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On Language
Roman Jakobson
Harvard University Press, 1990

One measure of Roman Jakobson's towering role in linguistics is that his work has defined the field itself. Jakobson's contributions have now become a permanent part of American and European views on language. With his uncanny ability to survive devastating uprooting again and again--from Moscow to Prague to Upsalla to New York and finally to Cambridge--Jakobson was able to bring to each milieu new and stimulating ideas, which have broadened the perspective of linguistics while giving it new direction and specifying its domain. Linda Waugh and Monique Monville-Burston have assembled an intellectual overview of his work in linguistics from partial and complete works that they have arranged, introduced, and cross-referenced. Some appear here in print for the first time, others are newly translated into English. More than a convenient access to Jakobson's basic works, On Language presents a broad profile of the polymathic general linguist who suggested radical innovations in every area of linguistic theory.

The breadth of Jakobson's engagement in linguistics is captured by the editors' informative introduction and by their perspicacious presentation of topics. His general view of the science of linguistics is followed by his stunning contributions to linguistic metatheory in the areas of structure and function. Various aspects of historical, typological, and sociolinguistics are also explored along with his phonological theory--perhaps his most influential contribution--and his views on grammatical semantics. A topic that increasingly preoccupied Jakobson in his later career, the interrelationship between sound and meaning, is presented here in detail. The concluding three essays focus on the various relations between linguistics and the human and natural sciences, which led Jakobson ultimately to be characterized as an interdisciplinary thinker.

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On Latin Adverbs
Harm Pinkster
Amsterdam University Press, 2006
This study deals with a number of aspects of the words which are usually called adverbs in Latin. It contains on the one hand a critical discussion of their treatment in Latin grammatical studies -- the characteristics attributed to them, their relationship to other words -- and on the other hand a discussion of the conditions that have to be met in order to achieve a better (sub)classification -- general problems of classification as well as criteria for affecting such classification -- and a better description of the functions of adverbs in larger constructions. The study contains, therefore, both language-specific sections and more general ones. The author wrote the passages specifically dealing with Latin in such a way that they are clear enough to the non-Latinist, the more general passages in such a way that they are understandable for Latinists who are not acquainted with recent developments in linguistics.
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On Particle Verbs and Similar Constructions in German
Anke Lüdeling
CSLI, 2001
Linguistic distinctions between the notions of a phrase, a word, and their components are challenged by so-called particle verbs in German and similar features in other languages. Particle verbs look like single words, yet are typically assembled from word-like fragments that together behave more like components of a phrase than of a word. The resolution of existing scholarly ambivalence has exciting ramifications, from questioning the existence of particle verbs to a broader understanding of what constitutes a word.

Particle verbs have previously been analyzed as morphological objects or as phrasal constructions, but neither approach fits cleanly within its chosen framework. The resolution presented here is that particle verbs should be seen as lexicalized phrasal constructions. Emphasizing morphological and syntactic testability, over a hundred colloquial examples are shown to break the rules of previous approaches while remaining consistent with this book's proposition. To distinguish particle verbs from similar constructions, and to demonstrate how structural and morphological factors have been misidentified in the past, preverb verb constructions (PVCs) are introduced and diagrammed. This reveals the roles of listedness and non-transparency in word formation and clarifies the conclusion that particle verbs do not form a definable class of words.
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On the Latin Language, Volume I
Books 5–7
Varro
Harvard University Press

Ancient Roman word lore.

Varro (M. Terentius), 116–27 BC, of Reate, renowned for his vast learning, was an antiquarian, historian, philologist, student of science, agriculturist, and poet. He was a republican who was reconciled to Julius Caesar and was marked out by him to supervise an intended national library.

Of Varro’s more than seventy works involving hundreds of volumes we have only his treatise On Agriculture (in LCL 283) and part of his monumental achievement De Lingua Latina (On the Latin Language), a work typical of its author’s interest not only in antiquarian matters but also in the collection of scientific facts. Originally it consisted of twenty-five books in three parts: etymology of Latin words (Books 1–7); their inflections and other changes (Books 8–13); and syntax (Books 14–25). Of the whole work survive (somewhat imperfectly) Books 5–10. These are from the section (Books 4–6) that applied etymology to words of time and place and to poetic expressions; the section (Books 7–9) on analogy as it occurs in word formation; and the section (Books 10–12) that applied analogy to word derivation. Varro’s work contains much that is of very great value to the study of the Latin language.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of On the Latin Language is in two volumes.

