A SCHOLARLY BOOK REPOSITORY96 start with S start with S
As he made his way through northern Australia, Dixon was dependent on rumors of Aboriginal speakers, the unreliable advice of white Australians, and the faulty memories of many of the remaining speakers of the languages. Suggestions of informants led him on a circuitous trail through the bush, to speakers such as the singer Willie Kelly in Ravenshoe, who wanted his recordings sent to the south, "where white people would pay big money to hear a genuine Aborigine sing" and Chloe Grant in Murray Upper, who told tales in four dialects of digging wild yams, of the blue-tongue lizard Banggara, and of the arrival of Captain Cook. Dixon tells of obtaining the trust of possible informants, of learning the customs and terrain of the country, and of growing understanding of the culture and tradition of his subjects. And he explains his surprise at his most unexpected discovery: that the rich oral tradition of the "primitive" Aborigines could yield a history of a people, as told by that people, that dates to almost ten millenia before.
Donald E. Knuth’s influence in computer science ranges from the invention of methods for translating and defining programming languages to the creation of the TeX and METAFONT systems for desktop publishing. His award-winning textbooks have become classics that are often given credit for shaping the field, and his scientific papers are widely referenced and stand as milestones of development over a wide variety of topics. The present volume is the eighth in a series of his collected papers.
The analysis presented in this book has important consequences for a cross-linguistic theory of anaphora. Linguists and logicians interested in discourse structure, cross-linguistic semantics, and the relationship between morpho-syntax and meaning will find this an engaging and innovative work.
The Semantics of Syntax is an elegant and powerful analysis of the relationship between syntax and semantics. Noting that meaning is underdetermined by form even in simple cases, Denis Bouchard argues that it is impossible to build knowledge of the world into grammar and still have a describable grammar. He thus proposes simple semantic representations and simple rules to relate linguistic levels. Focusing on a class of French verbs, Bouchard shows how multiple senses can be accounted for by the assumption of a single abstract core meaning along with background information about how objects behave in the world. He demonstrates that this move simplifies the syntax at no cost to the descriptive power of the semantics. In two important final chapters, he examines the consequences of his approach for standard syntactic theories.
Describing a process of continuous and enduring interaction between these geographically separate communities, Portis-Winner explains how, for instance, financial assistance from the emigrants enabled their Slovenian hometown to survive the economic depressions of the 1890s and 1930s. She also analyzes the extent to which memories, rituals, myths, and traditional activities from Slovenia have sustained their Cleveland relatives. The result is a unique anthropological investigation into the signifying practices of a strongly cohesive—yet geographically split—ethnic group, as well as an illuminating application of semiotic analyses to communities and the complex problems they face.
The Senegalese are notable, Smith suggests, both in their capacity for movement and in their multifaceted approach to language. She finds that, although the emigrants she interviews express complicated relationships to the multiple languages they speak and the places they inhabit, they also convey pleasure in both travel and language. Offering a mix of poignant, funny, reflexive, introspective, and witty stories, they blur the lines between the utility and pleasure of language, allowing a more nuanced understanding of why and how Senegalese move.
Originally published in cloth in 2001, the paperback includes a new foreword that will inspire all teachers who work with students others have deemed unteachable. A new afterword updates readers on the prison art's program -- and the author herself -- since 2001.
Divided into two parts, Shaping Phonology first explores the elaboration of abstract domains (or units of analysis) that fall under the purview of phonology. These chapters reveal the increasing multidimensionality of phonological representation through such analytical approaches as autosegmental phonology and feature geometry. The second part looks at how the advent of machine learning and computational technologies has allowed for the analysis of larger and larger phonological data sets, prompting a shift from using key examples to demonstrate that a particular generalization is universal to striving for statistical generalizations across large corpora of relevant data. Now fundamental components of the phonologist’s tool kit, these two shifts have inspired a rethinking of just what it means to do linguistics.
Most scholarly speculation on the origin of human language has centered around speech. However, the growing understanding of sign languages on human development has transformed the debate on language evolution. David F. Armstrong’s new book Show of Hands: A Natural History of Sign Language casts a wide net in history and geography to explain how these visible languages have enriched human culture in general and how their study has expanded knowledge of the human condition.
Armstrong addresses the major theories of language evolution, including Noam Chomsky’s thesis of an innate human “organ” for language and Steven Pinker’s contention that there is language and not-language without any gradations between gesture and language. This engrossing survey proceeds with William C. Stokoe’s revival of the early anthropological cognitive-linguistic model of gradual development through the iconicity of sign languages. Armstrong ranges far to reveal the nature of sign languages, from the anatomy of early human ancestors to telling passages by Shakespeare, Dickens, and Pound, to the astute observations of Socrates, Lucretius, and Abbé de l’Epée on sign communication among deaf people. Show of Hands illustrates the remarkable development of sign languages in isolated Bedouin communities and among Australian indigenous peoples. It also explores the ubiquitous benefits of “Deaf Gain” and visual communication as they dovetail with the Internet and its mushrooming potential for the future.
