This volume provides a systematic comparative treatment of urban contact dialects in the Global North and South, examining the emergence and development of these dialects in major cities in sub-Saharan Africa and North-Western Europe. The book's focus on contemporary urban settings sheds light on the new language practices and mixed ways of speaking resulting from large-scale migration and the intense contact that occurs between new and existing languages and dialects in these contexts. In comparing these new patterns of language variation and change between cities in both Africa and Europe, the volume affords us a unique opportunity to examine commonalities in linguistic phenomena as well as sociolinguistic differences in societally multilingual settings and settings dominated by a strong monolingual habitus. These comparisons are reinforced by a consistent chapter structure, with each chapter presenting the linguistic and social context of the region, information on available data (including corpora), sociolinguistic and structural findings, a discussion of the status of the urban contact dialect, and its stability over time. The discussion in the book is further enriched by short commentaries from researchers contributing different theoretical and geographical perspectives. Taken as a whole, the book offers new insights into migration-based linguistic diversity and patterns of language variation and change, making this ideal reading for students and scholars in general linguistics and language structure, sociolinguistics, creole studies, diachronic linguistics, language acquisition, anthropological linguistics, language education and discourse analysis.

Every linguistic theory has to come to grips with a fundamental property of human language: the existence of exceptions, i.e. phenomena that do not follow the standard patterns one observes otherwise. The contributions to this volume discuss and exemplify a variety of approaches to exceptionality within different formal and non-formal frameworks. Topics include criteria for exceptionality, the diachronic rise of exceptions, the relevance of different grammatical subsystems and their interaction in the explanation of exceptions, and the crucial characteristics of grammatical models that can accommodate exceptions. A special feature of the book is that the articles are accompanied by peer-commentaries and responses thereupon, thus opening up the papers to further discussion.

What constitutes our number concept? What makes it possible for us to employ numbers the way we do; which mental faculties contribute to our grasp of numbers? What do we share with other species, and what is specific to humans? How does our language faculty come into the picture? This book addresses these questions and discusses the relationship between numerical thinking and the human language faculty, providing psychological, linguistic, and philosophical perspectives on number, its evolution, and its development in children. Heike Wiese argues that language as a human faculty plays a crucial role in the emergence of systematic numerical thinking. She characterises number sequences as powerful and highly flexible mental tools that are unique to humans and shows that it is language that enables us to go beyond the perception of numerosity and to develop such mental tools.

What constitutes our number concept? What makes it possible for us to employ numbers the way we do; which mental faculties contribute to our grasp of numbers? What do we share with other species, and what is specific to humans? How does our language faculty come into the picture? This 2003 book addresses these questions and discusses the relationship between numerical thinking and the human language faculty, providing psychological, linguistic and philosophical perspectives on number, its evolution and its development in children. Heike Wiese argues that language as a human faculty plays a crucial role in the emergence of systematic numerical thinking. She characterises number sequences as powerful and highly flexible mental tools that are unique to humans and shows that it is language that enables us to go beyond the perception of numerosity and to develop such mental tools.