Across scholarship on gender and sexuality, binaries like female versus male and gay versus straight have been problematized as a symbol of the stigmatization and erasure of non-normative subjects and practices. The chapters in Queer Excursions offer a series of distinct perspectives on these binaries, as well as on a number of other, less immediately apparent dichotomies that nevertheless permeate the gendered and sexual lives of speakers. Several chapters focus on the limiting or misleading qualities of binaristic analyses, while others suggest that binaries are a crucial component of social meaning within particular communities of study. Rather than simply accepting binary structures as inevitable, or discarding them from our analyses entirely based on their oppressive or reductionary qualities, this volume advocates for a re-theorization of the binary that affords more complex and contextually-grounded engagement with speakers' own orientations to dichotomous systems. It is from this perspective that contributors identify a number of diverging conceptualizations of binaries, including those that are non-mutually exclusive, those that liberate in the same moment that they constrain, those that are imposed implicitly by researchers, and those that re-contextualize familiar divisions with innovative meanings. Each chapter offers a unique perspective on locally salient linguistic practices that help constitute gender and sexuality in marginalized communities. As a collection, Queer Excursions argues that researchers must be careful to avoid the assumption that our own preconceptions about binary social structures will be shared by the communities we study.

Over the past twenty years or so, the work on Japanese within generative grammar has shifted from primarily using contemporary theory to describe Japanese to contributing directly to general theory, on top of producing extensive analyses of the language. The Oxford Handbook of Japanese Linguistics captures the excitement that comes from answering the question, "What can Japanese say about Universal Grammar?" Each of the eighteen chapters takes up a topic in syntax, morphology, acquisition, processing, phonology, or information structure, and, first of all, lays out the core data, followed by critical discussion of the various approaches found in the literature. Each chapter ends with a section on how the study of the particular phenomenon in Japanese contributes to our knowledge of general linguistic theory. This book will be useful to students and scholars of linguistics who are interested in the latest studies on one of the most extensively studied languages within generative grammar.

This accessible textbook offers students the opportunity to explore for themselves a wide range of sociolinguistic issues relating to the German language and its role in societies around the world. It is written for undergraduate students who have a sound practical knowledge of German but who have little or no knowledge of linguistics or sociolinguistics. It combines text with practical exercises and discussion questions to stimulate readers to think for themselves and to tackle specific problems.
In Part One Patrick Stevenson invites readers to investigate and reflect on issues about the status and function of the German language in relation to its speakers and to speakers of other languages with which it comes into contact. In Part Two the focus shifts to the forms and functions of individual features of the language. This involves, for example, identifying features of regional speech forms, analysing similarities and differences between written and spoken German, or looking at the 'social meaning' underlying different forms of address. Part Three explores the relationship between the German language and the nature of 'Germanness'. It concentrates on people's attitudes towards the language, the ways in which it is changing, and their views on what it represents for them.
Features and benefits of using this book:
* Comprehensive: provides the basis for a typical one-semester course
* Informative and practical: combines a review of current themes with graded exercises and relevant reading, plus an index of terms
* Topical and contemporary: deals with current situations with the most up-to-date information
* Has a workbook character: encourages students to think and work for themselves.
Patrick Stevenson is a lecturer in German in the School of Modern Languages, Southampton University.

For the whole of the last half-century, most theoretical syntacticians have assumed that knowledge of language is different from the tasks of speaking and understanding. There have been some dissenters, but, by and large, this view still holds sway.

This book takes a different view: it continues the task set in hand by Kempson et al (2001) of arguing that the common-sense intuition is correct that knowledge of language consists in being able to use it in speaking and understanding. The Dynamics of Language argues that interpretation is built up across as sequence of words relative to some context and that this is all that is needed to explain the structural properties of language. The dynamics of how interpretation is built up is the syntax of a language system. The authors' first task is to convey to a general linguistic audience with a minimum of formal apparatus, the substance of that formal system. Secondly, as linguists, they set themselves the task of applying the formal system to as broad an array of linguistic puzzles as possible, the languages analysed ranging from English to Japanese and Swahili.

"This book makes an uncommon achievement in successfully using detailed analyses of typologically diverse languages to address foundational questions about what it means to know a language and about the relation between speaking and understanding. This book will be of interest to anybody who is serious about the cognitive science of syntax and semantics."
Colin Phillips, University of Maryland, USA

"For anyone interested in the basic nature of natural language syntax, this book is a necessary, and enjoyable, read. The authors provide a new take on howinterpretations are constructed by language users, and back up their general theoretical proposals with original analyses of an eclectic range of linguistic phenomena. The exposition
is clear and engaging-and challenging. You will have some of your assumptions shaken up; whether they fall back in place, or are radically rearranged, the experience is stimulating."
Caroline Heycock, University of Edinburgh, UK

