In this interdisciplinary collection of lectures, Chris Sinha presents an overview of topics ranging from language in children's play, through cultural conceptualizations of time, to philosophical and linguistic relativism. The intertwining of the evolutionary and individual time scales of human development is a key theme unifying the lectures, as is the fundamentally cultural nature of language and cognition. Familiar topics in cognitive linguistics, such as spatial semantics and conceptual blending, are addressed from these cultural, comparative and developmental perspectives. Chris Sinha also discusses the psychological roots of key concepts in cognitive linguistics, and sets out a biocultural approach to language evolution.

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 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.

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.

Aspects of modality and ellipsis have become prominent in theoretical linguistics over the last years. What has remained under-investigated is the fact that modals tend to make excellent ellipsis licensers and, conversely, that many of the naturally occurring cases of ellipsis are licensed by modals. The book concentrates on the syntax of the modal auxiliaries with special focus on English and investigates the grammatical relationship with the process of ellipsis that interacts most relevantly with the modals in grammaticalized fashion by including a special emphasis on verb-phrase ellipsis. After a critical discussion of pertinent approaches in the two domains, the book focuses on establishing the connection between the two areas by essentially drawing on the history of English and on observable effects in modern grammars, which it puts into perspective with semantically grounded features on the modals involved. Two major generalizations are proposed in the monograph. The first generalization concerns the treatment of the interaction between modals and ellipsis as determined by the features located in the licensing modal heads. To this end, the syntactic effects of the main semantic factors are explored in detail in English and partial effects obtaining in other languages are discussed. The second generalization concerns the syntactic component involved in ellipsis licensing. It is suggested that ellipsis types with the distributional features of verb-phrase ellipsis are licensed by interpretable features of the licensing head. The two generalizations are intertwined with one another and derive a series of further legitimate ellipsis licensers beyond the modals. The role of formal features that are interpretable is distinguished from agreement features, which are claimed not to be in charge of ellipsis licensing.

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.

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.

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 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.

Accented America is a sweeping study of U.S. literature between 1890-1950 that reveals a long history of English-Only nationalism: the political claim that U.S. citizens must speak a nationally distinctive form of English. This perspective presents U.S. literary works written between the 1890s and 1940s as playfully, painfully, and ambivalently engaged with language politics, thereby rewiring both narrative form and national identity. The United States has always been a densely polyglot nation, but efforts to prove the existence of a nationally specific form of English turn out to be a development of particular importance to interwar modernism. If the concept of a singular, coherent, and autonomous 'American language' seemed merely provocative or ironic in 1919 when H.L. Mencken emblazoned the phrase on his philological study, within a short period of time it would come to seem simultaneously obvious and impossible. Considering the continuing presence of fierce public debates over U.S. English and domestic multilingualisms demonstrates the symbolic and material implications of such debates in naturalization and citizenship law, presidential rhetoric, academic language studies, and the artistic renderings of novelists. Against the backdrop of the period's massive demographic changes, Accented America brings a broadly multi-ethnic set of writers into conversation, including Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, Henry Roth, Nella Larsen, John Dos Passos, Lionel Trilling, Americo Paredes, and Carlos Bulosan. These authors shared an acute sense of linguistic standardization during the interwar era and contend with the defamiliarizing sway of radical experimentation with invented and improper literary vernaculars. Mixing languages, these authors spurn expectations for phonological exactitude to develop multilingual literary aesthetics. Rather than confirming the powerfully seductive subtext of monolingualism-that those who speak alike are ethically and politically likeminded-multilingual modernists composed interwar novels that were characteristically American because, not in spite, of their synthetic syntaxes and enduring strangeness.

This book constitutes another step of the linguistic community in translating cognitive linguistics research into a set of guidelines applicable in the foreign language classroom. The authors, language scholars, and experienced practitioners discuss a collection of both more theoretical and practical issues from the area of second and foreign language pedagogy. These are matters that not only enhance our comprehension of particular grammatical and lexical problems, but also lead to the improvement of the efficiency of teaching a foreign language. The topics range from learners' emotions, teaching grammatical constructions, prepositions, and vocabulary, to specific issues in phonology. The observations concern the teaching of three different languages: English, French, and Italian. As a result, the book is of interest to scholars dealing with further developments of particular linguistic issues and practitioners who want to learn how to improve the quality of their classroom work.

Francis Lodwick FRS (1619-94) was a prosperous merchant, bibliophile, writer, thinker, and member of the Royal Society. He wrote extensively on language, religion, and experimental philosophy, most of it too controversial to be safely published during his lifetime. This edition includes the first publication of his unorthodox religious works alongside groundbreaking writings on language.
Following an extensive introduction by the editors the book is divided into three parts. Part One includes A Common Writing (1647), the first English attempt at an artificial language, and the equally pioneering phonetic alphabet set out in An Essay Towards an Universal Alphabet (1686). Part Two contains a series of linked short treatises on the nature of religion and divine revelation, including 'Of the Word of God' and 'Of the Use of Reason in Religion', in which Lodwick argues for a new understanding of the Bible, advocates a rational approach to divine worship, and seeks to reinterpret received religion for an age of reason. The final part of the book contains his unpublished utopian fiction, A Country Not Named here he creates a world to express his most firmly-held opinions on language and religion, and in which his utopians found a church that bans the Bible. The book gives new insights into the religious aspects of the scientific revolution and throws fresh light on the early modern frame of mind. It is aimed at intellectual and cultural historians, historians of science and linguistics, and literary scholars - indeed, at all those interested in the interplay of ideas, language, and religion in seventeenth-century England

Language Myths and the History of English aims to deconstruct the myths that are traditionally reproduced as factual accounts of the historical development of English. Using concepts and interpretive sensibilities developed in the field of sociolinguistics over the past 40 years, Richard J. Watts unearths these myths and exposes their ideological roots. His goal is not to construct an alternative discourse, but to offer alternative readings of the historical data. Watts raises the question of what we mean by a linguistic ideology, and whether any discourse--a hegemonic discourse, an alternative discourse, or even a deconstructive discourse--can ever be free of it. The book argues that a naturalized discourse is always built on a foundation of myths, which are all too easily taken as true accounts.

