front cover of Fanti Kinship and the Analysis of Kinship Terminologies
Fanti Kinship and the Analysis of Kinship Terminologies
David B. Kronenfeld
University of Illinois Press, 2008

This book examines Fanti kinship terminology from a variety of analytic and formal perspectives. Based on work with a broad number of informants, David B. Kronenfeld details and analyzes internal variation in usage within the Fanti community, shows the relationship between terminology and social groups and communicative usage, and relates these findings to major theoretical work on kinship and on the intersections of language, thought, and culture.

The terminological analysis in this study employs a great variety of formal approaches, assesses the strengths and weaknesses of each approach, and covers a wide range of types of usage. This work also performs a systematic, formal analysis of behavior patterns among kin, joining this approach with the analysis of a kinship terminological system. Rather than treating kinship terminology as a special, isolated piece of culture, this study also ties its analysis to more general semantic and cultural theoretical issues. Including computational and comparative studies of kinship terminologies, this volume represents the fullest analysis of any kinship terminological system in the ethnographic record.

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Fatwas and Court Judgments
A Genre Analysis of Arabic Legal Opinion
Ahmed Fakhri
The Ohio State University Press, 2014
Fatwas and Court Judgments: A Genre Analysis of Arabic Legal Opinion uses a genre analysis approach to investigate how Arabic legal opinion is linguistically and rhetorically constructed in two culturally significant types of texts: secular court judgments and fatwas, the Islamic edicts based on sharii’a law. Ahmed Fakhri’s analysis shows that the court judgments exhibit several Western-inspired features, particularly the complexity of syntax and the rhetorical moves utilized to construct arguments. But the fatwas maintain conventional Arabic patterns of persuasion, such as citing religious texts, relying on affective appeal, and offering moral advice. Showing how these two radically different rhetorical traditions coexist, Fatwas and Court Judgments totally re-conceptualizes Arabic legal argumentation by highlighting its diverse sources and hybridity.
 
The differences between the two genres stem from elements of their socio-cultural context, such as the role relations of the participants and the characteristics of the institutions to which the genres belong. Moving beyond these contexts, Fatwas and Court Judgments reveals generic practices that have broad implications for understanding various aspects of wider Arab culture, including the tension between modern secular ideologies and traditional religious beliefs, the male-dominated access to discourse, and the prevalence of utilitarian attitudes exhibited in “fatwa shopping.”
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A Few Months to Live
Different Paths to Life’s End
Jana Staton, Roger W. Shuy, and Ira Byock
Georgetown University Press, 2001

A Few Months to Live describes what dying is like from the perspectives of nine terminally ill individuals and their caregivers. Documenting a unique study of end-of-life experiences that included detailed conversations in home care settings, the book focuses on how participants lived their daily lives, understood their illnesses, coped with symptoms-especially pain-and searched for meaning or spiritual growth in their final months of life. The accounts are presented largely in the participants' own words, illuminating both the medical and non-medical challenges that arose from the time each learned the "bad news" through their final days of life and memorial services.

Describing the nationwide crisis that surrounds end-of-life care, the authors contend that informal caregiving by relatives and close friends is an enormous and too-often invisible resource that deserves close and public attention. By incorporating not only the ill person's but also the family's perspective, they portray the nine participants in the contexts of their daily lives and relationships rather than simply as patients. Addressing such issues as palliative care, quality of life, financial hardship, grief and loss, and communications with medical personnel, the authors identify how families, professionals, and communities can respond to the challenges of terminal illness and the need to confront life's end.

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Figures of Speech
Six Histories of Language and Identity in the Age of Revolutions
Tim Cassedy
University of Iowa Press, 2018

Tim Cassedy’s fascinating study examines the role that language played at the turn of the nineteenth century as a marker of one’s identity. During this time of revolution (U.S., French, and Haitian) and globalization, language served as a way to categorize people within a world that appeared more diverse than ever. Linguistic differences, especially among English-speakers, seemed to validate the emerging national, racial, local, and regional identity categories that took shape in this new world order. 

