V. N. Vološinov’s important work, first published in Russian in 1929, had to wait a generation for recognition. This first paperback edition of the English translation will be capital for literary theorists, philosophers, linguists, psychologists, and many others.

Vološinov is out to undo the old disciplinary boundaries between linguistics, rhetoric, and poetics in order to construct a new kind of field: semiotics or textual theory. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik have provided a new preface to discuss Vološinov in relation to the great resurgence of interest in all the writing of the circle of Mikhail Bakhtin.

Prasun (Wasi, Paruni) has long had a reputation for being the most aberrant of the Nuristani group of Indo-European languages. Only after the publication of a considerable number of Prasun texts in 2016 as volume 80 in this series has it been possible to analyze the language based on the solid foundation of a large text corpus. Georg Buddruss collected the source texts in the Prasun Valley in 1956 and 1970. That edition comprises texts in several dialectal varieties of Prasun.

The present volume is the outcome of extensive work on this text corpus. It is the first comprehensive grammar of Prasun as well as the most detailed description of any Nuristani language yet published. Among the topics addressed in this volume are: morphology, verbal categories, subordination, relative clauses, mirativity, verbal particles, and the complicated system of directional morphemes. This grammatical analysis is amply supported by quotations from the text volume. This book is a major contribution to studies of Nuristani and other languages of the Hindukush-Karakoram region.

Prasun (Wasi) is the most aberrant of the Nuristani languages, part of the Indo-Iranian branch of Indo-European languages. It is spoken in the Prasun Valley of the Pech River in northeast Afghanistan. Prasun is a non-literary, unwritten language, and it varies from village to village. Materialien zur Prasun-Sprache des Afghanischen Hindukusch is the fruit of many years of work by Georg Buddruss, assisted in the last few years by Almuth Degener. The texts, in prose and a few songs, were collected by Buddruss in 1956 and 1970. Included are all the texts collected, along with a German translation, a glossary, lists of numbers, place and personal names, and the Prasun calendar system. The volume also includes a brief Introduction in English. A second volume to come will contain an extensive grammar.

Apart from its linguistic value, the present book is also very important as it includes many “Kafiri” myths, still known in 1956, from the time before the forced Islamization in 1895. The ancient pagan religion has survived only in the texts and in some customs described in this book.

Spoken in the middle hills of Nepal, Gurung is a Tibeto-Burmese language spread along the southern slopes of the Himalayas. The Nepalese Gurung recitations known as pe or pe-da lu-da form a diverse group of oral narratives and invocations, thought to exemplify ritual utterances from the origin of Bon. The pe are performed by a medicine man or shaman, in collaboration with a priest, to promote health and prosperity, and to help with illness and bereavement. They work occasionally with Lamaist practitioners.

This two-volume set includes an analytical introduction, 13,000 lines of annotated transcriptions with interlinear gloss for 92 pe, and a synopsis of a further 49 items representing over 4,000 lines. The material was collected between 1979 and 1992. The introduction outlines the formal properties of pe: structure, metrics, style, figurative language, metaphor, and implicit meanings. This is followed by an overview of patterns of thought in pe, their ontologies, divinities, cosmological order, journeys, use of reported speech, action during discourse, the meanings of the lexical items, and a study of the methods of learning the pe. Appended is a catalog of pe and color plate illustrations. Field recordings of the transcribed pe are included on an accompanying DVD.

Spoken in the middle hills of Nepal, Gurung is a Tibeto-Burmese language spread along the southern slopes of the Himalayas. The Nepalese Gurung recitations known as pe or pe-da lu-da form a diverse group of oral narratives and invocations, thought to exemplify ritual utterances from the origin of Bon. The pe are performed by a medicine man or shaman, in collaboration with a priest, to promote health and prosperity, and to help with illness and bereavement. They work occasionally with Lamaist practitioners.

This two-volume set includes an analytical introduction, 13,000 lines of annotated transcriptions with interlinear gloss for 92 pe, and a synopsis of a further 49 items representing over 4,000 lines. The material was collected between 1979 and 1992. The introduction outlines the formal properties of pe: structure, metrics, style, figurative language, metaphor, and implicit meanings. This is followed by an overview of patterns of thought in pe, their ontologies, divinities, cosmological order, journeys, use of reported speech, action during discourse, the meanings of the lexical items, and a study of the methods of learning the pe. Appended is a catalog of pe and color plate illustrations. Field recordings of the transcribed pe are included on an accompanying DVD.

