern Pacific by arguing that Maritime Polynesian Pidgin preceded the introduction of Pidgin English by as much as a century. Emanuel J. Drechsel not only opens up new methodological avenues for historical-sociolinguistic research in Oceania by a combination of philology and ethnohistory, but also gives greater recognition to Pacific Islanders in early contact between cultures. Students and researchers working on language contact, language typology, historical linguistics and sociolinguistics will want to read this book. It redefines our understanding of how Europeans and Americans interacted with Pacific Islanders in Eastern Polynesia during early encounters and offers an alternative model of language contact.

Linguists, applied linguists and language teachers all appeal to the native speaker as an important reference point. But what exactly (who exactly?) is the native speaker? This book examines the native speaker from different points of view, arguing that the native speaker is both myth and reality.

Rather than offering variations in "world view" as evidence for linguistic relativity, this book views language related differences in terms of the facility with which information is processed. Distinctive perceptual, memory, and neurolinguistic aspects of the Chinese language are discussed, as is the cognitive style of the Chinese people. Chinese orthography and other features of morphology and syntax are examined in relation to both bottom-up and top-down cognitive processes. While providing an extensive review of the experimental literature published in English on the Chinese language, this volume also offers a significant sample of the literature originally published in Chinese.

This monograph presents Old English renderings of Christian words found in interlinear glosses, especially the Gospels and the Psalter glosses. Nouns, adjectives, adverbs and verbs in biblical contexts are included through dialectal (Northumbrian, Mercian, and West Saxon) diachronic (early and late West Saxon) and idiolectal (i.e. scribal) comparison. By using interlinear glosses, the correspondence between the original Latin word and the Old English rendering can be recognised more clearly than in ordinary prose, and at the same time, a flexible choice of renderings can be seen in some contexts. The author tries to show which Old English words were chosen as renderings, while some Latin words were accepted without translation.

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.

A compilation of the proceedings of a conference held to honor Alvin M. Liberman for his outstanding contributions to research in speech perception, this volume deals with two closely related and controversial proposals for which Liberman and his colleagues at Haskins Laboratories have argued forcefully over the past 35 years. The first is that articulatory gestures are the units not only of speech production but also of speech perception; the second is that speech production and perception are not cognitive processes, but rather functions of a special mechanism. This book explores the implications of these proposals not only for speech production and speech perception, but for the neurophysiology of language, language acquisition, higher-level linguistic processing, the visual perception of phonetic gestures, the production and perception of sign language, the reading process, and learning to read. The contributors to this volume include linguists, psycholinguists, speech scientists, neurophysiologists, and ethologists. Liberman himself responds in the final chapter.

Comprehension Processes in Reading addresses the interrelationship among several areas relevant to understanding how people comprehend text. The contributors focus on the on-line processes associated with text understanding rather than simply with the product of that comprehension -- what people remember from reading. Presenting the latest theories and research findings from a distinguished group of contributors, Comprehension Processes in Reading is divided into four major sections. Each section, concluding with a commentary chapter, discusses a different aspect of reader understanding or dysfunction such as individual word comprehension, sentence parsing, text comprehension, and comprehension failures and dyslexia .

Comprehension Processes in Reading addresses the interrelationship among several areas relevant to understanding how people comprehend text. The contributors focus on the on-line processes associated with text understanding rather than simply with the product of that comprehension -- what people remember from reading. Presenting the latest theories and research findings from a distinguished group of contributors, Comprehension Processes in Reading is divided into four major sections. Each section, concluding with a commentary chapter, discusses a different aspect of reader understanding or dysfunction such as individual word comprehension, sentence parsing, text comprehension, and comprehension failures and dyslexia .

Essays on the complexity of multilingualism in medieval England. Professor Jocelyn Wogan-Browne's scholarship on the French of England - a term she indeed coined for the mix of linguistic, cultural, and political elements unique to the pluri-lingual situation of medieval England - is of immenseimportance to the field. The essays in this volume extend, honour and complement her path-breaking work. They consider exchanges between England and other parts of Britain, analysing how communication was effected where languagesdiffered, and probe cross-Channel relations from a new perspective. They also examine the play of features within single manuscripts, and with manuscripts in conversation with each other. And they discuss the continuing reach ofthe French of England beyond the Middle Ages: in particular, how it became newly relevant to discussions of language and nationalism in later centuries. Whether looking at primary sources such as letters and official documents, orat creative literature, both religious and secular, the contributions here offer fruitful and exciting approaches to understanding what the French of England can tell us about medieval Britain and the European world beyond. Thelma Fenster is Professor Emerita of French and Medieval Studies, Fordham University; Carolyn Collette is Professor of English Language and Literature at Mount Holyoke College. Contributors: Christopher Baswell,Emma Campbell, Paul Cohen, Carolyn Collette, Thelma Fenster, Robert Hanning, Richard Ingham, Maryanne Kowaleski, Serge Lusignan, Thomas O'Donnell, W. Mark Ormrod, Monika Otter, Felicity Riddy, Delbert Russell, Fiona Somerset, +Robert M. Stein, Andrew Taylor, Nicholas Watson, R.F. Yeager

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.

