Southern Min (also known as Hokkien or Minnan) is a major branch of Chinese spoken mainly in Fujian and Taiwan, but also in Guangdong, Hainan and Hong Kong, as well as in many countries of Southeast Asia. Highly conservative in its linguistic profile, it is considered by many scholars to be a living language fossil due to the preservation of many archaic features that reflect its long-lasting history and culture. Yet to date there has been no comprehensive study of Southern Min using a typological framework, as the tendency is to base analyses on the model of Mandarin Chinese, the standard language. This grammar aims to present a systematic description of the Hui'an variety of Southern Min, mainly based on data collected via naturally occurring conversation. The volume includes four parts: nominal structure, predicate structure, clause structure and complex sentences, as well as a brief overview of phonology. It will have great appeal for heritage speakers, graduate students and scholars in both Chinese linguistics and typology.

By analysing the folk stories and personal narratives of a cross-section of Palestinians, Sirhan offers a detailed study of how content and sociolinguistic variables affect a narrator's language use and linguistic behaviour. This book will be of interest to anyone engaged with narrative discourse, gender discourse, Arabic studies and linguistics.

Business and culture are inextricably linked, each reflecting and reinforcing trends in the other. In Understanding American Business Jargon, W. Davis Folsom captures the essence of both by focusing on the terms and phrases that make up our business vocabulary. From "AAA" to "Zombie Bonds," Folsom takes us on a tour of over 2500 concepts that cover the spectrum of business-speak. In this fully revised, updated, and expanded edition, Folsom captures the spirit of business in the new millennium, with such colorful terms as "adhocracy," "Dilbert principle," "hyperlink," "traction," and "viral marketing." Each term is succinctly defined and described in context, and many are illustrated with quotations from the popular press. Including slang, acronyms, a bibliography, an introduction that discusses recent trends in business language, and cross-referenced throughout, Understanding American Business Jargon is not only a handy reference for any businessperson, student, or researcher, but an entertaining glimpse into our constantly evolving business culture.

This work investigates the syntax of the higher portion of the functional structure of the clause using comparative data from hundreds of Northern Italian dialects. The area contains dialects that are different in most ways yet homogenous syntactically, making it an ideal ground for analyzing micro-variations in syntax. The book sheds new light on debated problems such as subject-clitic inversion, verb movement and subject positions, and the structure of the higher functional phrases.

Dialectology proper has traditionally focused on the geographic distribution of language variation as an end in itself and has remained relatively segregated from other branches of linguistic and extra-linguistic inquiry. Cross-fertilizing winds have been blowing through the field for more than a decade, but much work remains for adequate synthesis. This book seeks to further the interdisciplinary integration of the field by highlighting, and harnessing, the many dialectic tensions inherent in language variation research and dialect definition. Undertaking a broadscale experiment in applied dialectics, the book demonstrates multiple grounds for insisting on a more robust, integrational approach to dialectology while simultaneously demonstrating grounds for defining the Phula languages of China and Vietnam. The Phula languages belong to the Burmic sub-branch of the Tibeto-Burman family and are primarily spoken in southeastern Yunnan Province, China. With origins as early as the ninth century, these language varieties have been left undefined, and largely unresearched, for hundreds of years. Based on extensive original fieldwork, the book identifies 24 synchronic Phula languages descended from three distinct macro-clades diachronically. This is accomplished by blending typological-descriptive, historical-comparative and socio-cognitive perspectives. Diagnostics include both qualitative and quantitative measurements, and insights from history, geography, ethnology, language contact, sociolinguistics and more are called on for data interpretation. This dialogic approach incorporates complexity by asserting that dialectology itself best flourishes as an interdependent dialectic - a dynamic synthesis of competing perspectives.