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On the Latin Language, Volume II
Books 8–10. Fragments
Varro
Harvard University Press

Ancient Roman word lore.

Varro (M. Terentius), 116–27 BC, of Reate, renowned for his vast learning, was an antiquarian, historian, philologist, student of science, agriculturist, and poet. He was a republican who was reconciled to Julius Caesar and was marked out by him to supervise an intended national library.

Of Varro’s more than seventy works involving hundreds of volumes we have only his treatise On Agriculture (in LCL 283) and part of his monumental achievement De Lingua Latina (On the Latin Language), a work typical of its author’s interest not only in antiquarian matters but also in the collection of scientific facts. Originally it consisted of twenty-five books in three parts: etymology of Latin words (Books 1–7); their inflections and other changes (Books 8–13); and syntax (Books 14–25). Of the whole work survive (somewhat imperfectly) Books 5–10. These are from the section (Books 4–6) that applied etymology to words of time and place and to poetic expressions; the section (Books 7–9) on analogy as it occurs in word formation; and the section (Books 10–12) that applied analogy to word derivation. Varro’s work contains much that is of very great value to the study of the Latin language.

The Loeb Classical Library edition of On the Latin Language is in two volumes.

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On the Placement and Morphology of Clitics
Aaron Halpern
CSLI, 1995
Using data from a variety of languages, this book investigates the place of clitics in the theory of language structure, and their implications for the relationships between syntax, morphology and phonology. It is argued that the least powerful theory of language requires us to recognise at least two classes of clitics, one with the syntax of independent phrases and the other with the syntax of inflectional affixes. It is also argued that prosodic conditions may influence the surface position of clitics beyond what may be accomplished by filtering potential syntactic structures. Finally, the relationship between syntactic, morphological, and phonological constituents within wordlike elements is explored.
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One or Two Words
Language and Politics in the Toraja Highlands of Indonesia
Aurora Donzelli
National University of Singapore Press, 2020
The Toraja highlanders of Indonesia use the expression “one or two words” to refer euphemistically to their highly elaborate form of political speechmaking. Taking off from this understatement, which signals the meaningfulness of transient acts of speech, One or Two Words offers an analysis of the shifting power relations between centers and peripheries in one of the world’s most linguistically diverse countries. Drawing on long-term fieldwork, Aurora Donzelli explores how people forge forms of collective belonging to a distinctive locality through the exchange of spoken words, WhatsApp messages, ritual gifts of pigs and buffaloes, and the performance of elaborate political speeches and ritual chants. Donzelli describes the complex forms of cosmopolitan indigeneity that have emerged in the Toraja highlands during several decades of encounters with a variety of local and international interlocutors, and by engaging wider debates on the dynamics of cultural and linguistic change in relationship to globalizing influences, the book sheds light on a neglected dimension of post-Suharto Indonesia: the recalibration of power relations between national and local languages. One or Two Words will be of interest to scholars of language, politics, power relationships, identity, social change, and local responses to globalizing influences.
 
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Online World Language Instruction Training and Assessment
An Ecological Approach
Carmen King Ramírez
Georgetown University Press

A new approach to training and evaluating world languages online instructors

The rapid growth in online world language programs in the United States coupled with the widespread implementation of virtual teaching in response to COVID-19 have pushed the field to reconceive instruction. Virtual learning creates unique challenges for instructors, who need to ensure that their students have adequate interaction with their peers, their professor, and native speakers of the language. Even with a growing demand for online language courses, there are few tools that evaluate the training and assessment of online language instructors.

In Online World Language Instruction Training and Assessment, authors Carmen King Ramírez, Barbara A. Lafford, and James E. Wermers fill that gap, providing a critical pedagogical approach to computer-assisted language learning (CALL) teacher education (CTE). By combining best CTE training and evaluation practices with assessment tools, the authors explain how teachers can integrate technology to build successful online programs. Their ecological, holistic approach addresses all facets of learning online—including pressing challenges of moving courses online, teacher training, developing core competencies and skills, instructions for assessment and self-evaluation, goal setting, and the normalization of critical CTE practices in an increasingly digital environment.