The 13th Volume in the Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities Series
This volume collects for the first time various accounts of contact between sign languages throughout the world, presenting an exciting opportunity to further understand the structural and social factors of this linguistic component in Deaf communities. Editor David Quinto-Pozos has divided Sign Languages in Contact into four parts, starting with Contact in a Trilingual Setting. The sole essay in this section features a study of Maori signs by Rachel McKee, David McKee, Kirsten Smiler, and Karen Pointon that reveals the construction of indigenous Deaf identity in New Zealand Sign Language.
In Part Two: Lexical Comparisons, Jeffrey Davis conducts an historic, linguistic assessment of varieties of North American Indian sign languages. Daisuke Sasaki compares the Japanese Sign Language lexicon with that of Taiwan Sign Language by focusing on signs that share the same meaning and all parameters except for their handshapes. Judith Yoel’s chapter takes up the entirety of Part Three: Language Attrition, with her analysis of the erosion of Russian Sign Language among immigrants to Israel.
The final part describes how educators and other “foreign”visitors can influence indigenous sign languages. Karin Hoyer delineates the effects of international sign and gesture on Albanian Sign Language. Jean Ann, Wayne H. Smith, and Chiangsheng Yu close this significant collection by assessing contact between Mainland China’s sign language and Taiwan Sign Language in the Ch’iying School in Taiwan.
The ability to search corpora to obtain information about the frequency of patterns in language is an important step forward for signed language research. Access to large datasets will expand scholarly understandings of signed language structure in ways never before possible. Through reflective discussions on the processes of creating, using, and utilizing corpora, the editors and contributors hope that other linguists will be inspired to take similar steps. The descriptions provided in this book have been written to provide a framework for those eager to develop or make use of signed language corpora for their respective signed language varieties. Creating signed language corpora is significant not only for linguistic research, but for the long-term preservation of collected texts that include the stories and histories of signed language communities.
Additional areas of focus include the use of signed language corpora in applied settings, the ethics of working with signed language communities, and the future of this methodology in research.
The ten papers in Signed Language Interpretation and Translation Research cover a range of topics, including the need for Deaf perspectives in interpretation research, discourse strategies and techniques that are unique to video relay call settings, the benefits of using sociology as a lens for examining sign language interpreting work, translating university entrance exams from written Portuguese into Libras (Brazilian Sign Language), the linguistic choices interpreters make when interpreting ASL figurative language into English, the nature of designated interpreting, and grammatical ambiguity in trilingual VRS interpreting. The research findings and insights contained here will be invaluable to scholars, students, and practitioners.
Signed Languages: Discoveries from International Research collects the thirteen freshest, most innovative papers presented at the sixth Theoretical Issues in Sign Language Research conference in 1998, the largest of its kind ever convened. Presented together in this timely compendium, the research reflects the current trend toward focusing on international signed languages that previously have been ignored, including those of Sweden, Israel, Venezuela, and northern Nigeria.
The anthology is divided into six sections: Phonology, Morphology and Syntax, Psycholinguistics, Language Acquisition, Sociolinguistics, and Poetics. In Part One, articulatory constraints and the sign language of the Netherlands are addressed. In Part Two, researchers tackle noun classifiers, nonhanded signs, and verb classes in the signed languages of Sweden, the United States, and Israel respectively. Part Three offers the study, "Functional Consequences of Modality: Spatial Coding in Working Memory for Signs."
Language acquisition is analyzed in both adult learners and deaf children in Part Four. Part Five reports on the relationship between language and society around the world, focusing particularly on the signed languages of Venezuela and northern Nigeria. Part Six considers the techniques employed in British Sign Language poetry and ASL poetry.
A study of interlocutor reference that significantly deepens our understanding of the ways in which self-other relations are linguistically mediated in social interaction, based on the analysis of Southeast Asian languages.
Terms used by speakers to refer to themselves and their interlocutors form one of the ways that language expresses, defines, and creates a field for working out social relations. Because this field of study in sociolinguistics historically has focused on Indo-European languages, it has tended to dwell on references to the addressee—for example, the choice between tu and vous when addressing someone in French. This book uses the study of Southeast Asian languages to theorize interlocutor reference more broadly, significantly deepening our understanding of the ways in which self-other relations are linguistically mediated in social interaction. As the authors explain, Southeast Asian systems exceed in complexity and nuance the well-described cases of Europe in two basic ways. First, in many languages of Southeast Asia, a speaker must select an appropriate reference form not only for other/addressee but also for self/speaker. Second, in these languages, in addition to pronouns, speakers draw upon a range of common and proper nouns including names, kin terms, and titles, in referring to themselves and the addressee. Acts of interlocutor reference, therefore, inevitably do more than simply identify the speaker and addressee; they also convey information about the proposed relation between interlocutors. Bringing together studies from both small-scale and large, urbanized communities across Mainland and Insular Southeast Asia, this is an important contribution to the regional linguistic and anthropological literature.