Locality is a key concept not only in linguistic theorizing, but in explaining pattern of acquisition and patterns of recovery in garden path sentences, as well. If syntax relates sound and meaning over an infinite domain, syntactic dependencies and operations must be restricted in such a way to apply over limited, finite domains in order to be detectable at all (although of course they may be allowed to iterate indefinitely). The theory of what these finite domains are and how they relate to the fundamentally unbounded nature of syntax is the theory of locality. The papers in this collection all deal with the concept of locality in syntactic theory, and, more specifically, describe and analyze the various contributions Luigi Rizzi has made to this area over the past three and a half decades. The authors are all eminent linguists in generative syntax who have collaborated with Rizzi closely, and in eleven chapters, they explore locality in both pure syntax and psycholinguistics. This collection is essential reading for students and scholars of linguistic theory, generative syntax, and comparative syntax.

This is an introduction to the history of languages, from the distant past to a glimpse at what languages may be like in the distant future. It looks at how languages arise, change, and ultimately vanish, and what lies behind their different destinies. What happens to languages, he argues, has to do with what happens to the people who use them, and what happens to people, individually and collectively, is affected by the languages they speak.
The book opens by examining what the languages are the hunter-gatherers might have spoken and the changes to language that took place when agriculture made settled communities possible. It then looks at the effects of the invention of writing, the formation of empires, the spread of religions, and the recent dominance of world powers, and shows how these relate to great changes in the use of languages. Tore Janson discusses the appearance of new languages, the reasons why some languages spread and others die, considers whether similar cyclical processes are found at different times and places, and examines the causes of internal changes in languages and dialects.
The book ranges widely among the world's languages and mixes thematic chapters on general processes of change with accounts of specific languages, including Chinese, Arabic, Latin, Greek, and English.

Basic Phonics Skills, Level C (Grades 1 to 2) features 238 reproducible skill sheets and 20 reproducible Little Phonics Readers. This book is organized into sections by phonetic or structural element, with each skill presented in the same consistent format. Worksheets for each skill progress in difficulty so that teachers may choose practice that meets individual student needs.Includes reproducible "Little Phonics Readers," featuring stories that utilize the phonetic elements presented in the book.

Work in morphology is typically concerned with productive word formation and regular inflection, in any event with open class categories such as verbs, nouns, and adjectives, and their various forms. The Architecture of Determiners, by contrast, is devoted to a set of function words: the closed class of determiners. While it is traditionally assumed that function words are syntactically atomic, Thomas Leu shows that a comparative perspective on a series of determiners - each insistently vivisected into its minimal morphotactic segments - reveals an anatomy with properties analogous to clausal syntax, including a lexical, an inflectional, and left peripheral layer, as well as transformational relations among subconstituents. Leu argues that determiners are extended adjectival projections with a closed class minimal stem. Leu focuses on Swiss German and German, using other Germanic and non-Germanic languages as a comparative domain. His discussion of the internal structure of determiners includes demonstratives (ch.2), distributive quantifiers (ch.4), possessive and negative determiners (ch.5), and interrogative determiners such as 'was fur' (ch.6). His main claim - that all of these involve extended adjectival projections - connects naturally to a discussion of adjectival / determiner inflection in German. Chapter 3 addresses the oft-debated strong versus weak agreement alternation in a novel way, proposing that the adjective moves within its own extended projection, in a way akin to verb movement to C in the clause. This accounts for the central facts of nominative and accusative inflection. Chapter 7, then, addresses dative and genitive morphology, setting them syntactically apart from adjectival / determiner inflection in a way that leads to a surprising account of most of the systematic (meta-) syncretism patterns in German adjectival inflection.

By comparing linguistic varieties that are quite similar overall, linguists can often determine where and how grammatical systems differ, and how they change over time. Micro-Syntactic Variation in North American English provides a systematic look at minimal differences in the syntax of varieties of English spoken in North America. The book makes available for the first time a range of data on unfamiliar constructions drawn from several regional and social dialects, data whose distribution and grammatical properties shed light on the varieties under examination and on the properties of English syntax more generally. The nine contributions collected in this volume fall under a number of overlapping topics: variation in the expression of negation and modality (the "so don't I " construction in eastern New England, negative auxiliary inversion in declaratives in African-American and southern white English, multiple modals in southern speech, the "needs washed " construction in the Pittsburgh area); pronouns and reflexives (transitive expletives in Appalachia, personal dative constructions in the Southern/Mountain states, long-distance reflexives in the Minnesota Iron Range); and the relation between linguistic variation and language change (the rise of "drama SO " among younger speakers, the difficulty in establishing which phenomena cluster together and should be explained by a single point of parametric variation). These chapters delve into the syntactic analysis of individual phenomena, and the editors' introduction and afterword contextualize the issues and explore their semantic, pragmatic, and sociolinguistic implications.

