Papers of the Algonquian Conference is a collection of peer-reviewed scholarship from an annual international forum that focuses on topics related to the languages and cultures of Algonquian peoples. This series touches on a variety of subject areas, including anthropology, archaeology, education, ethnography, history, Indigenous studies, language studies, literature, music, political science, psychology, religion, and sociology. Contributors often cite never-before-published data in their research, giving the reader a fresh and unique insight into the Algonquian peoples and rendering these papers essential reading for those interested in studying Algonquian society.

Papers of the Algonquian Conference is a collection of peer-reviewed scholarship from an annual international forum that focuses on topics related to the languages and cultures of Algonquian peoples. This series touches on a variety of subject areas, including anthropology, archaeology, education, ethnography, history, Indigenous studies, language studies, literature, music, political science, psychology, religion, and sociology. Contributors often cite never before published data in their research, giving the reader a fresh and unique insight into the Algonquian peoples and rendering these papers essential reading for those interested in studying Algonquian society.

Papers of the Algonquian Conference is a collection of peer-reviewed scholarship from an annual international forum that focuses on topics related to the languages and cultures of Algonquian peoples. This series touches on a variety of subject areas, including anthropology, archaeology, education, ethnography, history, Indigenous studies, language studies, literature, music, political science, psychology, religion, and sociology. Contributors often cite never-before-published data in their research, giving the reader a fresh and unique insight into the Algonquian peoples and rendering these papers essential reading for those interested in studying Algonquian society.

Papers of the Algonquian Conference is a collection of peer-reviewed scholarship from an annual international forum that focuses on topics related to the languages and cultures of Algonquian peoples. This series touches on a variety of subject areas, including anthropology, archaeology, education, ethnography, history, Indigenous studies, language studies, literature, music, political science, psychology, religion, and sociology. Contributors often cite never-before-published data in their research, giving the reader a fresh and unique insight into the Algonquian peoples and rendering these papers essential reading for those interested in studying Algonquian society.

The study of ancient Greek particles has been an integral part of the study of the Greek language from its earliest beginnings. Among the first parts of speech to be distinguished in Greek scholarship were the σύνδεσμοι (“combiners”), which include the later category of particles. In the Renaissance, Matthaeus Devarius—a Greek scholar working in Rome—published a monograph on particles only sixteen years after Estienne’s Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, and in the nineteenth century many great German philologists devoted considerable attention to particles and their forms, functions, and meanings. In the second half of the twentieth century Greek particles have returned to scholarly attention, partly as a result of the developments in contemporary linguistics.

The Emmy-Noether project “The Pragmatic Functions and Meanings of Ancient Greek Particles,” carried out in the Classics Department of the University of Heidelberg from 2010 to 2014, set out to trace more than two millennia of research on Greek particles, and to take stock of current work on particles, both within and beyond ancient Greek. Building on the foundations of this scholarship, Particles in Ancient Greek Discourse undertakes an analysis of particle use across five genres of ancient Greek discourse: epic, lyric, tragedy, comedy, and historiography.

This study analyzes passive sentences in English and Portuguese which result from a post-semantic transformation applied when a nound, which does not play the semantic role of actor, is chosen as syntactic subject. Choice between a passive and its non-passive or active counterpart reflects differences in the distribution of information in the sentence as regards the relative importance of the latter's constituents for communication. Such distribution is analyzed in terms of Praque school theory, especially that involving the notions of communicative dynamism and the distribution of theme and rheme.

The book concludes with a contrastive analysis of English and Portuguese passive sentence patterns which serves as the basis for observations on the teaching of Portuguese passives to native speakers of English.

Cryptology, the mathematical and technical science of ciphers and codes, and philology, the humanistic study of natural or human languages, are typically understood as separate domains of activity. But Brian Lennon contends that these two domains, both concerned with authentication of text, should be viewed as contiguous. He argues that computing’s humanistic applications are as historically important as its mathematical and technical ones. What is more, these humanistic uses, no less than cryptological ones, are marked and constrained by the priorities of security and military institutions devoted to fighting wars and decoding intelligence.