Measured Language: Quantitative Studies of Acquisition, Assessment, and Variation focuses on ways in which various aspects of language can be quantified and how measurement informs and advances our understanding of language. The metaphors and operationalizations of quantification serve as an important lingua franca for seemingly disparate areas of linguistic research, allowing methods and constructs to be translated from one area of linguistic investigation to another.

Measured Language includes forms of measurement and quantitative analysis current in diverse areas of linguistic research from language assessment to language change, from generative linguistics to experimental psycholinguistics, and from longitudinal studies to classroom research. Contributors demonstrate how to operationalize a construct, develop a reliable way to measure it, and finally validate that measurement—and share the relevance of their perspectives and findings to other areas of linguistic inquiry. The range and clarity of the research collected here ensures that even linguists who would not traditionally use quantitative methods will find this volume useful.

Historical linguistics, the oldest field in linguistics, has been traditionally dominated by phonological and etymological investigations. Only in the late twentieth century have linguists begun to focus their interest and research on the area of syntactic change and the insight it provides on the nature of language. This volume represents the first major contribution on the mechanisms of syntactic change.

The fourteen articles that make up this volume were selected from the Symposium on the Mechanisms of Syntactic Change held at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in 1976, one of a series of three conferences sponsored by the National Science Foundation.

These papers clearly demonstrate that the generative approach to the study of language does not explain diachronic processes in syntax. This collection is enlightening, provocative, and carefully documented with data drawn from a great variety of language families.

“At once an eloquent memoir, a wide-ranging commentary on cultural diversity, and an expert distillation of the research on language learning, loss, and recovery.”—The Economist

“Insightful and informative…Sedivy examines what happens to memory, dreams, and even the sense of self when you enter another language.”—Eva Hoffman, author of Lost in Translation

“Engagingly describes the disorienting and sometimes shattering experience of feeling one’s native language atrophy as a new language takes hold…Sedivy elegantly captures why the language(s) we use are so dear to us and how they play a central role in our identities.”—Science

“A profound elegy to memories that endure despite displacement and the many time zones that define our lives.”—André Aciman

Julie Sedivy was two years old when her parents left Czechoslovakia. By the time she graduated from college, she rarely spoke Czech, and English had taken over her life. When her father died unexpectedly and her strongest link to her native tongue was severed, she discovered that more was at stake than the loss of language: she began to feel she was losing herself.

In Memory Speaks, Sedivy explores the brain’s capacity to learn—and forget—languages at various stages of life, poignantly combining a rich body of psychological research with a moving story that is at once deeply personal and universally resonant.

Denis Donoghue turns his attention to the practice of metaphor and to its lesser cousins, simile, metonym, and synecdoche. Metaphor (“a carrying or bearing across”) supposes that an ordinary word could have been used in a statement but hasn’t been. Instead, something else, something unexpected, appears. The point of a metaphor is to enrich the reader’s experience by bringing different associations to mind. The force of a good metaphor is to give something a different life, a new life. The essential character of metaphor, Donoghue says, is prophetic. Metaphors intend to change the world by changing our sense of it.

At the center of Donoghue’s study is the idea that metaphor permits the greatest freedom in the use of language because it exempts language from the local duties of reference and denotation. Metaphors conspire with the mind in its enjoyment of freedom. Metaphor celebrates imaginative life par excellence, from Donoghue’s musings on Aquinas’ Latin hymns, interspersed with autobiographical reflection, to his agile and perceptive readings of Wallace Stevens.

When Donoghue surveys the history of metaphor and resistance to it, going back to Aristotle and forward to George Lakoff, he is a sly, cogent, and persuasive companion. He also addresses the question of whether or not metaphors can ever truly die. Reflected on every page of Metaphor are the accumulated wisdom of decades of reading and a sheer love of language and life.

Only recently have linguists ceased to regard metaphors as mere frills on the periphery of language and begun to recognize them as cornerstones of discourse. Phyllis Wilcox takes this innovation one step further in her fascinating study of metaphors in American Sign Language (ASL).