The authors propose new solutions to teacher training challenges, providing extensive rubrics and tools that can equitably assess online language instructor skills, the training they receive, the assessment process they undergo, and the instruments used for instructor assessment. A list of CALL and CTE resources (available on the Press’s website) further supports readers’ successful adaptation to an everchanging learning environment.

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Open-Domain Question Answering from Large Text Collections
Marius Pasca
CSLI, 2003
Many books have indexes, but most textual media have none. Newspapers, legal transcripts, conference proceedings, correspondence, video subtitles, and web pages are increasingly accessible with computers, yet are still without indexes or other sophisticated means of finding the excerpts most relevant to a reader's question.

Better than an index, and much better than a keyword search, are the high-precision computerized question-answering systems explored in this book. Marius Pasca presents novel and robust methods for capturing the semantics of natural language questions and for finding the most relevant portions of texts. This research has led to a fully implemented and rigorously evaluated architecture that has produced experimental results showing great promise for the future of internet search technology.
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Optimal Communication
Edited by Reinhard Blutner, Helen de Hoop and Petra Hendriks
CSLI, 2005
This volume explores how the effectiveness of communication is shaped by aspects of semantics and pragmatics such as compositionality, the role of the speaker and hearer, and the acquisition of meaning. Optimal Communication surveys recent research in the fields of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, and draws from optimality theory to argue that optimal meanings result from a compromise between competing constraints. Optimal Communication will be an invaluable resource for students in cognitive science, linguistics, and natural language semantics.
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Optimality-Theoretic Syntax
A Declarative Approach
Jonas Kuhn
CSLI, 2003
With this book, Jonas Kuhn greatly advances Optimality Theory (OT) by clarifying the significant choices in the design of a formally precise OT approach to syntax. Building on OT work that uses the representation structures of Lexical Functional Grammar (OT-LFG), Kuhn defines the notion of an OT-syntactic grammar in a declarative, non-derivational way.

Along with the standard OT architecture, which is based on a generation metaphor, Kuhn also formalizes parsing-based OT, and goes on to discuss possible combinations of these two architectures. This is followed by an examination of assumptions under which the computational tasks of generation and parsing are decidable for an OT-syntactic grammar.
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Optimizing Structure in Context
Scrambling and Information Structure
Hye-Won Choi
CSLI, 1999
This book examines the scrambling phenomena in German and Korean from the perspective that different ordering possibilities are motivated and constrained by interactions among syntactic, semantic, and discourse principles. Using Optimality Theory, Optimizing Structure in Context demonstrates how these principles from different modules of grammar interact and thus resolve conflicts among themselves to yield the most optimal output, that is, a sentence with a particular word order, in a given semantic and discoursal context. This way, it explains various meaning-related effects associated with scrambling such as definiteness effect and focus effect. While developing constraints in the discourse domain, it also proposes a new model of information structure based on basic discourse features. By expanding the core idea of constraint interaction in Optimality Theory to interactions 'between' modules of grammar as well as 'between', this book provides a model of interface theory.
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The Oral and Beyond
Doing Things with Words in Africa
Ruth Finnegan
University of Chicago Press, 2007
With her 1976 book Oral Literature in Africa, Ruth Finnegan almost single-handedly created the field of ethnography of language. Now, Finnegan has gathered and updated a selection of her best work on oral literature, performance, and the creative use of language in Africa, along with several new essays that broaden and extend her ideas.

The Oral and Beyond looks simultaneously backwards and forwards, reviewing and critiquing the achievements of scholarship on African oral literature, revisiting issues of perennial contention, and highlighting some of the most interesting new ideas and approaches in the field. Exploring such fundamental questions as how texts and textuality relate to performance, how ideology inflects language, and how traditional forms adapt to modern media and popular culture, Finnegan essentially crafts an intellectual history of her field. At the same time, she propels the ethnography of language forward, bringing the techniques and knowledge developed through her fieldwork in Africa to bear on issues that transcend African studies and reach into the larger world of anthropology and beyond.
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Ordinary Meaning
A Theory of the Most Fundamental Principle of Legal Interpretation
Brian G. Slocum
University of Chicago Press, 2015
Consider this court case: a defendant has traded a gun for drugs, and there is a criminal sentencing provision that stipulates an enhanced punishment if the defendant “uses” a firearm “during and in relation to a drug trafficking crime.” Buying the drugs was obviously a crime—but can it be said that the defendant actually “used” the gun during the crime? This sort of question is at the heart of legal interpretation.
 