Focusing on six eccentric characters of the time—from the woman known as “Princess Caraboo” to wordsmith Noah Webster—Cassedy shows how each put language at the center of their identities and lived out the possibilities of their era’s linguistic ideas. The result is a highly entertaining and equally informative look at how perceptions about who spoke what language—and how they spoke it—determined the shape of communities in the British American colonies and beyond. 

This engagingly written story is sure to appeal to historians of literature, culture, and communication; to linguists and book historians; and to general readers interested in how ideas about English developed in the early United States and throughout the English-speaking world. 

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Finite-State Morphology
Kenneth R. Beesley and Lauri Karttunen
CSLI, 2003
The finite-state paradigm of computer science has provided a basis for natural-language applications that are efficient, elegant, and robust. This volume is a practical guide to finite-state theory and the affiliated programming languages lexc and xfst. Readers will learn how to write tokenizers, spelling checkers, and especially morphological analyzer/generators for words in English, French, Finnish, Hungarian, and other languages.

Included are graded introductions, examples, and exercises suitable for individual study as well as formal courses. These take advantage of widely-tested lexc and xfst applications that are just becoming available for noncommercial use via the Internet.
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A First Language
The Early Stages
Roger Brown
Harvard University Press, 1973

For many years, Roger Brown and his colleagues have studied the developing language of pre-school children--the language that ultimately will permit them to understand themselves and the world around them. This longitudinal research project records the conversational performances of three children, studying both semantic and grammatical aspects of their language development.

These core findings are related to recent work in psychology and linguistics--and especially to studies of the acquisition of languages other than English, including Finnish, German, Korean, and Samoan. Roger Brown has written the most exhaustive and searching analysis yet undertaken of the early stages of grammatical constructions and the meanings they convey.

The five stages of linguistic development Brown establishes are measured not by chronological age-since children vary greatly in the speed at which their speech develops--but by mean length of utterance. This volume treats the first two stages.

Stage I is the threshold of syntax, when children begin to combine words to make sentences. These sentences, Brown shows, are always limited to the same small set of semantic relations: nomination, recurrence, disappearance, attribution, possession, agency, and a few others.

Stage II is concerned with the modulations of basic structural meanings--modulations for number, time, aspect, specificity--through the gradual acquisition of grammatical morphemes such as inflections, prepositions, articles, and case markers. Fourteen morphemes are studied in depth and it is shown that the order of their acquisition is almost identical across children and is predicted by their relative semantic and grammatical complexity.

It is, ultimately, the intent of this work to focus on the nature and development of knowledge: knowledge concerning grammar and the meanings coded by grammar; knowledge inferred from performance, from sentences and the settings in which they are spoken, and from signs of comprehension or incomprehension of sentences.

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Flexible Semantics for Reinterpretation Phenomena
Markus Egg
CSLI, 2005
Deriving the correct meaning of such colloquial expressions as "I am parked out back" requires a unique interaction of knowledge about the world with a person's natural language tools. In this volume, Markus Egg examines how natural language rules and knowledge of the world work together to produce correct understandings of expressions that cannot be fully understood through literal reading. An in-depth and exciting work on semantics and natural language, this volume will be essential reading for scholars in computational linguistics.
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Focus Projection in Serbo-Croatian
Svetlana Godjevac
CSLI, 2004
Research on the English language suggests that the relationship between phonological prominence, word order, and focus—better known as focus projection—is mediated through syntax. This book breaks new ground with its demonstration of how the Serbo-Croatian language shows the workings of this relationship.