Thomas P. Horejes’s new book focuses on revealing critical knowledge that addresses certain social justice issues, including deafness, language, culture, and deaf education. He conveys this information through discourses about his own experiences being deaf and through his research in which he “stresses the contingency of the social” in educational institutions.
In Social Constructions of Deafness: Examining Deaf Languacultures in Education, Horejes contends that schools as social institutions play powerful and exacting roles in the creation and maintenance of social constructions such as language and culture for deaf children. He subscribes to Michael Agar’s concept of “languaculture,” defined as the inextricable relationship between language and culture in which a specific language will shape and influence culture. His approach employs other anthropological terminology as he connects his personal experience as a deaf student (emic) to academic research on deafness (etic) to bring understanding to the multidimensional aspects of his own negotiated identities.
Horejes extends his inquiry through his analysis of two kindergarten classes for deaf students, one orally oriented and the other conducted using sing language. His findings are sobering evidence of the myriad challenges educators face in defining appropriate academic, linguistic, and cultural pedagogy for deaf children in schools and other social institutions.
David Block asks the question "What is second language acquisition (SLA)?" by offering an extended critique of one of the main theoretical approaches to second language acquisition: the "Input-Interaction-Output" model. He argues that a more interdisciplinary and socially informed approach to SLA research is in order, and he draws on recent work in sociolinguistics as well as SLA research influenced by sociolinguistic and sociohistorical approaches to language and language learning. In so doing, he demonstrates that there is a need to broaden the horizons of second language acquisition. Finally, he offers some important thoughts on the future direction of SLA research, and includes an extensive bibliography.
This selection of Peter Trudgill's major works since 1988, appearing here in updated and revised form, reveals major recurring themes in his work on linguistic diversity. This book evinces his deep concern that the world's linguistic diversity is diminishing at an alarming rate. The linguistic future is likely to be very different from the past, because increased language contact among peoples will result in the creation of fewer new languages to balance the language deaths. The essays here manifest Trudgill's conviction that linguists must make every effort to study minority languages and dialects before they vanish. The book also demonstrates his sense of the obligation that linguists have to educate the public about why linguistic diversity is valuable.
The book deals with a number of specific but related topics. One area is the role of English in the world, and the nature of Standard English or Englishes. Another is language as a human issue, reflecting the author's concern that the results of sociolinguistic research should be made available to assist, wherever possible, with the solution of educational and other real-world problems. A third focus is on the problematic and interconnected relationships among nation and language and dialect, but, unlike the work of most other writers in this field, this book looks closely at the linguistic characteristics of the varieties concerned. The final major emphasis is on sociohistorical linguistics: in particular, the relationship between colonial and motherland varieties of English; dialect contact and language contact; and the sociolinguistically informed dialectology of linguistic theory, linguistic description, and the applications of linguistics. The major overall unifying theme of the book is linguistic variation and, as the diachronic outcome of linguistic variation, linguistic change.
The first volume in the new Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities series presents a rich collection of essays showcasing the breadth and depth of this exciting discipline. Topics of inquiry in the premiere volume include fingerspelling in Langue des Signes Quebecoise (LSQ) in Quebec, Canada; language used by a Navajo family with deaf children; language policy, classroom practice, and multiculturalism in deaf education; aspects of American Sign Language (ASL) discourse and of Filipino Sign Language discourse; and the nature and role of rhetorical language in Deaf social movements.
Among the noted contributors are Dominique Machabee, Arlene Blumenthal-Kelly, Jeffrey Davis, Melanie Metzger, Samuel Supalla, Barbara Gerner de Garcia, Liza B. Martinez, Kathy Jankowski, and also Ceil Lucas. Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities affords an invaluable opportunity to assess up-to-date information on sign language linguistics worldwide and its impact on policy and planning in education, interaction with spoken languages, interpreting, and the issues of empowerment.
Tamene collects data from three principal groups of people: deaf participants, teachers of deaf students, and parents of deaf children. He examines EthSL use within families, in formal and informal settings, and in various community spaces. He documents the awareness among different groups of the services available for deaf people, such as sign language interpreters and Deaf associations. He finds that members of the Deaf community show positive attitudes toward the use of EthSL and investigates the factors that impact those attitudes. His work indicates that there are still critical gaps in recognition and support for the use of EthSL, which can pose a threat to the vitality of the language. The Sociolinguistics of Ethiopian Sign Language will help to advance public understanding of EthSL and contribute to improved educational and social outcomes for the Deaf community in Ethiopia.
