'Any bibliophile will find many enjoyable nuggets in this compendium of book chat' Stephen Poole, Guardian 'An engaging little eye-opener about the publishing business, full of tasty nuggets about books, writers and their editors' Sunday Times 'Enjoyable ... engaging ... insightful' Independent Once upon a time, a writer had an idea. They wrote it down. But what happened next? Join Rebecca Lee, professional text-improver, as she embarks on a fascinating journey to find out how words get from an author's brain to finished, printed books. She'll reveal the dark arts of ghostwriters, explore the secret world of literary agents and uncover the hidden beauty of typesetting. Along the way, her quest will be punctuated by a litany of little-known (but often controversial) considerations that make a big impact: ellipses, indexes, hyphens, esoteric points of grammar and juicy post-publication corrections. After all, the best stories happen when it all goes wrong. From foot-and-note disease to the town of Index, Missouri - turn the page to discover how books get made and words get good.* * Or, at least, better

In this enlightening biography, award- winning academic psychologist Michael Corballis tells the story of how the field of cognitive psychology evolved and the controversies and anecdotes that occurred along the way. Since the Second World War, psychology has undergone several scientific movements, from behaviourism to cognitive psychology and finally to neuroscience. In this fascinating biography, Corballis recounts his career as a researcher who played a part in these monumental changes in psychology. Beginning with his boarding-school education in New Zealand, Corballis goes on to recount his PhD studies and behavioural research into mirror-image discriminations in pigeons, the uprising of the "cognitive revolution" amidst 1960s counterculture and his switch to become a cognitive psychologist, his research into brain asymmetry and the evolution of language and its origin of manual gestures, and the development of mental time travel in animals. Featuring stories of prominent scientists who were integral in psychology's biggest discoveries and insight into the heated debates and controversies in psychology during a time of great scientific and sociocultural change, this biography is a must-read for those interested in how psychology became established as a science.

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.

Contains revised papers from a September 1996 symposium which provided a forum for synchronically and diachronically oriented scholars to exchange ideas and for American and European cognitive linguists to confront representatives of different directions in European structural semantics. Papers are in sections on theories and models, descriptive categories, and case studies, and examine areas such as cognitive and structural semantics, diachronic prototype semantics, synecdoche as a cognitive and communicative strategy, and intensifiers as targets and sources of semantic change.

From birth to early adulthood, all aspects of a child's life undergo enormous development and change, and language is no exception. This book documents the results of a pioneering longitudinal linguistic survey, which followed a cohort of sixty-seven African American children over the first twenty years of life, to examine language development through childhood. It offers the first opportunity to hear what it sounds like to grow up linguistically for a cohort of African American speakers, and provides fascinating insights into key linguistics issues, such as how physical growth influences pronunciation, how social factors influence language change, and the extent to which individuals modify their language use over time. By providing a lens into some of the most foundational questions about coming of age in African American Language, this study has implications for a wide range of disciplines, from speech pathology and education, to research on language acquisition and sociolinguistics.

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.

The present volume is a monographic study devoted to selected aspects of English historical phonology, orthography, syntax, morphology and semantics. It is the result of international cooperation of scholars affiliated with various academic institutions around the world, such as the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, USA; the University of Edinburgh, UK; the University of Westminster, UK; the University of Tours, France, the University of Amsterdam, Netherlands; the Boris Grinchenko University in Kiev, Ukraine; the South-West University "Neofit Rilski", Bulgaria; the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin, Poland; the University of Silesia, Poland; the Silesian University of Technology, Poland.

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.

This volume examines the determining role of context in the production and reception of news texts from the seventeenth century until the first half of the twentieth century. The context is understood as historical, social, political, professional, textual and material, with chapters focusing on how such a context or contexts influenced the language and reception of the news texts in question. The contributors to the volume are experts in their field of research and have employed a variety of methodological approaches in their analyses of the interrelationship between context and historical news discourse. These include historical pragmatics, historical discourse analysis, critical discourse analysis, appraisal theory, frame theory, and corpus linguistics. The volume is divided into three sections: British News Contexts, International News Contexts, and Advertising Contexts. The first two sections offer a wide-ranging examination of how context has determined the writing and understanding of news in both the British and international domain. The third section in the volume on advertising contexts and discourse is not just justified by the fundamental importance of advertising in the development and history of the press but also by the social and political relevance of the topics examined in the advertisements. These include studies on mental health and asylum advertisements, runaway slaves classified advertisements, and embedded nationalistic content and ideology in Irish newspaper advertisements of the 1930s.