Svetlana Godjevac explores the development of focus projection. Further distinguishing her work from the numerous studies of the English language, she analyzes how focus projection in Serbo-Croatian also depends on the semantic type of the prominence bearing element. This volume is an innovative analysis of linguistic theory as well as a study of a lesser examined language.
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Folklore and Literature
Rival Siblings
Bruce Rosenberg
University of Tennessee Press, 1991
Literature's dependence on a few folktale plots is a cliche, and the significance of structuralist theory cannot have escaped many scholars, so Rosenberg's insistence on the interrelation of folklore and literature is nothing new. He surveys the foundational work of Aarne, Thompson, and Propp and the oral-formulaic theories of Parry and Lord, but the references are too elliptical to be clear to nonspecialists, while explanations of methodology will be redundant to folklorists. Bits of good material, of interest to medievalists and other literary scholars (especially on Beo wulf and on Chaucerian narrative), are buried in this disjointed collection of chapters. Serious editorial lapses include the complete absence of footnotes, forcing inappropriate supplementary matter into the body of the text and further blurring its weak structure. The parity of literary and narrative-folklore studies is the author's underlying theme, but his preoccupation with status in the academic hierarchy does nothing to make his arguments on the symbiosis of the two disciplines more convincing.
- Patricia Dooley, Univ. of Washington Lib. Sch., Seattle
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Following Searle on Twitter
How Words Create Digital Institutions
Adam Hodgkin
University of Chicago Press, 2017
Twitter allows us to build communities, track celebrities, raise our social profile, and promote a personal brand. Adam Hodgkin thinks Twitter is much more than a mere social media tool—it is a terrain ripe for a conceptual and theoretical analysis of our use of digital language. In Following Searle on Twitter, Hodgkin takes John Searle’s theory of speech acts as Status Function Declarations (SFDs)—speech acts that fulfill their meaning by saying the right words in the right context—as a probe for understanding Twitter’s institutional structure and the still-developing toolset that it provides for its members. He argues that Twitter is an institution built, constituted, and evolving through the use of SFDs. Searle’s speech act theories provide a framework for illuminating how Twitter membership arises, how users of Twitter relate to each other by following, and how increasingly complex content is conveyed with tweets. Using this framework, Hodgkin places language, action, intention, and responsibility at the core of the digital culture and the digital institutions that we are constructing.
 
Combining theoretical perspective with a down-to-earth exposition of present-day digital institutions, Following Searle on Twitter explores how all of our interactions with these emerging institutions are deeply rooted in language, and are the true foundation of social media and contemporary institutions.
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Fonología generativa contemporánea de la lengua española
segunda edición
Rafael A. Núñez Cedeño, Sonia Colina y Travis Bradley, editores
Georgetown University Press, 2014

Fonología generativa contemporánea de la lengua española, in its extensively revised and updated second edition, shows how recent theoretical and methodological advances have enhanced our understanding of Spanish phonology.

This comprehensive book, written completely in Spanish, introduces the latest concepts and principles of phonological analysis and applies these theories to the study of the Spanish language. This new edition includes new chapters on intonation and laboratory phonology and greatly expands the coverage of optimality theory. Exercises and further readings at the end of each chapter, as well as the volume’s glossary of linguistic terminology, facilitate effective classroom use.

This book is an essential reference for scholars of Spanish linguistics and will be required reading for advanced undergraduate and graduate students of Spanish. An answer key is available on the GU Press website for teachers only.

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Form and Meaning in Language
Volume I, Papers on Semantic Roles
Charles Fillmore
CSLI, 2003
The early papers collected here trace a trajectory through the work and thinking of Charles Fillmore over his long and distinguished career—reflecting his desire to make sense of the workings of language in a way that keeps in mind questions of language form, language use, and the conventions linking form, meaning, and practice.
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Form and Meaning in Language, Volume II
Papers on Discourse and Pragmatics
Charles J. Fillmore
CSLI, 2020
This volume continues the collection of work by Charles J. Fillmore, which he started in 2003. Taken together, the work gathered in these volumes reflects Fillmore’s desire to make sense of the workings of language in a way that keeps in mind questions of language form, language use, and the conventions linking form, meaning, and practice.
 