The contributions of this volume offer both a diachronic and synchronic approach to aspects relating to different areas of colonial life as for example colonial place-naming in a comparative perspective. They comprise topics of diverse interests within the field of language and colonialism and represent the linguistic fields of sociolinguistics, onomastics, historical linguistics, language contact, obsolescence convergence and divergence, (colonial) discourse, lexicography and creolistics.

This book systematically discusses the link between bilingual language production and its manifestation in historical documents, drawing together two branches of linguistics which have much in common but are traditionally dealt with separately. By combining the study of historical mixed texts with the principles of modern code-switching and bilingualism research, the author argues that the cognitive processes underpinning the human capacity to produce mixed utterances have remained unchanged throughout history, even as the languages themselves are constantly changing. This book will be of interest to scholars of historical linguistics, syntactic theory (particularly generative grammar), language variation and change.

Singapore English is a focal point across the many subfields of linguistics, as its semantic, syntactic and phonetic/phonological qualities tell us a great deal about what happens when very different types of language come together. Sociolinguists are also interested in the relative status of Singapore English compared to other languages in the country. This book charts the history of Singapore English and explores the linguistic, historical and social factors that have influenced the variety as it is spoken today. It identifies novel grammatical features of the language, discusses their structure and function, and traces their origins to the local languages of Singapore. It places grammatical system and usage at the core of the analysis, and shows that introspective and corpus data are complementary. This study will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working on language contact, world varieties of English, historical linguistics and sociolinguistics.

This book uses a corpus of manuscript letters from Bess of Hardwick to investigate how linguistic features characteristic of spoken communication function within early modern epistolary prose. Using these letters as a primary data source with reference to other epistolary materials from the early modern period (1500-1750), the author examines them in a unique and systematic way. The book is the first of its kind to combine a replicable scribal profiling technique, used to identify holograph and scribal handwriting within the letters, with innovative analyses of the language they contain. Furthermore, by adopting a discourse-analytic approach to the language and making reference to the socio-historical context of language use, the book provides an alternative perspective to the one often presented in traditional historical accounts of English. This volume will appeal to students and scholars of early modern English and historical linguistics.

The use of vague language (for example expressions such as 'bags of time', 'doing stuff', 'sort of thing', 'and all that') is an aspect of communicative competence of considerable social importance. Vague Language Explored examines the function of vague language in context. It spans genre analysis, critical discourse analysis, psycholinguistics and cross-cultural sociolinguistics, in a variety of world cultures. It suggests also applications in TEFL, asking questions such as 'What should learners be taught to understand and use, and why?' and suggesting directions for future research.

The major aim of the book is to trace the current structuring of the Chinese language(s) on the ground of Chinese linguistics. The research presented is based on the newest and most renowned sources, namely The Great Dictionary of Modern Chinese Dialects, and the Language Atlas of China. The author discusses the role The Great Dictionary plays in analyzing the spectrum of linguistic differentiation in China and gives a detailed account of the kind of information the dictionary provides. As background, she sketches the development and current state of Chinese dialectology and dialect research. One of the author's aims is to show respect for the grand achievement the Dictionary undoubtedly is, but also to emphasize a critical distance to some of the views presented in it. Apart from being an analysis of this particular Dictionary, the book presents data about the state of modern Chinese dialectology. It provides information about different classifications of the dialects and explains on what basis the classifications are made. Looking at Chinese dialectology from a Western point of view, the author aims to understand and present the Chinese perspective. The book fills an important gap in the field of Western sinology. So far, despite lively discussions concerning the status of the varieties of Chinese and their taxonomy, full-scale studies on Chinese dialects have been almost non-existent in the Western World.

Romani is the first language, and family and community language, of upwards of 3-4 million people and possibly many more in Europe, the Americas, and Australia. Documentation and research on the language draws on a tradition of more than two centuries, yet it remains relatively unknown and often engulfed by myths. In recent decades there has been an upsurge of interest in the language including language maintenance and educational projects, the creation of digital resources, language policy initiatives, and a flourishing community of online users of the language. This Handbook presents state of the art research on Romani language and linguistics. Bringing together key established scholars in the field of linguistics and neighbouring disciplines, it introduces the reader to the structures of Romani and its dialect divisions, and to the history of research on the language. It then goes on to explore major external influences on the language through contact with other key languages, aspects of language acquisition, and interventions in support of the language through public policy provisions, activism, translation, religious and literary initiatives, and social media. This comprehensive and groundbreaking account of Romani will appeal to students and scholars from across language and linguistics.

First published in 1987. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.