Legal interpretation is built around one key question: by what standard should legal texts be interpreted? The traditional doctrine is that words should be given their “ordinary meaning”: words in legal texts should be interpreted in light of accepted standards of communication. Yet often, courts fail to properly consider context, refer to unsuitable dictionary definitions, or otherwise misconceive how the ordinary meaning of words should be determined. In this book, Brian Slocum builds his argument for a new method of interpretation by asking glaring, yet largely ignored, questions. What makes one particular meaning the “ordinary” one, and how exactly do courts conceptualize the elements of ordinary meaning? Ordinary Meaning provides a much-needed, revised framework, boldly instructing those involved with the law in how the components of ordinary meaning should properly be identified and developed in our modern legal system.
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Original Signs
Gesture, Sign, and the Sources of Language
David F. Armstrong
Gallaudet University Press, 2002

In the ongoing debate about evolution, scholars frequently argue either the perspective that humans stand as the end product of a deliberate process or that they derive from a series of random acts of natural selection. David F. Armstrong’s new book Original Signs embraces the Darwinian concept of natural selection and extends it to apply to the formation of language. While most current linguistic theory envisions language as a system for translating the contents of the mind into linear strings of arbitrary symbols, Armstrong asserts that this model does not characterize signed languages. He shows that language is inherently a multichannel activity, of which the two primary channels are auditory and visual.

       Original Signs employs a more expansive notion of language that takes into account the full range of human communicative behavior. By making no strict separation between language and gesture, this thought-provoking work reveals that the use by deaf people of signs to create a fully formed language is also a natural facet of communication development for hearing people.

       Armstrong explores the influences of Plato and Descartes on modern linguistics, and delineates the theories of earlier anthropological linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, who thought of language as natural experiments connected to individual cultures. This exceptional work of scholarship methodically demonstrates that the intricacies of how languages develop, whether they depend upon words or signs, and that the complexity among languages that contact one another cannot be accounted for by the sequential hierarchical processes previously put forth by linguists and logicians. Original Signs will prove to be a fascinating, watershed work invaluable to linguists, anthropologists, and all other scholars and students engaged in the search for the origin of language.

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The Origins of Catholic Words
A Discursive Dictionary
Anthony Lo Bello
Catholic University of America Press, 2020
The study of the vocabulary of the Catholic religion may be taken as a definition of the liberal arts. Origins of Catholic Words is a work of reference organized like a lexicon or encyclopedia. There is an entry for each word of importance having to do with the Catholic Church. Anthony Lo Bello gives the etymology of the word, describes what it means, and then adds whatever further discussion he feels is needed; in some cases this amounts to several pages. Lo Bello has assembled, over a number of years, lucid and wide-ranging remarks on the etymology and history of the words that occur in the study of the Catholic religion. A true labor of love, this sophisticated, one-of-a-kind dictionary will delight those who take pleasure in learning. Anyone interested in words and language—indeed, in culture, will find something interesting on every page. This is a book one may read and not just consult. The author has been ecumenical in his choice of authorities. J. B. Bury, Lord Chesterfield, Mandell Creighton, S. R. Driver, Ferdinand Gregorovius, Dr. Johnson, Henry Charles Lea, Bishop Lightfoot, Thomas Babington Macaulay, John Stuart Mill, Henry Hart Milman, Leopold von Ranke, and Bertrand Russell find their places alongside Alban Butler, Denzinger, Ignaz Döllinger the Abbé Duchesne, Adrian Fortescue, Bishop Hefele, Cardinal Gasparri, Msgr. Ronald Knox, Msgr. Horace K. Mann, John Henry Newman, Ludwig von Pastor, Wilfrid Ward, William George Ward, and Evelyn Waugh. There have been many changes in the Catholic Church since 1962, and one of the goals of this book is to describe what will soon be missing from the memories of all living people. Origins of Catholic Words may, Lo Bello hopes, make its small contribution so that the situation not arise, which would convict Newman of error when he wrote, “What the Catholic Church once has had, she never has lost.”
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The Origins of Self
An Anthropological Perspective
Martin P. J. Edwardes
University College London, 2019
The Origins of Self explores the role selfhood plays in defining both human society and each individual in that society. It considers the genetic and cultural origins of self, the role that self plays in socialization and language, and the types of selves we generate in our individual journeys to and through adulthood. Martin P. J. Edwardes argues that other-awareness is a relatively early evolutionary development, present throughout the primate clade and perhaps beyond, but self-awareness is a product of the sharing of social models, something only humans appear to do. The self of which we are aware is not something innate within us, it is a model of our self produced as a response to the models of us offered to us by other people. Edwardes proposes that human construction of selfhood involves seven different types of self. All but one of them are internally generated models, and the only nonmodel, the actual self, is completely hidden from conscious awareness. We rely on others to tell us about our self, and even to let us know we are a self. Developed in relation to a range of subject areas—linguistics, anthropology, genomics, and cognition, as well as sociocultural theory—The Origins of Self is of particular interest to students and researchers studying the origins of language, human origins in general, and the cognitive differences between human and other animal psychologies.
 