Divided into four parts, the papers collected in Volume II explore language in use; semantics and pragmatics; text and discourse; and language in society.
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Form and Meaning in Language, Volume III
Papers on Linguistic Theory and Constructions
Charles J. Fillmore
CSLI, 2020
This volume continues the collection of work by Charles J. Fillmore, which he started in 2003. Taken together, the work gathered in these volumes reflects Fillmore’s desire to make sense of the workings of language in a way that keeps in mind questions of language form, language use, and the conventions linking form, meaning, and practice.
 
Divided into four parts, the papers collected in Volume III explore the organization of linguistic knowledge; the foundations of constructing grammar; construction grammar analyses; and constructions and language in use.
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Form, Meaning, and Focus in American Sign Language
Miako N. P. Rankin
Gallaudet University Press, 2013

The meaning of any linguistic expression resides not only in the words, but also in the ways that those words are conveyed. In her new study, Miako N. P. Rankin highlights the crucial interrelatedness of form and meaning at all levels in order to consider specific types of American Sign Language (ASL) expression. In particular, Form, Meaning, and Focus in American Sign Language considers how ASL expresses non-agent focus, similar to the meaning of passive voice in English.

       Rankin’s analyses of the form-meaning correspondences of ASL expressions of non-agent focus reveals an underlying pattern that can be traced across sentence and verb types. This pattern produces meanings with various levels of focus on the agent. Rankin has determined in her meticulous study that the pattern of form-meaning characteristic of non-agent focus in ASL is used prolifically in day-to-day language. The recognition of the frequency of this pattern holds implications regarding the acquisition of ASL, the development of curricula for teaching ASL, and the analysis of ASL discourse in effective interpretation.

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front cover of Formal Issues in Lexical-Functional Grammar
Formal Issues in Lexical-Functional Grammar
Edited by Mary Dalrymple, Ronald M. Kaplan, John Maxwell III, and Annie Zaenen
CSLI, 1994
Lexical-Functional Grammar was first developed by Joan Bresnan and Ronald M. Kaplan in the late 1970s, and was designed to serve as a medium for expressing and explaining important generalisations about the syntax of human languages and thus to serve as a vehicle for independent linguistic research. An equally important goal was to provide a restricted, mathematically tractable notation that could be interpreted by psychologically plausible and computationally efficient processing mechanisms. The formal architecture of LFG provides a simple set of devices for describing the common properties of all human languages and the particular properties of individual languages. This volume presents work conducted over the past several years at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, Stanford University, and elsewhere. The different sections link mathematical and computational issues and the analysis of particular linguistic phenomena in areas such as wh-constructions, anaphoric binding, word order and coordination.
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Formal Methods and Empirical Practices
Conversations with Patrick Suppes
Roberta Ferrario and Viola Schiaffonati
CSLI, 2012
The philosopher Patrick Suppes has developed a unique and influential approach to studying the foundations of science—he combines an understanding of the main principles of scientific theories in axiomatic terms and formal models with a hands-on approach. While moving the study of the philosophy of science out of the parlor and into the lab, he often comes up with original results from the psychology of learning to the theory of measurement and quantum mechanics. This book searches for a common thread in Suppes’s multifaceted work through a series of conversations with the man himself and illuminates many of the more challenging aspects of his philosophy.
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Formalizing the Dynamics of Information
Edited by Martina Faller, Stefan Kaufmann, and Marc Pauly
CSLI, 2000
The papers collected in this volume exemplify some of the trends in current approaches to logic, language and computation. Written by authors with varied academic backgrounds, the contributions are intended for an interdisciplinary audience. The first part of this volume addresses issues relevant for multi-agent systems: reasoning with incomplete information, reasoning about knowledge and beliefs, and reasoning about games. Proofs as formal objects form the subject of Part II. Topics covered include: contributions on logical frameworks, linear logic, and different approaches to formalized reasoning. Part III focuses on representations and formal methods in linguistic theory, addressing the areas of comparative and temporal expressions, modal subordination, and compositionality.
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front cover of French as Language of Intimacy in the Modern Age
French as Language of Intimacy in the Modern Age
Le français, langue de l'intime à l'époque moderne et contemporaine
Edited by Madeleine van Strien-Chardonneau and Marie-Christine Kok Escalle
Amsterdam University Press, 2017
For centuries, French was the language of international commercial and diplomatic relations, a near-dominant language in literature and poetry, and was widely used in teaching. It even became the fashionable language of choice in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for upper class Dutch, Russians, Italians, Egyptians, and others for personal correspondence, travel journals, and memoirs. This book is the first to take a close look at how French was used in that latter context: outside of France, in personal and private life. It gathers contributions from historians, literary scholars, and linguists and covers a wide range of geographical areas.
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Frequency of Occurrence and Ease of Articulation of Sign Language Handshapes
The Taiwanese Example
Jean Ann
Gallaudet University Press, 2006
In the growing body of research on sign language linguistics, one area of inquiry considers an important component of all sign languages — handshapes — and whether the use of specific kinds increase in direct relation to the ease of their formation. Author Jean Ann provides significant clarification in her book Frequency of Occurrence and Ease of Articulation of Sign Language Handshapes: The Taiwanese Example.