While variation within individual languages has traditionally been focused upon in sociolinguistics, its relevance for grammatical theory has only recently been acknowledged. On the methodological side, there is an ongoing competition between large-scale statistical analyses and investigations that rely more heavily on introspection and elicited grammaticality judgements. The aim of this volume is to bridge the 'cultural gap' between empirical-variationist and formal-theoretical approaches in linguistics. The volume offers case studies that seek to combine corpus-based and competence-based approaches to the description of variation. In doing so, it opens up new avenues for locating and analyzing variability, both at the level of the individual speaker and between speakers of different dialects and generations. The contributions document the plurality of current research into models of grammatical competence that live up to the challenge of variationist data. More specifically, parameter-based (e.g. Minimalist), constraint-based (e.g. Optimality Theoretic), and usage-based (e.g. Construction Grammar) approaches to variation are discussed. The volume therefore is of interest to a broad public within linguistics, including syntacticians of different theoretical persuasion, morphologists and sociolinguists. While a majority of contributions addresses facets of variation in English and German, the volume also includes variationist studies written by specialists of French, Dutch, Icelandic, and Uralic.

Ever wonder what going on the wagon has to do with drinking? Why does extreme behavior take the cake? And did Americans' pocket change ever really include wooden nickels? Many of our most intriguing expressions grew out of once-familiar bits of American culture, the roots of which are now obscure. Respected linguist Rosemarie Ostler demystifies over 150 of these colorful homegrown figures of speech. She traces each saying from its first known appearance in print to its place in modern English, uncovering a host of cultural and historical tidbits along the way. Homegrown metaphors sprang up on American soil almost as fast as the colonists' first bean crop. Just as they learned new farming skills and adjusted to an unfamiliar diet, they shaped their language to fit their new situation. Expressions like to play possum and bury the hatchet are uniquely American - they would hardly have made sense in the old country, where possums didn't exist and where hatchets were used only for splitting firewood. Ostler explains the rich history of figures of speech that grew out of the landscape and culture of North America. Much more than a list of phrases and definitions, Let's Talk Turkey is a lively and enjoyable exploration of how Americans developed their own inimitable style of speech. Expressions are arranged by cultural categories. These include some of our most bountiful sources for metaphor - the great outdoors, business, entertainment, politics, cops and robbers, food and drink, and doing chores. The thoroughly researched entries reveal the latest etymological discoveries, along with charming and illustrative quotes. This entertaining, amusing, and very informative reference book is sure to captivate language lovers of all ages, as well as anyone fascinated with the byways and back roads of American lore.

The New Cockney provides a sociolinguistic account of speech variation among adolescents in the 'traditional' East End of London. Embedded in its social context, it focuses on the interaction and social practices within a single community and highlights some of the possible mechanisms for language change.

It was traditionally assumed that having a single official language was a necessary condition for the wellbeing of the state, particularly in France and Britain. This assumption is now questioned, and the regional languages are making, in some cases, an impressive comeback. It is the story of their decline, their survival and, more recently their efforts to re-establish themselves as effective tools of normal communication which is tackled in this book. Each language is analyzed in terms of its development from the earliest times, through its period of decline to present-day efforts at regeneration.

Drawing on a dual expertise of rare intensity, Mirco Ghini's book is a major contribution to both Romance dialectology and phonological theory. It gives a comprehensive account of the segmental and metrical phonology of the Ligurian dialect of the village of Miogliola, North-west Italy. Based on the author's own fieldwork, it is the first in-depth study of this area, also tracing its development from Latin. Feature assignment, underspecification, and quantity alternations are most prominent among the general theoretical issues on which the particulars of Miogliola phonology, meticuously analysed, are brought to bear with elegance and force.

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.