Lennon’s history encompasses the first documented techniques for the statistical analysis of text, early experiments in mechanized literary analysis, electromechanical and electronic code-breaking and machine translation, early literary data processing, the computational philology of late twentieth-century humanities computing, and early twenty-first-century digital humanities. Throughout, Passwords makes clear the continuity between cryptology and philology, showing how the same practices flourish in literary study and in conditions of war.

Lennon emphasizes the convergence of cryptology and philology in the modern digital password. Like philologists, hackers use computational methods to break open the secrets coded in text. One of their preferred tools is the dictionary, that preeminent product of the philologist’s scholarly labor, which supplies the raw material for computational processing of natural language. Thus does the historic overlap of cryptology and philology persist in an artifact of computing—passwords—that many of us use every day.

Our journey to language begins before birth, as babies in the womb hear clearly enough to distinguish their mother's voice. Canvassing a broad span of experimental and theoretical approaches, this book introduces new ways of looking at language development.

A remarkable mother-daughter collaboration, Pathways to Language balances the respected views of a well-known scholar with the fresh perspective of a younger colleague prepared to challenge current popular positions in these debates. The result is an unusually subtle, even-handed, and comprehensive overview of the theory and practice of language acquisition, from fetal speech processing to the development of child grammar to the sophisticated linguistic accomplishments of adolescence, such as engaging in conversation and telling a story.

With examples from the real world as well as from the psychology laboratory, Kyra Karmiloff and Annette Karmiloff-Smith look in detail at the way language users appropriate words and grammar. They present in-depth evaluations of different theories of language acquisition. They show how adolescent usage has changed the meaning of certain phrases, and how modern living has led to alterations in the lexicon. They also consider the phenomenon of atypical language development, as well as theoretical issues of nativism and empiricism and the specificity of human language. Their nuanced and open-minded approach allows readers to survey the complexity and breadth of the fascinating pathways to language acquisition.

Subject: Linguistics; Grammar--Phonology

Starting in the late nineteenth century, unusual pictographic books began to flow from a remote corner of Southwest China into the libraries of the Western world. What made these books so attractive? For one, they possessed the air of mystery that came with being “magical” books almost indecipherable to all but a select few ritual specialists, but perhaps more importantly, they were written in what looked like an ancient form of picture writing. In these books, written in the Naxi dongba script of southwest China, the events unfold on the page visually. This book offers a full translation of a central Naxi origin myth in a level of detail never before seen: readers are invited to delve into this unique script in both its original form and digital recreation, alongside historic and updated translations and an accompanying explanation of each individual graph.

A collection of work on pidgins and creoles that includes discussions of the English-derived creole of San Andres Island and the French-derived creole of Cayenne, the theoretical contributions of creolistics to general linguistic theory, decreolization, generative phonological treatment of a hypothesized English-derived proto-creole, and the little-known Shelta language.

In Piros and Prehistory, David Leedom Shaul turns his attention to the Piro language, once spoken by the people of the Piro pueblos in New Mexico but extinct since approximately the year 1900. While arguments have been made in favor of Piro belonging to the Tiwa branch of the Tanoan family, Shaul counters this classification with a detailed rebuttal, firmly establishing Piro within the Tanoan family but outside of the Tiwa branch.

Shaul’s arguments use linguistic analyses coupled with historic and prehistoric records of migration and cultural interaction. Following the establishment of Piro as a Tanoan language, much of the linguistic analysis involves determining the aspects of Piro that were inherited from the earlier Proto-Tanoan versus those that were incorporated later as a result of borrowing from other languages through cultural interaction. This book lays out the linguistic argument that the similarities between Piro and Tiwan languages result from borrowing, not common ancestry, and it provides a record of contact between groups and linguistic evolution based on these movements.