Ann employs a straightforward methodology in her examination of the use of Taiwan Sign Language (TSL) handshapes in five succinct chapters. In the first chapter, she discusses the two approaches linguists have taken toward understanding languages, and how these theories have influenced sign language researchers’ consideration of the ease of articulation and frequency of handshapes. In her second chapter, Ann delineates the physiology of hands and explains why certain digits move with greater dexterity than others.

Ann applies this physiological information in the third chapter to construct a model for determining the ease of articulation of any logically possible handshape. She divides the handshapes into three categories, ranging from impossible to easy. In the fourth chapter, she applies her model to examine the patterns of TSL, first by describing the 56 handshapes identified in TSL, then determining how often each is used. She then compares the usage data to the handshapes’ ease of formation. The final chapter summarizes her findings and suggests implications of this work that are bound to generate further speculation and study on sign language handshapes in the future.
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From Gesture to Language in Hearing and Deaf Children
Virginia Volterra
Gallaudet University Press, 1994
In 21 essays on communicative gesturing in the first two years of life, this vital collection demonstrates the importance of gesture in a child’s transition to a linguistic system. Introductions preceding each section emphasize the parallels between the findings in these studies and the general body of scholarship devoted to the process of spoken language acquisition.

Renowned scholars contributing to this volume include Ursula Bellugi, Judy Snitzer Reilly, Susan Goldwin-Meadow, Andrew Lock, M. Chiara Levorato, and many others.
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From Latin to Romance in Sound Charts
Peter Boyd-Bowman
Georgetown University Press, 1980

This handbook offers a synopsis of the regular changes that Latin words underwent in the course of their evolution into modern Romance languages (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and French, with their English cognates). Although it is intended for the nonspecialist, students of Romance philology will find it useful as a ready reference and as a source of abundant examples of Latin sound changes.

The synopsis is presented in the form of separate alphabetical charts for each major sound change. The rules, stated as simply as possible, do not generally explain the evolution of the changes, but only the end results. For those desiring further information, there are notes after most rules outlining exceptions to or modifications of that rule and often sketching successive stages in the development of the sound. Several minor or sporadic sound changes are also treated in note form. Each chart is supplemented by a list of additional words illustrating the same sound change.

From Latin to Roman in Sound Charts has been used successfully as a graduate level text for such courses as History of Spanish, History of French, and Romance Linguistics.

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From Quirky Case to Representing Space
Papers in Honor of Annie Zaenen
Edited by Tracy Holloway King and Valeria de Paiva
CSLI
Annie Zaenen’s research has broadly influenced the field of linguistics from the underlying architecture of formal theories to the minute details of lexical representation. This volume assembles a wide range of essays from linguists who have been profoundly influenced by Zaenen’s work. Taking Zaenen as a model, the contributors explore a variety of topics, including the mapping of syntax onto argument and the relationship between syntax and semantics. From Quirky Case to Representing Space presents new research in linguistics, but also reasserts Zaenen’s crucial role in the evolution of linguistic theory.   
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From Small Talk to Microaggression
A History of Scale
Michael Lempert
University of Chicago Press
A provocative and eye-opening history of how we have studied and theorized social interaction.
 