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front cover of Ossium Carnes Multae e Marci Tullii Ciceronis Epistulis / The Bones’ Meats Abundant from the Epistles of Marcus Tullius Cicero
Ossium Carnes Multae e Marci Tullii Ciceronis Epistulis / The Bones’ Meats Abundant from the Epistles of Marcus Tullius Cicero
Reginaldus Thomas Foster
Catholic University of America Press, 2021
Beginners and experts alike will find a complete immersion into the workings and nature of the Latin language embodied in the incomparable, insuperable epistles of the great Marcus Tullius Cicero, something which other commentators pass over or scorn. This second volume puts “meat on the bones” of the Latin language presented in the first volume: Ossa Latinitatis Sola: The Mere Bones of Latin. The personal letters of Cicero provide ample meat to enflesh the skeletal structure of the language, thus the title: Ossium Carnes Multae: The Bones’ Meats Abundant from the epistles of Marcus Tullius Cicero. Part 1 presents 51 complete letters from the Tyrell-Purser text. Facing each letter is an image of its oldest manuscript edition as early as the ninth century, which are preserved and guarded in the Medicea Laurentiana library in Florence, Italy, witnessing to the human hand preserving this monument of world heritage for over two millennia. Part 2 follows with a most careful rendition into English of Tully’s living, telephone-like Latin discourse. A thorough treatment and explanation of noteworthy elements of his natural talk follows with numerous references to the Encounters in Volume I. All this has students, learners, teachers, experts of the Latin language in mind and is humbly designed to deepen the understanding and appreciation of specific expressions and peculiarities of Cicero’s language itself. Part 3 provides 500 sentences consisting of from 1 to 5 words and suited for the beginnings or continuation of Latin conversations: 200 declarations, 100 questions, 100 exclamations, 100 injunctions drawn from his letters. The volume is amply indexed. All this has been done to enhance the study and use of Latin, to popularize Cicero’s correspondence, to prepare the reader for Volume III which will deal again with the letters and their usefulness for Latin conversation.
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Other Floors, Other Voices, Twentieth Anniversary Edition
A Textography of a Small University Building
John M. Swales
University of Michigan Press, 2018
“John Swales’ textography might also be called ‘comparative rhetoric in a small building,’ offering proof, once again, that another culture may be only a trip up or down a flight of stairs. . . .such an appealing and original book.” ---BAAL News
 
Originally published in 1998, Other Floors, Other Voices uses texts to capture the lives of three communities operating within a single building (the North University Building, or NUBS) on the University of Michigan campus. Swales' thoughtful exploration of the three units—the Computer Resource Site, the University Herbarium (botany), and the English Language Institute—centers around the individuals who work on each floor and the discourse-related activities they engage in.
 
The Twentieth Anniversary Edition of Other Floors, Other Voices includes: a new preface, an introductory essay on the value of rereading this volume many years after publication, and an epilogue that reflects on and reveals what has happened to the three units in the past 20 years.
 
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Other People's Stories
Entitlement Claims and the Critique of Empathy
Amy Shuman
University of Illinois Press, 2010
In Other People's Stories, Amy Shuman examines the social relations embedded in stories and the complex ethical and social tensions that surround their telling. Drawing on innovative research and contemporary theory, she describes what happens when one person's story becomes another person's source of inspiration, or when entitlement and empathy collide.
 