A Global Analysis of Sites, Practices, and Processes of Decolonial and Indigenous Meaning-Making

Decolonial projects can end up reinforcing dominant modes of thinking by shoehorning understandings of Indigenous and non-Western traditions within Eurocentric frameworks. The pluralization of literacies and the creation of so-called alternative rhetorics accepts that there is a totalizing reality of rhetoric and literacy. This volume seeks to decenter these theories and to engage Indigenous contexts on their own terms, starting with the very tools of representation. Language itself can disrupt normative structures and create pluriversal possibilities. The volume editors and contributors argue for epistemic change at the level of the language and media that people use to represent meaning. The range of topics covered includes American Indian and Indigenous representations, literacies, and rhetorics; critical revisionist historiography and comparative rhetorics; delinking colonial literacies of cartographic power and modernity; “northern” and “southern” hemispheric relations; and theorizations of/from oceanic border spaces.

What do possessive noun phrases mean? Although possessives are one of the most commonly used construction types cross-linguistically, they have never received detailed or sustained study from a semantic point of view. Taking work of Abney, May, and Heim as a starting point, this book develops a comprehensive analysis of the contribution of possessive NPs to the truth conditions of the sentences in which they occur.

However exciting new technologies and educational tools may seem, they can become solely for entertainment unless their design, use, and evaluation are guided by principles of education and language development. Task-based Language Teaching (TBLT) provides an excellent approach for teachers who want to realize the potential of technology to engage learners and improve language learning inside and outside the classroom.

This practical guide shows teachers how to successfully incorporate technology into TBLT in the classroom and to develop technology-mediated materials. Whether the goal is to conduct a needs analysis, to develop classroom or homework materials, or to implement a new approach of student assessment, A Practical Guide to Integrating Technology into Task-Based Language Teaching will be a welcome resource for language teachers at all levels.

Designed for use in the classroom as well as for independent study, the book includes reflective questions, activities, and further reading at the end of each chapter. Examples of units in Chinese, Spanish, ESL, and the hospitality industry are provided.

Georgetown Digital Shorts—longer than an article, shorter than a book—deliver timely works of peer-reviewed scholarship for a fast-paced world. They present new ideas and original content that are easily digestable for students, scholars, and general readers.

The Netherlands have a long and important tradition in scholarly philology. For instance in the early days of Leiden University 'philology', or the critical examination of classical texts, was regarded as a 'cutting-edge science'. This field of scholarship had far reaching implications on disciplines such as theology, chronology, astronomy, history, law and other demarcated bodies of knowledge identified as a separate science. Regardless of the exact field of inquiry, philologists as protectors and teachers of the written heritage always played a pivotal role in the formation of the cultural repertoire of the educated public. As men of learning and high esteem, philologists also exerted influence outside the cultural sphere, especially in politics and religion. The ever-changing composition of the philological frame of reference made no difference in this respect. But in the nineteenth century, the practice of philology was passing a crucial phase of change. In both its object of study and in its methods, several fundamental modifications occurred. Texts in the vernacular and national philologies attracted more and more attention of the public, and 'neo-philology' succeeded in taking over the central position traditionally occupied by classical philology. Subfields such as 'linguistics', 'edition technique' and 'history' grew into new, more-or-less independent (sub-)disciplines, whereas scientific methods such as stemmatology and comparative approaches were introduced in the humanities. This redesigned the landscape of philology radically. New boundaries became apparent and existing ones were questioned or drawn sharper. At the time, philology underwent an accelerated process of differentiation and professionalization. Philology demarcated its own more or less independent sphere, with a specific authority. The establishment of a branch of 'national philology' can be regarded as an example of discipline formation in the humanities. This fascinating process of change and the search for new boundaries in Dutch philology is highlighted in this book The Practice of Philology in the Netherlands in the Nineteenth Century, the first book on this topic in the English language.

The Prague Linguistic Circle came into being on the afternoon of October 6, 1926, when five Czech and Russian linguists gathered to hear a lecture by a German colleague. From this international beginning, the interests of the group grew to first encompass language in all its functional heterogeneity and then finally all of culture, which the Circle conceived of as a structure of sign systems. Semiotics was thus the overarching discipline for the Prague School, serving to organize all phenomena shared and exchanged by a cultural community.