Semantic Indexicality shows how a simple syntax can be combined with a propositional language at the level of logical analysis. It is the adoption of such a base language which has not been attempted before, and it is this which constitutes the originality of the book. Cresswell's simple and direct style makes this book accessible to a wider audience than the somewhat specialized subject matter might initially suggest.

This is a history of the great language controversy that has occupied and empassioned Greeks - sometimes with fatal results - for over two hundred years. It begins in the late eighteenth-century when a group of Greek intellectuals sought to develop a new, Hellenic, national identity alongside the traditional identity supplied by Orthodox Christianity. The ensuing controversy focused on the language, fuelled on the one hand by a desire to develop a form of Greek that expressed the Greeks' relationship to the ancients, and on the other by the different groups' contrasting notions of what the national image so embodied should be. The purists wanted a written language close to the ancient. The vernacularists - later known as demoticists - sought to match written language to spoken, claiming the latter to be the product of the unbroken development of Greek since the time of Homer. Peter Mackridge explores the political, social, and linguistic causes and effects of the controversy in its many manifestations. Drawing on a wide range of evidence from literature, language, history, and anthropology, he traces its effects on spoken and written varieties of Greek and shows its impact on those in use today. He describes the efforts of linguistic elites and the state to achieve language standardization and independence from languages such as Turkish, Albanian, Vlach, and Slavonic. This is a timely book. The sense of national and linguistic identity that has been inculcated into generations of Greeks since the start of the War of Independence in 1821 has, in the last 25 years, received blows from which it may not recover. Immigration from Eastern Europe and elsewhere has introduced new populations whose religions, languages, and cultures are transforming Greece into a country quite different from what it has been and to what it once aspired to be.

This book provides a state-of-the-art introduction to categorial grammar, a type of formal grammar which analyzes expressions as functions or according to a function-argument relationship. The book's focus is on linguistic, computational, and psycholinguistic aspects of logical categorial grammar, i.e. enriched Lambek Calculus. Glyn Morrill opens with the history and notation of Lambek Calculus and its application to syntax, semantics, and processing. Successive chapters extend the grammar to a number of significant syntactic and semantic properties of natural language. The final part applies Morrill's account to several current issues in processing and parsing, considered from both a psychological and a computational perspective. The book offers a rigorous and thoughtful study of one of the main lines of research in the formal and mathematical theory of grammar, and will be suitable for students of linguistics and cognitive science from advanced undergraduate level upwards.

The starting date of the fourth volume of Julie Coleman's pioneering history marks the appearance of the most influential slang dictionary of the twentieth century, Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, produced at a time when the Depression had broken down traditional working-class communities; the United States was a still-reluctant world power; and another world war was inevitable. If the First World War unsettled combatants' minds, the second unsettled society. It challenged values around the world and, as the author shows, offered new opportunities for vibrant self-expression. Lexicographers recorded a rich harvest of words and phrases from around the world, reflecting new-found freedoms from convention, increased social mobility, and the continued rise of the mass media. Julie Coleman's account ranges across the English-speaking world. It will fascinate all those interested in slang and its reflections of social and cultural change.

This book deals with one aspect of Greek and Proto-Indo-European nominal morphology, the formation, inflection and semantics of s-stem nouns and adjectives. It uncovers the mechanisms of their creation and shows their limitation. The established view that the nouns are an unproductive category is challenged; at the same time, the expanding and partly changing nature of the basis governing the creation of the adjectives is explained. Morphology and semantics are studied in tandem, and a large chronological span of the Greek language is covered. The historical side is then extended into prehistory, and in particular the Greek evidence is tested against recent theories on Proto-Indo-European ablaut, leading to a reassessment of the morphonological characteristics in question.

This book provides a state-of-the-art introduction to categorial grammar, a type of formal grammar which analyzes expressions as functions or according to a function-argument relationship. The book's focus is on linguistic, computational, and psycholinguistic aspects of logical categorial grammar, i.e. enriched Lambek Calculus. Glyn Morrill opens with the history and notation of Lambek Calculus and its application to syntax, semantics, and processing. Successive chapters extend the grammar to a number of significant syntactic and semantic properties of natural language. The final part applies Morrill's account to several current issues in processing and parsing, considered from both a psychological and a computational perspective. The book offers a rigorous and thoughtful study of one of the main lines of research in the formal and mathematical theory of grammar, and will be suitable for students of linguistics and cognitive science from advanced undergraduate level upwards.

This book takes a fresh approach to analysing how new languages are created, combining in-depth colonial history and empirical, usage-based linguistics. Focusing on a rarely studied language, the authors employ this dual methodology to reconstruct how multilingual individuals drew on their perception of Romance and West African languages to form French Guianese Creole. In doing so, they facilitate the application of a usage-based approach to language while simultaneously contributing significantly to the debate on creole origins. This innovative volume is sure to appeal to students and scholars of language history, creolisation and languages in contact. Chapter 3 is published open access under a CC BY 4.0 license.