This book presents a journey into how language is put together for speaking and understanding and how it can come apart when there is injury to the brain. The goal is to provide a window into language and the brain through the lens of aphasia, a speech and language disorder resulting from brain injury in adults. This book answers the question of how the brain analyzes the pieces of language, its sounds, words, meaning, and ultimately puts them together into a unitary whole. While its major focus is on clinical, experimental, and theoretical approaches to language deficits in aphasia, it integrates this work with recent technological advances in neuroimaging to provide a state-of-the-art portrayal of language and brain function. It also shows how current computational models that share properties with those of neurons allow for a common framework to explain how the brain processes language and its parts and how it breaks down according to these principles. Consideration will also be given to whether language can recover after brain injury or when areas of the brain recruited for speaking, understanding, or reading are deprived of input, as seen with people who are deaf or blind. No prior knowledge of linguistics, psychology, computer science, or neuroscience is assumed. The informal style of this book makes it accessible to anyone with an interest in the complexity and beauty of language and who wants to understand how it is put together, how it comes apart, and how language maps on to the brain.

This book offers an in depth analysis of the interactional challenges that arise due to various dementias and in a variety of social contexts. By assessing conversations between persons with dementia and their family members, caregivers, and clinicians, it shares insights into both the language and actions selected by the participants. Using several different research methods, authors highlight competencies and areas of struggle, as well as choices that ease interactions along with those that seem to complicate them. Each chapter provides practical strategies to help readers better navigate day-to-day interactions with persons with dementia. The book is part of a continuing effort to offer guidance and hope to those for whom such conversations have become part of their daily lives. It presents concrete recommendations for specific groups such as family members, caregivers, and clinicians; it will also be of interest to researchers in the field of dementia and early career scholars interested in the methodologies discussed.

Do the languages people speak influence their economic decisions and social behavior in multilingual societies? This Handbook brings together scholars from various disciplines to examine the links and tensions between economics and language to find the delicate balance between monetary benefits and psychological costs of linguistic dynamics.

*An approachable and engaging introduction to Historical Linguistics with up-to-date pedagogy including exercises, further reading and online support material. *Historical Linguistics is a core part of most linguistics programmes. With the more experienced linguistics student in mind, this book covers many subjects in considerable depth while not sacrificing an appreciation of the whole. *Includes examples and datasets from a wide variety of languages and language families, whereas most historical linguistics textbooks tend to just focus on the language family the author works on.

This is the most detailed and comprehensive study to date of early Latin language, literary and non-literary, featuring twenty-nine chapters by an international team of scholars. 'Early Latin' is interpreted liberally as extending from the period of early inscriptions through to the first quarter of the first century BC. Classical Latin features significantly in the volume, although in a restricted sense. In the classical period there were writers who imitated the Latin of an earlier age, and there were also interpreters of early Latin. Later authors and views on early Latin language are also examined as some of these are relevant to the establishment of the text of earlier writers. A major aim of the book is to define linguistic features of different literary genres, and to address problems such as the limits of periodisation and the definition of the very concept of 'early Latin'.

*Cutting-edge and controversial branch of linguistics, closely relating to ideas of ‘verbal hygiene’ and language discrimination, with the potential to bring about changes to the study of linguistics *The first handbook-length treatment of linguistic prescriptivism, inspired by the recent proliferation of research, conferences and undergraduate sociolinguistics courses dedicated to the topic *Includes languages that have traditionally not been the focus of analysis within this field of research, namely highly standardised European languages, thus attracting readership interested in prescriptive efforts outside of their well-explored context

A Survey of Modern English covers a wide selection of aspects of the modern English language. Fully revised and updated, the major focus of the third edition lies in Standard American and British English individually and in comparison with each other. Over and beyond that, this volume treats other Englishes around the world, especially those of the southern hemisphere countries of Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa as well as numerous varieties spoken in southern, eastern and western Africa, south and southeast Asia, and the Pacific. The main areas of investigation and interest include: pronunciation, grammar, and vocabulary; multiple facets of English dialects and sociolects with an emphasis on gender and ethnicity; questions of pragmatics as well as a longer look at English-related pidgin and creole varieties. This authoritative guide is a comprehensive, scholarly, and systematic review of modern English. In one volume, the book presents a description of both the linguistic structure of present-day English and its geographical, social, gender, and ethnic variations. This is complemented with an updated general bibliography and with exercises at the end of each chapter and their suggested solutions at the end of the volume, all intended to provide students and other interested readers with helpful resources.