In recent years increasing attention has been paid to the importance of the Prague School, but writing about it has frequently been marred by misconceptions. The central aim of this volume is to correct those misconceptions and to present the diversity of interests within the Prague School—literary criticism, linguistics, theory of theater, folklore, and philosophy. These essays by Bogatyrëv, Jakobson, Karcevskij, Mukařovský, Rieger, Vodička, and Honzl are here translated into English for the first time. Some have a special historical value in illuminating critical stages of structuralist thinking; others reveal the timeliness of the School's contributions for the theoretical conflicts of our day. Each essay is accompanied by an informative introductory note, and the whole is followed by the editor's "Postscript," tracing the roots of structuralist aesthetics.

"Poetry does not impose, it exposes itself," wrote Paul Celan. Werner Hamacher's investigations into crucial texts of philosophical and literary modernity show that Celan's apothegm is also valid for the structure of understanding and for language in general. "Subject position" is widely invoked today, yet Hamacher is the first to thoroughly investigate the premises for this invocation. He demonstrates that the promise of a subject position is not only unavoidable--and thus produces more and more fundamentalisms--but is also unattainable and therefore always open to innovation, revision, and unexpected transformation. In a book that is both philosophical and literary, Hamacher gives us the fullest account of the vast disruption in the very nature of our understanding that was first unleashed by Kant's critique of human subjectivity.

In light of the double nature of every premise--that it is promised but never attainable--Hamacher gives us nine decisive themes, topics, and texts of modernity: the hermeneutic circle in Schleiermacher and Heidegger, the structure of ethical commands in Kant, Nietzsche's genealogy of moral terms and his exploration of the aporias of singularity, the irony of reading in de Man, the parabasis of language in Schlegel, Kleist's disruption of narrative representation, the gesture of naming in Benjamin and Kafka, and the incisive caesura that Paul Celan inserts into temporal and linguistic reversals.

There is no book that so fully brings the issues of both critical philosophy and critical literature into reach.

In this book, two related phenomena are studied: presupposition and anaphora. Dynamic semantics is by now widely accepted as a first-rate foundation for such an exercise and it forms the backbone of most of the work in this book. A recurring additional theme of the present book is the usefulness of techniques from partial logic in the treatment of both phenomena. Rather than adding completely new semantic theories to the present gamut of theories, the author discusses a number of existing approaches which aim at accounting for the behavior of presuppositions and/or anaphors, makes improvements where necessary, and compares the results. Presupposition and Anaphora starts with an introduction to a number of dynamic semantic theories and their correlations, paying special attention to the treatment of disjunctions and negations. Subsequently, presuppositions are studied in the context of partial logics, Montague Grammar and dynamic semantics.

Russell and Strawson sparked a well known debate on the subject of Linguistic Presupposition inspiring many linguists and philosophers to follow suit, including Frege, whose work initiated the modern study in this area. Beaver begins with the most comprehensive overview and critical discussion of this burgeoning field published to date. He then goes on to motivate and develop his own account based on a Dynamic Semantics. This account is a recent line of theoretical work in which the Tarskian emphasis on truth conditions is questioned. The central plank of the theory of meaning is a formal account of the change in information effected by use of language on hearers or readers. The proposal thus consolidates ideas of Stalnaker, Karttunen and Heim, all of whom had suggested that such an account was needed. At the same time it provides a new impulse and motivation to Dynamic Semantics itself.

Subject: Philosophy; Theory of Knowledge

A textbook exploring predictive modes of linguistic development and analysis.

During the last two decades, computational linguists, in concert with other researchers in AI, have turned to machine learning and statistical techniques to capture features of natural language and aspects of the learning process that are not easily accommodated in classical algebraic frameworks. These developments are producing a revolution in linguistics in which traditional symbolic systems are giving way to probabilistic and deep learning approaches. This collection features articles that provide background to these approaches, and their application in syntax, semantics, pragmatics, morphology, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and dialogue modeling. Each chapter provides a self-contained introduction to the topic that it covers, making this volume accessible to graduate students and researchers in linguistics, NLP, AI, and cognitive science.
 