The resulting analyses are wonderfully diverse, integrating narrative studies, sociolinguistics, communications, folklore, and ethnographic studies to examine the everyday, conversational stories told by cultural groups including Latinas, Jews, African Americans, Italians, and Puerto Ricans. Shuman offers a nuanced and clear theoretical perspective derived from the Frankfurt school, life history research, disability research, feminist studies, trauma studies, and cultural studies. Without compromising complexity, she makes narrative inquiry accessible to a broad population.
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The Other Tongue
English Across Cultures
Edited by Braj B. Kachru
University of Illinois Press, 1992

When The Other Tongue appeared in 1982, it was called "required reading for all those concerned with English teaching in non-native situations, from the classroom teacher to the policy planner", Jowhn Platt, English World-Wide) and "an extremely useful and stimulating collection" (William C. Ritchie, Language). It introduced refreshingly new perspectives for understanding the spread and functions of English around the world.

This dramatically revised volume contains eight new chapters, replacing or updating more than half of the first edition. The Other Tongue is the first attempt to integrate and address provocative issues relevant to a deeper understanding of the forms and functions of English within different sociolinguistic, cross-cultural, and cross-linguistic contexts. The volume discusses linguistic, literary, pedagogical, and attitudinal issues related to world Englishes.

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An Other Tongue
Nation and Ethnicity in the Linguistic Borderlands
Alfred Arteaga
Duke University Press, 1994
As our millennium draws to a close, we find ourselves in the midst of great and rapid global changes with nations and political systems dissolving all around us and the world becoming one of shifting identities--of peoples unified and divided by such distinctions as nationality, ethnicity, race, religion, and colonial status. The articulation and construction of these distinctions, the very language of difference, is the subject of An Other Tongue. This collection of essays by a group of distinguished scholars, including Norma Alarcón, Gayatri Spivak, Tzvetan Todorov, and Gerald Vizenor, explores the interconnections between language and identity.
The Chicanos, the U.S./Mexico borderland polyglots whose sense of history, nationality, and race is as mixed as their language, are the book's prime example. But the authors recognize that border zones, like diasporas and post-colonial relations, occur globally, and their discussion of hybrid or mestizo identities ranges from the United States to the Caribbean to South Asia to Ireland. Drawing on personal experience, readings of poetry and fiction, and cultural theory, the authors detail the politics of being human through the mediation of language. What does "shadow" mean to the Native American Indian, or diaspora to the East Indian immigrant? How does British colonialism yet affect Irish and Indian nationalist literary production? Why is the split between Eastern and Western European language use necessarily schizophrenic? So much of our sense of difference today is constructed as we speak, and An Other Tongue speaks with eloquence to this phenomenon and will be of great interest to those concerned with the discourse of post-colonial studies, critical theory, and the remapping of world literature.

Contributors. Norma Alarcón, Alfred Arteaga, Juan Bruce-Novoa, Cordelia Chávez Candelaria, Michael G. Cooke, Edmundo Desnoes, Eugene C. Eoyang, David Lloyd, Lydie Moudileno, Jean-Luc Nancy, Tejaswini Niranjana, Ada Savin, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Michael Smith, Tzvetan Todorov, Luis A. Torres, Gerald Vizenor

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Out of the Mouths of Slaves
African American Language and Educational Malpractice
By John Baugh
University of Texas Press, 1999

Winner, A Choice Outstanding Academic Book

When the Oakland, California, school board called African American English "Ebonics" and claimed that it "is not a black dialect or any dialect of English," they reignited a debate over language, race, and culture that reaches back to the era of slavery in the United States. In this book, John Baugh, an authority on African American English, sets new parameters for the debate by dissecting and challenging many of the prevailing myths about African American language and its place in American society.

Baugh's inquiry ranges from the origins of African American English among slaves and their descendants to its recent adoption by standard English speakers of various races. Some of the topics he considers include practices and malpractices for educating language minority students, linguistic discrimination in the administration of justice, cross-cultural communication between Blacks and whites, and specific linguistic aspects of African American English. This detailed overview of the main points of debate about African American language will be important reading for both scholars and the concerned public.

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