This book provides a clear and comprehensive overview of sociolinguistics and the pragmatics of oral communication in Spanish. Drawing on the research of foremost scholars in the field, Carmen Silva-Corvalán covers central concerns of variational sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, language change, and language contact, with special reference to Spanish in the United States.
A thoroughly revised and expanded version of Silva-Corvalán’s 1989 study, Sociolingüística: teoría y análisis, the book includes rigorous quantitative and qualitative analyses, and it documents such ongoing issues as language change in monolingual and bilingual communities, the nature of phonetic and syntactic variation, and modes of data collection and analysis. New topics include pragmatics and discourse analysis, discourse markers, and sociolinguistics and education.
Written in Spanish, Sociolingüística y pragmática del español will be welcomed by students and sociolinguistic researchers, who will find in it the ideal overview of the social aspects of language as well as a wealth of empirical data on Spanish linguistics. Complete with exercises at the end of each chapter and a convenient subject index, the book is appropriate for advanced undergraduates and graduate students of Spanish throughout the world.
This thoroughly updated second edition provides a clear and comprehensive overview of sociolinguistics and the pragmatics of oral communication in Spanish. While maintaining the same structure as the first edition, it includes revised “Ejercicios de reflexión” and new comprehension checks at the end of each chapter, along with numerous bibliographic references throughout, enhancing its use as a classroom text. Among the significant revisions are new sections on corpus linguistics and on statistical modeling programs for studying linguistic variables, an expanded chapter on the study of linguistic attitudes with special attention to Spanish in the United States, greater attention to the relation of pragmatics to sociolinguistics, including coverage of verbal politeness and forms of address, and updated information on Spanglish and on the teaching of Spanish as a heritage language.
Sonido y sentido lifts the learning of Spanish pronunciation for American English-speaking students to a new level, with support of an accompanying CD. Written in Spanish by a native speaker who is a leading figure in the field of Spanish phonology, this introduction to Spanish phonetics and phonology will improve both the pronunciation and understanding of spoken Spanish by demonstrating the specific ways in which the sound pattern of Spanish differs from English. Notable in that it explains the "why" of pronunciation with specific information on how the sounds of Spanish are organized—it also highlights the most important differences among varieties within the Spanish-speaking world. Together, the book and CD emphasize the sounds and sound combinations that are most problematic for English speakers learning Spanish.
In addition to a clear theoretical analysis of Spanish phonology, Sonido y sentido introduces the fundamental concepts of language, Spanish language, and the teaching and learning of phonetics—Spanish phonetics in particular. Utilizing the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) throughout the text to make for more precise phonetic descriptions, Guitart also discusses the relation between both the physical and psychological aspects of pronunciation.
Sonido y sentido contains exercises, both transcription and pronunciation drills, and each chapter concludes with a section, "Para pensar," which tests comprehension of the concepts presented. Answers to the "Para pensar" exercises appear in a separate appendix. A glossary of technical terms, a subject index, and a basic bibliography of Spanish phonetics and phonology round out this fresh and rewarding contribution to learning the Spanish language.
The book includes useful sections on quantifiers and adverbial and deictic particles, often inadequately treated in reference grammars. A section on auxiliary verbs and well-documented information on voice, aspect, and other features of verbal inflection provide readers with useful data for particular lines of linguistic inquiry. Each grammatical point is illustrated by example sentences distinguished by their naturalness and cultural relevance. At the end of the book, a Yaqui text provides a sample of connected sentences in a natural context.
Sonora Yaqui Language Structures is a valuable source not only for research on this language family but also for anthropological studies of the Arizona-Sonora cultural region. In addition, it documents an indigenous language for future generations of Yaqui speakers.
What happens when language wars are not about hurling insults or quibbling over meanings, but are waged in the physical sounds and shapes of language itself?
Native and foreign speakers, mother tongues and national languages, have jostled for distinction throughout the modern period. The fight for global dominance between the English and Chinese languages opens into historical battles over the control of the medium through standardization, technology, bilingualism, pronunciation, and literature in the Sinophone world. Encounters between global languages, as well as the internal tensions between Mandarin and other Chinese dialects, present a dynamic, interconnected picture of languages on the move.
In Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora, Jing Tsu explores the new global language trade, arguing that it aims at more sophisticated ways of exerting influence besides simply wielding knuckles of power. Through an analysis of the different relationships between language standardization, technologies of writing, and modern Chinese literature around the world from the nineteenth century to the present, this study transforms how we understand the power of language in migration and how that is changing the terms of cultural dominance. Drawing from an unusual array of archival sources, this study cuts across the usual China-West divide and puts its finger on the pulse of a pending supranational world under “literary governance.”