This volume presents the proceedings of the fifteenth West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics held at the University of California, Irvine. This volume is a comprehensive representation of the papers presented at the conference in the areas of syntax, semantics and phonology, including a special focus on Native American phonology and syntax. Topics range from underspecification and natural classes to child language, with languages covered ranging from Basque to Navajo. This volume will be of interest to a wide range of linguists covering numerous special interests and fields.

Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 24 includes “The Celticity of Galicia and the Arrival of the Insular Celts,” by Manuel Alberro; “Reading Aislinge Óenguso as a Christian-Platonist Parable,” by Brenda Gray; “Celtic Legends in Irish Opera, 1900–1930,” by Axel Klein; “‘I wonder what the king is doing tonight’—Looking for Arthur in All the Wrong Places,” by Laurance J. Maney†; “What Future for the Irish Gaeltacht Communities in the Twenty-First Century?” by Nollaig Ó Gadhra†; “Acallam Na Senórach as Prosimetrum,” by Geraldine Parsons; “Traditional and Courtly Themes in a Medieval Welsh Elegy to a ‘Góann Wargann Wery’ (‘A Fair Virgin, Meek and Mild’),” by Laura Radiker; and “Welsh Prophetic Poetry in the Age of the Princes,” by Elizabeth Schoales.

Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 25 includes “Keltoi, Galatai, Galli: Were They All One People?” by Timothy P. Bridgman; “On Verbal Nouns in Celtic Languages,” by Chao Li; “Cross-Linguistic Discourse Markers in Manx Gaelic and English,” by Marie Clague; “The Acallam na Senórach: A Medieval Instruction Manual,” by Annie Donahue; “Gendered Postcolonial Discourse in the Mabinogi,” by Morgan Kay; “Language Death and Resurrection in the Isle of Man: The Continuity of Manx Gaelic Exemplified by the Use of Inflected Verb Tenses,” by Jennifer Kewley Draskau; “High Kings and Pipe Dreams: Revisiting John Vincent Kelleher’s Theory of Revision to the Early Irish Annals,” by Laurance J. Maney†; and “The Rise of Christian Nomenclature in Medieval Scotland,” by David Morris.

Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 26 includes “Heroic Recycling in Celtic Tradition,” by Joseph F. Nagy; “On the Celtic-American Fringe: Irish–Mexican Encounters in the Texas–Mexico Borderlands,” by Marian J. Barber; “The Encomium Urbis in Medieval Welsh Poetry,” by Helen Fulton; “Prophecy in Welsh Manuscripts,” by Morgan Kay; “‘Ceol agus Gaol’ (‘Music and Relationship’): Memory, Identity, and Community in Boston’s Irish Music Scene,” by Natalie Kirschstein; “Colonization Circulars: Timber Cycles in the Time of Famine,” by Kathryn Miles; “Up Close and Personal: The French in Bantry Bay (1796) in the Bantry Estate Papers,” by Grace Neville; “In Praise of Two Margarets: Two Laudatory Poems by Piaras Feiritéar,” by Deirdre Nic Mhathúna; “Observations on Cross-Cultural Names and Name Patterns in Medieval Wales and the March,” by Laura Radiker; and “Mouth to Mouth: Gaelic Stories as Told within One Family,” by Carol Zall.

Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, 27 includes “Poets and Carpenters: Creating the Architecture of Happiness in Late-Medieval Wales,” by Richard Suggett; “Revisiting Preaspiration: Evidence from the Survey of the Gaelic Dialects of Scotland,” by Anna Bosch; “The Anoetheu Dialogue in Culhwch ac Olwen,” by Fiona Dehghani; “Homophony and Breton Loss of Lexis,” by Francis Favereau; “The Origins of ‘the Jailtacht,’” by Diarmait Mac Giolla Chríost; “A Confluence of Wisdom: The Symbolism of Wells, Whirlpools, Waterfalls and Rivers in Early Celtic Sources,” by Sharon Paice MacLeod; “The Real Charlotte: The Exclusive Myth of Somerville and Ross,” by Donald McNamara; “Language Shift in Early Twentieth-Century Ireland,” by Máire Ní Chiosáin; and “Conceptions of an Urban Ideal and the Early Modern Welsh Town,” by Sally-Anne Shearn.

This volume of the Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium offers a wide range of articles on topics across the field of Celtic Studies. It includes the Colloquium keynote given by Prof. Barbara Hillers which studied the literary use of folklore, Irish and international, in the Irish tale “Aislinge Meic Con Glinne” (“The Vision of Mac Con Glinne”).

More recent literary topics expand the scope of this volume from the medieval into the early modern period, and into the early twentieth century. Of special interest to scholars of more recent times will be articles on the Irish language in nineteenth-century American print media, and on the unpublished sequel by Muiris Ó Súilleabháin to his memoir Fiche Blian ag Fás (1933), which was published in English as Twenty Years a-Growing.

Processing Compound Verbs in Persian is the first monograph investigating how Persian compound verbs are processed in the mental lexicon, through which it can be inferred how they are stored, organized, and accessed. The study examines Persian compound verbs in light of psycholinguistic theories on poly-morphemic word processing as well as linguistic theories of complex predicates.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the standard approach to argument linking in terms of "thematic roles", which are determined by the lexical meaning of verbs, has some serious shortcomings. This volume sets out to explore alternatives to a rigid model of lexical projection. It brings together a set of papers from different backgrounds that converge on the general hypothesis that the many semantic factors which influence the projection of arguments should be attributed to compositional processes rather than to the fixed contents of lexical entries. Proposals for a reassessment of the lexicon-syntax interface include flexible models of lexical meaning with productive derivation of alternants, as well as models where the structural context supplants much of the putative role of lexical entries. The topics addressed include questions of argument hierarchies and adicity of predicates, and the syntax and semantics of argument alternations in a set of very diverse languages, which include English, Dutch, Scottish Gaelic, Finnish, Hebrew, Kannada, Malay, Inuit, and Yaqui.

Pronouncing English is a textbook for teaching English phonetics and phonology, offering an original "stress-based" approach while incorporating all the standard course topics. Drawing on current linguistic theory, it uniquely analyzes prosody first, and then discusses its effects on pronunciation—emphasizing suprasegmental features such as meter, stress, and intonation, then the vowels and consonants themselves.

Distinguished by being the first work of its kind to be based on an exhaustive statistical analysis of all the lexical entries of an entire dictionary, Pronouncing English is complemented by a list of symbols and a glossary. Richard Teschner and M. Stanley Whitley present an improved description of English pronunciation and conclude each chapter with suggestions on how to do a better job of teaching it. An appendix with a brief introduction to acoustic phonetics—the basis for the perception vs. the production of sounds—is also included. Revolutionary in its field, Pronouncing English declares that virtually all aspects of English pronunciation—from the vowel system to the articulation of syllables, words, and sentences—are determined by the presence or absence of stress.

The accompanying CD-ROM carries audio recordings of many of the volume's exercises, more than 100 text and sound files, and data files on which the statistical observations were based.

This book offers a new theory of the structure of propositions, which provides a uniform treatment of constative and performative sentences. Jerrold Katz shows that performatives can enter into logically valid arguments, even though, as Austin claimed, they can't be true or false. Katz also argues that “speech act theory” is not a theory at all, but an assortment of observations about heterogeneous aspects of the performance of speech acts. He shows that a better explanation of speech acts is given by a grammatical account of the iIIocutionary potential of sentences and a separate pragmatic account of how this potential is realized in actual speech situtations. Katz provides such a grammatical account, which makes it possible for the first time to explain the iIIocutionary potential of sentences within grammar.