Japanese syntax has been studied within the framework of generative linguistics for nearly 50 years. But when it is studied in comparison with other languages, it is mostly compared with English. Japanese Syntax in Comparative Perspective seeks to fill a gap in the literature by examining Japanese in comparison with other Asian languages, including Chinese, Korean, Turkish, and Dravidian and Indo-Aryan languages of India. By focusing on Japanese and other Asian languages, the ten papers in this volume (on topics such as ellipsis, postponing, and wh-questions) make a unique contribution to the study of generative linguistics, and to the Principles and Parameters theory in particular.

From the dawn of the early modern period around 1400 until the eighteenth century, Latin was still the European language and its influence extended as far as Asia and the Americas. At the same time, the production of Latin writing exploded thanks to book printing and new literary and cultural dynamics. Latin also entered into a complex interplay with the rising vernacular languages. This Handbook gives an accessible survey of the main genres, contexts, and regions of Neo-Latin, as we have come to call Latin writing composed in the wake of Petrarch (1304-74). Its emphasis is on the period of Neo-Latin's greatest cultural relevance, from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Its chapters, written by specialists in the field, present individual methodologies and focuses while retaining an introductory character. The Handbook will be valuable to all readers wanting to orientate themselves in the immense ocean of Neo-Latin literature and culture. It will be particularly helpful for those working on early modern languages and literatures as well as to classicists working on the culture of ancient Rome, its early modern reception and the shifting characteristics of post-classical Latin language and literature. Political, social, cultural and intellectual historians will find much relevant material in the Handbook, and it will provide a rich range of material to scholars researching the history of their respective geographical areas of interest.

In response to increased focus on the protection of intangible cultural heritage across the world, Music Endangerment offers a new practical approach to assessing, advocating, and assisting the sustainability of musical genres. Drawing upon relevant ethnomusicological research on globalization and musical diversity, musical change, music revivals, and ecological models for sustainability, author Catherine Grant systematically critiques strategies that are currently employed to support endangered musics. She then constructs a comparative framework between language and music, adapting and applying the measures of language endangerment as developed by UNESCO, in order to identify ways in which language maintenance might (and might not) illuminate new pathways to keeping these musics strong. Grant's work presents the first in-depth, standardized, replicable tool for gauging the level of vitality of music genres, providing an invaluable resource for the creation and maintenance of international cultural policy. It will enable those working in the field to effectively demonstrate the degree to which outside intervention could be of tangible benefit to communities whose musical practices are under threat. Significant for both its insight and its utility, Music Endangerment is an important contribution to the growing field of applied ethnomusicology, and will help secure the continued diversity of our global musical traditions.

In this book Adrian Koopman details the complex relationship between plants, the Zulu language and Zulu culture. Zulu plant names do not just identify plants, they tell us a lot more about the plant, or how it is perceived or used in Zulu culture. For example, the plant name umhlulambazo (what defeats the axe’ tells us that this is a tree with hard, dense wood, and that usondelangange (come closer so I can embrace you) is a tree with large thorns that snag the passer-by. In a similar vein, both umakuphole (let it cool down) and icishamlilo (put out the fire) refer to plants that are used medicinally to treat fevers and inflammations. Plants used as the base of love-charms have names that are particularly colourful, such as unginakile (she has noticed me), uvelabahleke (appear and they smile) and the wonderfully named ungcingci-wafika-umntakwethu (how happy I am that you have arrived, my sweetheart!). And then there are those plant names that are just plain intriguing, if not mystifying: umakhandakansele (the heads of Mr Ratel), isandlasonwabu (hand of a chameleon), intombikayibhinci (the girl does not wear clothes) and ukhuningomile (piece of firewood, I am thirsty).

This volume looks at the impact of evergreen activities - sports, games and gambling - upon the way we talk and the things we say. Peter Ryding takes us from cricket to roulette via some very tricky and diverting tangents.

Dictionary of the language spoken in Tunisia -French-Arabic-, designed for the benefit of beginners and more experienced learners, the fruit of years of research. The vocabulary is in Arabic, and the transliteration helps with the pronunciation. References to literary Arabic make interesting comparisons possible. Dictionnaire de la langue parlA (c)e en Tunisie -franAais-arabe-, destinA (c) aux dA (c)butant et aux plus chevronnA (c)s, fruit da annA (c)es de recherches. Le vocabulaire est rA (c)digA (c) en arabe et la translitA (c)ration en facilite la comprA (c)hension. Les rA (c)fA (c)rences A la langue littA (c)raire permettent des comparaisons intA (c)ressantes.

This volume looks at the legacy of British history in the way we talk and the things we say. It takes us from the departure of the Romans from Britain up to and including the Middle Ages.

The author presents a humorous journey through the English language, exploring the fascinating facts and phrases that make English so rich and exciting.