Avant-garde writers and artists of the twentieth century radically reconceived poetic language, appropriating scientific theories and techniques as they turned their attention to the physical process of spoken language. This modernist “sound writing” focused on the bodily production of speech, which it rendered in poetic, legible, graphic form.
Modernist sound writing aims to capture the acoustic phenomenon of vocal articulation by graphic means. Tobias Wilke considers sound writing from its inception in nineteenth-century disciplines like physiology and experimental phonetics, following its role in the aesthetic practices of the interwar avant-garde and through to its reemergence in the postwar period. These projects work with the possibility of crossing over from the audible to the visible, from speech to notation, from body to trace. Employing various techniques and concepts, this search for new possibilities played a central role in the transformation of poetry into a site of radical linguistic experimentation. Considering the works of writers and artists—including Raoul Hausmann, Kurt Schwitters, Viktor Shklovsky, Hugo Ball, Charles Olson, and Marshall McLuhan—Wilke offers a fresh look at the history of the twentieth-century avant-garde.
This book fills the crucial need for a single volume that gives broad coverage and synthesizes findings for both the general reader and the specialist. This collection of twenty-two essays from fifteen well-known scholars presents linguistic research on the indigenous languages of South America, surveying past research, providing data and analysis gathered from past and current research, and suggesting prospects for future investigation.
Of interest not only to linguists but also to anthropologists, historians, and geographers, South American Indian Languages offers a wide perspective, both temporal and regional, on an area noted for its enormous linguistic diversity and for the lack of knowledge of its indigenous languages. An invaluable source book and reference tool, its appearance is especially timely when exploitation of the rich natural resources in a number of areas in South America must surely result in the demise and/or acculturation of some indigenous groups.
These twelve original papers extend the mental-spaces framework and demonstrate its utility in solving deep problems in linguistics and discourse theory. Investigating the ties between mental constructs, they analyze a wide range of phenomena, including analogical counterfactuals; the metaphor system for conceptualizing the self; abstract change expressions in Japanese; mood in Spanish; deictic expressions; copular sentences in Japanese; conditional constructions; and reference in American Sign Language.
The ground-breaking research presented in this volume will be of interest to linguists and cognitive scientists.
The contributors are Claudia Brugman, Gilles Fauconnier, George Lakoff, Yo Matsumoto, Errapel Mejias-Bikandi, Laura A. Michaelis, Gisela Redeker, Jo Rubba, Shigeru Sakahara, Jose Sanders, Eve Sweetser, and Karen van Hoek.
There is growing interest in heritage language learners—individuals who have a personal or familial connection to a nonmajority language. Spanish learners represent the largest segment of this population in the United States.
In this comprehensive volume, experts offer an interdisciplinary overview of research on Spanish as a heritage language in the United States. They also address the central role of education within the field. Contributors offer a wealth of resources for teachers while proposing future directions for scholarship.
This collection is the first to examine the effects of bilingualism and multilingualism on the development of dialectal varieties of Spanish in Africa, America, Asia and Europe. Nineteen essays investigate a variety of complex situations of contact between Spanish and typologically different languages, including Basque, Bantu languages, English, and Quechua. The overall picture that evolves clearly indicates that although influence from the contact languages may lead to different dialects, the core grammar of Spanish remains intact.
Silva-Corvalán's volume makes an important contribution both to sociolinguistics in general, and to Spanish linguistics in particular. The contributors address theoretical and empirical issues that advance our knowledge of what is a possible linguistic change, how languages change, and how changes spread in society in situations of intensive bilingualism and language contact, a situation that appears to be the norm rather than the exception in the world.
This encyclopedic text focuses on the nature of Hispanic dialects, the spread of Spanish, and contemporary Spanish dialects in the Americas.
Fifteen research linguists discuss the varieties of Spanish spoken in California, Iowa, Indiana, Louisiana, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, and Texas. They variously address language maintenance, syntactic variation, lexicography, language use and language teaching, and include studies on socioeconomic, political, and cultural aspects of language in the Spanish-speaking communities in the United States.
Spanish Phonology offers a comprehensive analysis of a variety of crucial issues in the phonology and morphophonology of various dialects of Spanish including syllable types, syllabification algorithms, syllable repair mechanisms, syllable mergers, nasal assimilation, obstruent vocalization and spirantization, obstruent neutralization, diphthongs and hiatuses, glide formation, onset strengthening, aspiration, rhotics, velarization, plural formation, word classes, and diminutives.
Written from the perspective of optimality theory and with syllabic structure at its core, this volume highlights recent advances in Spanish phonology.