Can language change be modelled as an evolutionary process? Can notions like variation, selection and competition be fruitfully applied to facts of language development? The present volume ties together various strands of linguistic research which can bring us towards an answer to these questions. In one of the youngest and rapidly growing areas of linguistic research, mathematical models and simulations of competition based developments have been applied to instances of language change. By matching the predicted and observed developmental trends, researchers gauge existing models to the needs of linguistic applications and evaluate the fruitfulness of evolutionary models in linguistics. The present volume confronts these studies with more empirically-based studies in creolization and historical language change which bear on key concepts of evolutionary models. What does it mean for a linguistic construction to survive its competitors? How do the interacting factors in phases of creolization differ from those in ordinary language change, and how - consequently - might Creole languages differ structurally from older languages? Some of the authors, finally, also address the question how different aspects of our linguistic competence tie in with our more elementary cognitive capacities. The volume contains contributions by Brady Clark et al., Elly van Gelderen, Alain Kihm, Manfred Krifka, Wouter Kusters, Robert van Rooij, Anette Rosenbach, John McWhorter, Teresa Satterfield, Michael Tomasello and Elizabeth C. Traugott. The book brings together contributions from two areas of research: the study of language evolution by means of methods from artifical intelligence/artificial life (like computer simulations and analytic mathematical methods) on the one hand, and empirically oriented research from historical linguistics and creolisation studies that uses concepts from evolutionary theory as a heuristic tool in a qualitative way. The book is thus interesting for readers from both traditions because it supplies them with information about relevant ongoing research and useful methods and data from the other camp.

This monograph is an anthropological study of the social significance of English among Kru residents of Monrovia, the capital city of Liberia. The volume contributes to our understanding of how contemporary Africans use language to negotiate conflicts and aspirations based on socioeconomic position and ethnic solidarity. aftermath of the first modern war.

A range of electronic corpora has become increasingly accessible via the WWW and CD-ROM. This development coincided with improvements in the standards governing the collecting, encoding and archiving of such data. Less attention, however, has been paid to making other types of digital data available. This is especially true of that which one might describe as 'unconventional', namely, the fragmentary texts and voices left to us as accidents of history. This book is a first step toward developing similar standards for enriching and preserving these neglected resources.

Contents:
Introduction 1. Some Aspects of African-American Vernacular English Guy Bailey and Erik Thomas 2. The Sentence in African-American Vernacular English Stefan Martin and Walt Wolfram 3. Aspect and Predicate Phrases in African-American Vernacular English Lisa Green 4. The Structure of the Noun Phrase in African-American English Salikoko S. Mufwene 5. Coexistent Systems in African-American English William Labov 6. The Development of African-American Vernacular English, Focusing on the Creole Origin Issue John R. Rickford 7. Word from the Hood: The Lexicon of African-American Vernacular English Geneva Smitherman 8. African-American Language Use: Ideology and So-Called Obscenity Arthur K. Spears 9. More than a Mood or an Attitude: Discourse and Verbal Genres in African-American Culture Marcyliena Morgan 10. Linguistics, Education, and the Law: Education Reform for African-American Language Minority Students John Baugh

A range of electronic corpora has become increasingly accessible via the WWW and CD-ROM. This development coincided with improvements in the standards governing the collecting, encoding and archiving of such data. Less attention, however, has been paid to making other types of digital data available. This is especially true of that which one might describe as 'unconventional', namely, dialects, child language and bilingual databases. This book is a first step toward developing similar standards for enriching and preserving these neglected resources.

Time-Bound Words argues that changes in English society and the English language are woven together, often in surprising ways, and investigates this claim by following eleven words from Chaucer's time to Shakespeare's. Middle English words like corage, estat, thrift , and virtu come to serve the logic of new social discourses by 1611. Language from Chaucer, Wyclif, More, Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson and others is examined both as current and emerging usage, and as verbal play that accomplishes cultural work.

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 book presents the most contemporary and comprehensive description of the acoustics of the sounds used in American English. Intended to serve as an introductory text for students and professionals interested in acoustic phonetics, linguistics, physics, electrical engineering, and computer science, the authors bring to the subject the points of view of both linguistics and physics. The book uses numerous examples of acoustic spectrograms to show the continuities and variability of natural speech. The book begins by introducing the basic concepts of phonetics, phonology, and linguistics to readers whose background is in physics or engineering and introducing the physics of sound generation and analysis for speech scientists and linguists. The authors then use the tools developed in the first part to examine the characteristics of individual phonemes as well as the changes introduced when individual sounds are combined in speech. Modern applications of speech acoustics, especially speech synthesis and recognition, are also discussed.