From an award-winning writer and linguist, a scientific and personal meditation on the phenomenon of language loss and the possibility of renewal. As a child Julie Sedivy left Czechoslovakia for Canada, and English soon took over her life. By early adulthood she spoke Czech rarely and badly, and when her father died unexpectedly, she lost not only a beloved parent but also her firmest point of connection to her native language. As Sedivy realized, more is at stake here than the loss of language: there is also the loss of identity. Language is an important part of adaptation to a new culture, and immigrants everywhere face pressure to assimilate. Recognizing this tension, Sedivy set out to understand the science of language loss and the potential for renewal. In Memory Speaks, she takes on the psychological and social world of multilingualism, exploring the human brain's capacity to learn-and forget-languages at various stages of life. But while studies of multilingual experience provide resources for the teaching and preservation of languages, Sedivy finds that the challenges facing multilingual people are largely political. Countering the widespread view that linguistic pluralism splinters loyalties and communities, Sedivy argues that the struggle to remain connected to an ancestral language and culture is a site of common ground, as people from all backgrounds can recognize the crucial role of language in forming a sense of self. Distinctive and timely, Memory Speaks combines a rich body of psychological research with a moving story at once personal and universally resonant. As citizens debate the merits of bilingual education, as the world's less dominant languages are driven to extinction, and as many people confront the pain of language loss, this is badly needed wisdom.

Literacy is a concern of all nations of the world, whether they be classified as developed or undeveloped. A person must be able to read and write in order to function adequately in society, and reading and writing require a script. But what kinds of scripts are in use today, and how do they influence the acquisition, use and spread of literacy? "Scripts and Literacy" systematically explores how the nature of a script affects how it is read and how one learns to read and write it. It reveals the similarities underlying the world's scripts and the features that distinguish how they are read. Scholars from different parts of the world describe several different scripts, e.g. Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Indian Amerindian -- and how they are learned. Research data and theories are presented. This book should be of primary interest to educators and researchers in reading and writing around the world.

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.

In their book, the authors describe the usage of and attitudes towards English in Asia since the 19th century, as well as the creative and dynamic ways in which Asians of the 21st century continually reinvent the lexicon of English, and the lexicons of their native tongues. The current biggest source of loanwords for many of the world's languages is English, the once obscure Germanic language that has risen to the role of a global lingua franca. However, the overwhelming influence of English is far from being entirely one-sided, at least from a lexical perspective. Many have decried the way that English has "invaded" the vocabularies of their languages, without realising that the English word stock is to some extent also being invaded by these languages. This book explores the phenomenon of word exchange by examining its occurrence between English and some of the major languages spoken in Asia-highly multi-ethnic, multicultural, and multilingual region where English is the predominant medium of international and intraregional communication. Students and researchers from various linguistic areas such as world Englishes, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, lexicology, and contact linguistics will find this book appealing.

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 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.

This book is a selection of papers presented at the 11th International Conference on Middle English (ICOME11), held at the University of Florence, Italy from 5 to 8 February 2019. The papers, organised under three headings "Textual Interlacing," "Borrowing and the Lexicon," and "Language at Different Levels," interface different fields of linguistics, literature and philology in the context of Medieval England and offer a holistic view of current research within Middle English studies. The contributors employ a wealth of different new and traditional approaches and methodologies, and deal with materials ranging from canonical literary works to scientific and practical texts, including electronic corpora and databases.

Learn the Essentials of Biblical Greek So You Can Study the New Testament More Deeply This newly revised third edition of Greek for the Rest of Us by Greek instructor William Mounce 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. In Greek for the Rest of Us readers 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 For anyone interested in seriously studying the New Testament, Greek for the Rest of Us is your gateway to learning the skills and tools you need to accomplish your goals. You can enhance your learning experience even more with the Greek for the Rest Us Workbook (sold separately) which contains exercises to help practice and reinforce the concepts you are learning in the main book.