In this ambitious, wide-ranging book, anthropologist Michael Lempert offers a conceptual history that explores how, why, and with what effects we have come to think of interactions as “scaled.” Focusing on US-based sciences of interaction from 1930 to 1980, Lempert meticulously traces efforts to study conversation microscopically and shows how scale-making has defined pioneering work in sociology, anthropology, and linguistics. Exploring talk therapy and group dynamics studies, social psychology and management science, conversation analysis, “micropolitics,” and more, Lempert shows how scale became a defining problem across the behavioral sciences and how new tools and technologies were developed to get to the heart of social life at its most granular.
 
Ultimately, he argues, if we learn how our objects of study have been scaled in advance, we can better understand how we think and interact with them—and with each other—across disciplinary and ideological divides. Even as once-fierce debates over micro and macro have largely subsided, Lempert shows how scale lives on and continues to affect our treatment of language and communication today.
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From Syntax to Text
The Janus Face of Functional Sentence Perspective
Libuse Dusková
Karolinum Press, 2015
The volume deals with the interaction between syntax, informational structure (or functional sentence perspective), and text in present-day English and Czech. Libuše Dušková focuses on the two facets of functional sentence perspective: syntactic structures as carriers of informational structure functions and the connection of functional sentence perspective within the level of text. Functional sentence perspective is investigated as a potential factor of syntactic divergence between English and Czech, and the role of functional sentence perspective is examined with respect to theme development, text build-up, and style. Other topics include the hierarchical relationship between syntax and functional sentence perspective and general and specific questions of word order, with major attention paid to the role of semantics.
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From Topic Boundaries to Omission
New Research on Interpretation
Melanie Metzger
Gallaudet University Press, 2003
This new collection examines several facets of signed language interpreting. Claudia Angelelli’s study confirms that conference, courtroom, and medical interpretation can no longer be seen as a two-party conversation with an “invisible” interpreter, but as a three-party conversation in which the interpreter plays an active role. Laura M. Sanheim defines different turn-taking elements in a medical setting as two overlapping conversations, one between the patient and the interpreter and the other between the interpreter and the medical professional.
 
     In her analysis of discourse at a Deaf revival service, Mary Ann Richey demonstrates how Deaf presenters and audiences interact even in formal settings, creating special challenges for interpreters. Jemina Napier shares her findings on the nature and occurrence of omissions by interpreters in Australian Sign Language and English exchanges. Elizabeth Winston and Christine Monikowski describe different strategies used by interpreters to indicate topic shifts when interpreting into American Sign Language and when transliterating. The study concludes with Bruce Sofinski’s analysis of nonmanual elements used by interpreters in sign language transliteration.
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Fundamental Issues in the Romance Languages
Edited by Danièle Godard
CSLI, 2010

Fundamental Issues in the Romance Languages compares six Romance languages—Catalan, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Romanian—and summarizes the last thirty years of scholarship in the fields of morphology, syntax, semantics, and discourse for each language. The up-to-date analyses in this volume make it essential for undergraduate and graduate students as well as scholars of each language.

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front cover of Fundamentos y modelos del estudio pragmático y sociopragmático del español
Fundamentos y modelos del estudio pragmático y sociopragmático del español
Susana de los Heros y Mercedes Niño-Murcia, editoras
Georgetown University Press, 2012

This rich textbook provides a comprehensive introduction to the principal concepts and thematic areas of Spanish pragmatics. It is aimed at advanced students of Spanish—upper-level undergraduates and beginning graduate students—who need to hone their language skills for contextually sensitive use of the language.

Written entirely in Spanish, with Spanish examples, this volume introduces basic pragmatics, methods of analysis, and new thematic areas such as language and the press and globalization. Theoretical explanations combine with practical exercises in each chapter to help students master the subtleties of language use.

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