1. 0. V2 AND NULL SUBJECTS IN THE HIS TORY OF FRENCH The prototypical Romance null subject language has certain well known characteristics: verbal inflection is rich, distinguishing six per sonlnumber forms; subject pronouns are generally emphatic; and, when there is no need to emphasize the subject, the pronoun is not expressed at all. Spanish and Italian, for example, fit this description rather weIl. Modem French, however, provides a striking contrast to these lan guages; it does not allow subjects to be missing and, not unexpectedly, it has a verbal agreement system with few overt endings and subject pronouns which are not emphatic. One of the goals of the present work is to examine null subjects in two dialects of Romance that fit neither the Italian nor the French model: later Old French (12th-13th centriries) and MiddIe French (14th- 15th centuries). Old French has null subjects only in contexts where the subject would be postverbal if expressed (cf. Foulet (1928)), and Mid dIe French has null subjects in a wider range of syntactic contexts but does not freely allow a11 persons of the verb to be null. The work of Vanelli, Renzi and Beninca (1985) (along with many other works by these authors individually) shows that a number of other geographically proximate medieval dialects had similar systems, though it appears that there are significant differences in detail among them."

First published in 1987, the Dictionary of Jargon expands on its predecessor Newspeak (Routledge Revivals, 2014) as an authoritative reference guide to specialist occupational slang, or jargon. Containing around 21, 000 entries, the dictionary encompasses a truly eclectic range of fields and includes extensive coverage of both British and U.S. jargon. Areas dealt with range from marketing to medicine, from advertising to artificial intelligence and from skiing to sociology. This is a fascinating resource for students of lexicography and professional lexicographers, as well as the general inquisitive reader.

George Orwell coined the term 'Newspeak' for his novel 1984, the purpose of which was designed to shrink vocabularies and eliminate subtlety and nuance. For this dictionary, first published to herald the year 1984, Jonathon Green compiled nearly 8, 000 entries - selected from the slangs and specific vocabularies of trades, professions and interests - covering such areas as the world of entertainment, the media, the military economics, and finance. This dictionary provides an accurate and useful linguistic guide for students of lexicography and an interesting compendium for the general inquisitive reader.

Most of the world's Extraterritorial Englishes stem historically from southern English dialects - Southern England having been the most densely-habited part of the country. However, the dialects of Southern England remain under-studied. The papers in this volume consider both diachronic and synchronic aspects of the dialects of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Kent, Sussex, Dorset, Somerset, Devon, Cornwall, Gloucestershire and the Isles of Scilly.

Tonal accents in Norwegian: Phonology, morphology and lexical specification breaks from the traditional and contemporary analyses of word accent in North Germanic with the goal of providing a more simplex and unified morphophonological analysis of word accents in North Germanic. It gives the facts of accent distribution in Standard East Norwegian, discusses how three of the more recent and most important analyses of accent assignment in Norwegian and Swedish deal with these facts and provides an alternative analysis. Given that many Accent 1 words are loans, the book also discusses how loanword incorporated in East Norwegian and other North Germanic dialects and the question of why loans predominantly bear Accent 1. Although the focus of the book is word accent assignment in Standard East Norwegian, it also refers to Central Swedish and Old Norse. In this way, it accounts for many aspects of accent assignment, the true nature of which might have gone undetected had only one of the North Germanic language been taken into consideration. The book also dedicates one chapter to the phonetics of the tonal contrast. Addressing the question of how perceptually salient the tonal contrast is.

This book discusses the methodology of systematic Chinese Dialect classification, with particular attention to the conservative Miin and Hakka groups spoken in southern China. The primary linguistic methodology employed is the historical-comparative method, and the dialects chosen as examples of classification are those spoken in and around the township of Wann'an in western Fukien's Longyan country. The book features extensive comparative tables of dialect forms, and a two-hundred page appendix outlining the diasystem of the four principal Wann'an dialects.