       Such an inquiry has long been obscured by, as Wilcox calls it, “the shroud of iconicity.” ASL’s iconic nature once discouraged people from recognizing it as a language; more recently it has served to confuse linguists examining its metaphors. Wilcox, however, presents methods for distinguishing between icon and metaphor, allowing the former to clarify, not cloud, the latter. “If the iconic influence that surrounds metaphor is set aside, the results will be greater understanding, and interpretations that are less opaque.”

       Wilcox concludes her study with a close analysis of the ASL poem, “The Dogs,” by Ella Mae Lentz. In presenting Deaf Americans’, Deaf Germans’, and Deaf Italians’ reactions to the poem, Wilcox manages not only to demonstrate the influence of culture upon metaphors, but also to illuminate the sources of sociopolitical division within the American Deaf community. Metaphor in American Sign Language proves an engrossing read for those interested in linguistics and Deaf culture alike.

An increasing number of U.S. Latinos are seeking to become more proficient in Spanish. The Spanish they may have been exposed to in childhood may not be sufficient when they find themselves as adults in more demanding environments, academic or professional. Heritage language learners appear in a wide spectrum of proficiency, from those who have a low level of speaking abilities, to those who may have a higher degree of bilingualism, but not fluent. Whatever the individual case may be, these heritage speakers of Spanish have different linguistic and pedagogical needs than those students learning Spanish as a second or foreign language.

The members of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese (AATSP) have identified teaching heritage learners as their second greatest area of concern (after proficiency testing). Editors Ana Roca and Cecilia Colombi saw a great need for greater availability and dissemination of scholarly research in applied linguistics and pedagogy that address the development and maintenance of Spanish as a heritage language and the teaching of Spanish to U.S. Hispanic bilingual students in grades K-16. The result is Mi lengua: Spanish as a Heritage Language in the United States.

Mi lengua delves into the research, theory, and practice of teaching Spanish as a heritage language in the United States. The editors and contributors examine theoretical considerations in the field of Heritage Language Development (HLD) as well as community and classroom-based research studies at the elementary, secondary, and university levels. Some chapters are written in Spanish and each chapter presents a practical section on pedagogical implications that provides practice-related suggestions for the teaching of Spanish as a heritage language to students from elementary grades to secondary and college and university levels.

How do people learn nonnative languages? Is there one part or function of our brains solely dedicated to language processing, or do we apply our general information-processing abilities when learning a new language? In this book, an interdisciplinary collaboration of scholars and researchers presents an overview of the latter approach to adult second language acquisition and brings together, for the first time, a comprehensive picture of the latest research on this subject.

Clearly organized into four distinct but integrated parts, Mind and Context in Adult Second Language Acquisition first provides an introduction to information-processing approaches and the tools for students to understand the data. The next sections explain factors that affect language learning, both internal (attention and awareness, individual differences, and the neural bases of language acquisition) and external (input, interaction, and pedagogical interventions). It concludes by looking at two pedagogical applications: processing instruction and content based instruction.

This important and timely volume is a must-read for students of language learning, second language acquisition, and linguists who want to better understand the information-processing approaches to learning a non-primary language. This book will also be of immense interest to language scholars, program directors, teachers, and administrators in both second language acquisition and cognitive psychology.

The Modern Arabic Literary Language is a thoughtful examination of the changes that the Arabic language has undergone in its transition from its roots in classical Arabic to a language able to meet the demands of twentieth-century life.

In this volume a respected and masterful scholar of the Arabic language Jaroslav Stetkevych notes the ways that new words have been incorporated into the language, ranging from deriving new terms from existing roots (for example, the word for "newspaper" derives from the word meaning "sheet to write on") to downright assimilation of foreign words. Also noting the changes in grammar and semantics, Stetkevych illustrates how literary Arabic has become a more flexible language. Originally published in 1970, this volume is a clear assessment of lexical and stylistic developments in Modern Literary Arabic.

This classic book is an important resource for scholars and advanced students of Arabic language and linguistics who wish to study the complexities of language change and lexical expansion.

The revised and updated edition of Modern Arabic takes this authoritative, concise linguistic description of the structure and use of modern Arabic to an invaluable new level. Clive Holes traces the development of the Arabic language from Classical Arabic, the written language used in the 7th century for the Qur'an and poetry, through the increasingly symbiotic use of Modern Standard Arabic or MSA (the language of writing and formal speech) and dialectal Arabic (the language of normal conversation). He shows how Arabic has been shaped over the centuries by migration, urbanization, and education—giving us "a balanced, dispassionate, and accurate picture of the structures, functions, and varieties of the contemporary Arabic language."