The book includes margin notes to highlight key points and a glossary of constraints. Each chapter includes study questions, lists of the most influential sources for each chapter, and topics for further research. Spanish Phonology is intended as core reading for advanced phonology courses in Spanish linguistics, general linguistics, and related areas such as bilingualism, language variation, language acquisition, and speech and hearing.
Spanish Phonology and Morphology serves as an introduction to both the formal study of Spanish phonology and the framework of generative phonology.
Spanish Second Language Acquisition provides a panoramic overview of previous studies on the acquisition of Spanish as a second or foreign language, the theoretical approaches used in these studies, and the effects of various pedagogical approaches on the development of Spanish interlanguage systems. Barbara Lafford and Rafael Salaberry have compiled the first volume to provide a comprehensive critical overview of the research done and data compiled on how adults acquire Spanish as a second language. Major scholars in the field of SLA have contributed chapters having to do with a wide range of "products" (phonology, tense/aspect, subjunctive, clitics, lexicon, discourse/pragmatics) and "processes" (generative, cognitive and sociocultural theories) involved in the acquisition process-concluding with a discussion of the effects of instruction on Spanish interlanguage development.
While being an invaluable reference tool for undergraduate and graduate programs that focus on the acquisition of Spanish as a second language, due to the extraordinary range of the review research on theoretical and methodological issues, this is also an extremely useful volume for second language theoreticians and practitioners involved in all aspects of the pedagogy of other second languages. It is the editors' desire that students, teachers, program administrators and scholars alike will benefit from the insights that the contributors bring to the myriad issues that language professionals confront.
An invaluable text in language and linguistics because it has a unique scope: a one-volume description of the Spanish language and its differences from English, and ranges from pronunciation and grammar to word meaning, language use, and social and dialectical variation. Designed for survey courses in Spanish linguistics with technical concepts explained in context for beginners in the field, Spanish/English Contrasts brings out the ways in which insights into the two languages have evolved as scholars have built on the work and research of others in the field. A bilingual glossary of linguistic terms is provided to facilitate discussion in either language.
This second edition is thoroughly updated to incorporate insights and issues that have come to the fore from the explosion of research in the past twenty-five years in all of the areas covered by the book. It includes an expanded bibliography and index, and adds new exercises for student application and class discussion. Its approach remains broadly based however, in order to accommodate a range of areas and data rather than focusing narrowly on one single theory or research area, and it continues to emphasize implications for language teaching, translation, and other practical applications.
"This is a most interesting and thought-provoking book. . . . Peters maintains that communication is ultimately unthinkable apart from the task of establishing a kingdom in which people can live together peacefully. Given our condition as mortals, communication remains not primarily a problem of technology, but of power, ethics and art." —Antony Anderson, New Scientist
"Guaranteed to alter your thinking about communication. . . . Original, erudite, and beautifully written, this book is a gem." —Kirkus Reviews
"Peters writes to reclaim the notion of authenticity in a media-saturated world. It's this ultimate concern that renders his book a brave, colorful exploration of the hydra-headed problems presented by a rapid-fire popular culture." —Publishers Weekly
What we have here is a failure-to-communicate book. Funny thing is, it communicates beautifully. . . . Speaking Into the Air delivers what superb serious books always do-hours of intellectual challenge as one absorbs the gradually unfolding vision of an erudite, creative author." —Carlin Romano, Philadelphia Inquirer
Thomas E. Nunnally’s fascinating volume presents essays by linguists who examine with affection and curiosity the speech varieties occurring both past and present across Alabama. Taken together, the accounts in this volume offer an engaging view of the major features that characterize Alabama’s unique brand of southern English.
Written in an accessible manner for general readers and scholars alike, Speaking of Alabama includes such subjects as the special linguistic features of the Southern drawl, the “phonetic divide” between north and south Alabama, “code-switching” by African American speakers in Alabama, pejorative attitudes by Alabama speakers toward their own native speech, the influence of foreign languages on Alabama speech to the vibrant history and continuing influence of non-English languages in the state, as well as ongoing changes in Alabama’s dialects.
Adding to these studies is a foreword by Walt Wolfram and an afterword by Michael B. Montgomery, both renowned experts in southern English, which place both the methodologies and the findings of the volume into their larger contexts and point researchers to needed work ahead in Alabama, the South, and beyond. The volume also contains a number of useful appendices, including a guide to the sounds of Southern English, a glossary of linguistic terms, and online sources for further study.
Language, as presented in this collection, is never abstract but always examined in the context of its speakers’ day-to-day lives, the driving force for their communication needs and choices. Whether specialist or general reader, Alabamian or non-Alabamian, all readers will come away from these accounts with a deepened understanding of how language functions between individuals, within communities, and across regions, and will gain a new respect for the driving forces behind language variation and language change.