Holes explains the structural characteristics—phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and lexical and stylistic developments—that the majority of the dialects share, as distinguished from Modern Standard Arabic. He also shows how native speakers use both types of Arabic for different purposes, with MSA being the language of power and control as used on television and in political speeches, and the dialects serving as the language of intimacy and domesticity. He further shows how MSA and spoken dialects are not as compartmentalized as one might be led to believe. Modern Arabic illustrates the use of the Arabic language in real life, whether in conversation, news bulletins and newspaper articles, serious literature, or song.

This new edition takes into account research published in several areas of Arabic linguistics since the first edition was published in 1995. It includes more extensive comment on the North African Arabic vocabulary of Modern Standard Arabic, more information about "mixed" varieties of written Arabic that are not in MSA (especially in Egypt), updated references, explanations, and many new examples. All Arabic is transcribed, except for an appendix presenting the Arabic alphabet and script. Students of the Arabic language will find Modern Arabic without peer—as will those general linguists who are interested in discovering how Arabic compares structurally and sociolinguistically with European languages.

The human mind is an unlikely evolutionary adaptation. How did humans acquire cognitive capacities far more powerful than anything a hunting-and-gathering primate needed to survive? Alfred Russel Wallace, co-founder with Darwin of evolutionary theory, saw humans as "divine exceptions" to natural selection. Darwin thought use of language might have shaped our sophisticated brains, but his hypothesis remained an intriguing guess--until now. Combining state-of-the-art research with forty years of writing and thinking about language evolution, Derek Bickerton convincingly resolves a crucial problem that both biology and the cognitive sciences have hitherto ignored or evaded.

What evolved first was neither language nor intelligence--merely normal animal communication plus displacement. That was enough to break restrictions on both thought and communication that bound all other animals. The brain self-organized to store and automatically process its new input, words. But words, which are inextricably linked to the concepts they represent, had to be accessible to consciousness. The inevitable consequence was a cognitive engine able to voluntarily merge both thoughts and words into meaningful combinations. Only in a third phase could language emerge, as humans began to tinker with a medium that, when used for communication, was adequate for speakers but suboptimal for hearers.

Starting from humankind's remotest past, More than Nature Needs transcends nativist thesis and empiricist antithesis by presenting a revolutionary synthesis--one that instead of merely repeating "nature and nurture" clichés shows specifically and in a principled manner how and why the synthesis came about.

This collection offers a wide variety of fascinating studies that consider multicultural aspects among deaf people worldwide. Mala Kleinfeld and Noni Warner investigate variation in the use of gay, lesbian, and bisexual signs in the Deaf community; Jan Branson, Don Miller, and I Gede Marsaja, assisted by I Wayan Negara, profile a deaf village in Bali, Indonesia in which hearing people are fluent in both sign and spoken languages. Alejandro Oviedo in Venezuela comments on bilingual deaf education in Venezuela, and Sara Schley outlines the sociolinguistic and educational implications of comparing ASL and English word definitions.

       Susan Mather discusses initiation in visually constructed dialogue from reading books with 3- to 8-year-old students who are deaf or hard of hearing. Pietro Celo offers insights on the interrogative in Italian Sign Language, and Julie Wilson examines narrative structure in American Sign Language ASL) through her analysis of “the tobacco story.” Rhonda Jacobs completes this significant, wide-ranging volume with her research on second language learning, as she presents the case for ASL as a truly foreign language by posing the question, “Just how hard is it to learn ASL?”

Renowned linguist Kenneth L. Pike and his coauthors offer three previously unpublished essays that apply theoretical linguistic research to the areas of historical linguistics, cross-cultural communications, and text analysis.

"Toward the Historical Reconstruction of Matrix Patterns in Morphology" establishes a comprehensive theory of morphological structure based on a number of languages. "Understanding Misunderstanding as Cross-Cultural Emic Clash" examines the crucial role that language plays in the numerous problems encountered in contacts between people from divergent cultural backgrounds. "The Importance of Purposive Behavior in Text Analysis" explores the centrality of establishing the relationship of reality to what is actually expressed in a text.