An essential introduction to the use and misuse of language within the criminal justice system, updated for a new generation.
Does everyone understand the Miranda warning? Why do people confess to a crime they did not commit? Can linguistic experts identify who wrote an anonymous threatening letter? Since its first publication, Speaking of Crime has been answering these questions. Introducing major topics and controversies at the intersection of language and law, Lawrence M. Solan, Peter M. Tiersma, and Tammy Gales apply multidisciplinary insights to examine the complex role of language within the US justice system.
The second edition features in-depth discussions of recent cases, new legislation, and innovative research advances, and includes a new chapter on who interprets the laws governing linguistic contexts. Thoroughly updated and approachable, Speaking of Crime is a state-of-the-art survey that will be useful to scholars, students, and practitioners throughout the criminal justice system.
Puns, jokes, proverbs, riddles, play languages, verbal dueling, parallelism, metaphor, grammatical stretching and manipulation in poetry and song— people around the world enjoy these forms of speech play and verbal artistry which form an intrinsic part of the fabric of their lives. Verbal playfulness is not a frivolous pursuit. Often indicative of people's deepest values and worldview, speech play is a significant site of intersection among language, culture, society, and individual expression.
In this book, Joel Sherzer examines many kinds of speech play from places as diverse as the United States, France, Italy, Bali, and Latin America to offer the first full-scale study of speech play and verbal art. He brings together various speech-play forms and processes and shows what they have in common and how they overlap. He also demonstrates that speech play explores and indeed flirts with the boundaries of the socially, culturally, and linguistically possible and appropriate, thus making it relevant for anthropological and linguistic theory and practice, as well as for folklore and literary criticism.
In this spirited book, Pavel shows that structuralism's flawed use of linguistic theory has rendered hollow the philosophical core of a whole generation of work in the human sciences.
Swahili was once an obscure dialect of an East African Bantu language. Today more than one hundred million people use it: Swahili is to eastern and central Africa what English is to the world. From its embrace in the 1960s by the black freedom movement in the United States to its adoption in 2004 as the African Union’s official language, Swahili has become a truly international language. How this came about and why, of all African languages, it happened only to Swahili is the story that John M. Mugane sets out to explore.
The remarkable adaptability of Swahili has allowed Africans and others to tailor the language to their needs, extending its influence far beyond its place of origin. Its symbolic as well as its practical power has evolved from its status as a language of contact among diverse cultures, even as it embodies the history of communities in eastern and central Africa and throughout the Indian Ocean world.
The Story of Swahili calls for a reevaluation of the widespread assumption that cultural superiority, military conquest, and economic dominance determine a language’s prosperity. This sweeping history gives a vibrant, living language its due, highlighting its nimbleness from its beginnings to its place today in the fast-changing world of global communication.
In this intriguing book, renowned sociolinguistics experts explore the importance of discourse analysis, a process that examines patterns of language to understand how users build cooperative understanding in dialogues. It presents discourse analyses of sign languages native to Bali, Italy, England, and the United States.
Studies of internal context review the use of space in ASL to discuss space, how space in BSL is used to “package” complex narrative tasks, how signers choose linguistic tools to structure storytelling, and how affect, emphasis, and comment are added in text telephone conversations. Inquiries into external contexts observe the integration of deaf people and sign language into language communities in Bali, and the language mixing that occurs between deaf parents and their hearing children.
Both external and internal contexts are viewed together, first in an examination of applying internal ASL text styles to teaching written English to Deaf students and then in a consideration of the language choices of interpreters who must shift footing to manage the “interpreter’s paradox.” Storytelling and Conversation casts new light on discourse analysis, which will make it a welcome addition to the sociolinguistics canon.
This book takes a detailed look at two differing complex predicates in the South Asian language Urdu. The Urdu permissive in particular brings into focus the problem of the syntax-semantics mismatch. An examination of the syntactic properties of this complex predicate shows that it is formed by the combination of two semantic heads, but that this combination is not mirrored in the syntax in terms of any kind of syntactic or lexical incorporation.
With an emphasis on discourse function throughout, students are never expected to rely on lists of unrelated, constructed example sentences. Rather, when major points of grammar are presented, the structures are illustrated with rich, "real world" contexts excerpted from literature (mostly American), including novels, short stories, poems, essays, and drama. Exercises in the companion workbook are likewise based on naturally occurring stretches of discourse.
The editors and fourteen other research linguists discuss—in English and in Spanish—the African influence on Caribbean phonology, dominant sociolinguistic attitudes in Puerto Rico, and historico-legal aspects of bilingualism in colonial Hispanic America.
Translated by Marvin Taylor and Anatoly Liberman
N. S. Trubetzkoy (1890–1939) is generally celebrated today as the creator of the science of phonology. While his monumental Grundzüge der Phonologie was published posthumously and contains a summary of Trubetzkoy’s late views on the linguistic function of speech sounds, there has, until now, been no practical way to trace the development of his thought or to clarify the conclusions appearing in that later work. With the publication of Studies in General Linguistics and Language Structure, not only will linguists have that opportunity, but a collection of Trubetzkoy’s work will appear in English for the first time.
Translated from the French, German, and Russian originals, these articles and letters present Trubetzkoy’s work in general and on Indo-European linguistics. The correspondence reprinted here, also for the first time in English, is between Trubetzkoy and Roman Jakobson. The resulting collection offers a view of the evolution of Trubetzkoy’s ideas on phonology, the logic in laws of linguistic geography and relative chronology, and the breadth of his involvement with Caucasian phonology and the Finno-Ugric languages.
A valuable resource, this volume will make Trubetzkoy’s work available to a larger audience as it sheds light on problems that remain at the center of contemporary linguistics.
"Buy Williams's book. And dig out from storage your dog-eared old copy of The Elements of Style. Set them side by side on your reference shelf."—Barbara Walraff, Atlantic
"Let newcoming writers discover this, and let their teachers and readers rejoice. It is a practical, disciplined text that is also a pleasure to read."—Christian Century
"An excellent book....It provides a sensible, well-balanced approach, featuring prescriptions that work."—Donald Karzenski, Journal of Business Communication
"Intensive fitness training for the expressive mind."—Booklist
Much recent scholarship has sought to identify the linguistic and social factors that favor the expression or omission of subject pronouns in Spanish. This volume brings together leading experts on the topic of language variation in Spanish to provide a panoramic view of research trends, develop probabilistic models of grammar, and investigate the impact of language contact on pronoun expression.
The book consists of three sections. The first studies the distributional patterns and conditioning forces on subject pronoun expression in four monolingual varieties—Dominican, Colombian, Mexican, and Peninsular—and makes cross-dialectal comparisons. In the second section, experts explore Spanish in contact with English, Maya, Catalan, and Portuguese to determine the extent to which each language influences this syntactic variable. The final section examines the acquisition of variable subject pronoun expression among monolingual and bilingual children as well as adult second language learners.
"[A] superb collection of studies that substantially increases our understanding, not only of variation in subject personal pronouns, but also of variable morphosyntactic processes generally.... clearly relevant to all students and scholars who wish to understand the complexities of linguistic variation and dialect contact." -- Robert Bayley, professor of linguistics, University of California, Davis
"Students and scholars will find that this volume is an essential reference in the field of Spanish language variation. If the study of final /s/ has led Spanish sociophonetics, the study of subject pronouns stars in sociogrammar. This volume presents a 3D analysis of how subject pronouns are used and acquired in Spanish. This comprehensive volume is not only of interest to those concerned with Spanish grammar, but also to anyone interested in pro-drop languages. The vision of Carvalho, Orozco and Shin has harmonized an excellent collective volume." -- Francisco Moreno-Fernández, professor of Hispanic linguistics. University of Alcala (Spain) and Instituto Cervantes at Harvard University.
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"If you seek innovative, theoretically and empirically driven research into syntactic variation, open this book and read on. Here a variationist focus on alternating sound and silence, something and nothing, or subject pronouns and nulls generates striking insights into the nature of Spanish and those who speak and learn it." -- Richard Cameron,, University of Illinois at Chicago
The sixteen-volume Handbook of Middle American Indians, completed in 1976, has been acclaimed the world over as the single most valuable resource ever produced for those involved in the study of Mesoamerica. When it was determined in 1978 that the Handbook should be updated periodically, well-known cultural anthropologist Victoria Reifler Bricker was selected to be general editor.
This second volume of the Supplement is devoted to Mesoamerican languages. It differs in both scope and content from its forerunner, Volume 5 of the Handbook of Middle American Indians: Linguistics, which presents a general survey of Middle American linguistics and descriptions of Classical Nahuatl, Yucatec, Quiche, Popoluca, Zapotec, Mazatec, Pame, and Chontal de Oaxaca.
The aim of the present volume is to provide detailed sketches of five additional languages: Mixe, Chichimeco Jonaz, Choltí, Tarascan, and Huastec. All the grammatical sketches deal with the phonology, morphology, and syntax of the languages treated; most cover discourse as well. Taken together, these new essays represent a substantial enrichment of the earlier Handbook volume on linguistics. Alone, the Supplement stands as an invaluable reference guide for all who are interested in learning about these important and heretofore poorly treated languages of Middle America.
Surface Structure provides a complete and up-to-date exposition of a major variant of the Chomskian theory of language: the so-called Revised Extended Standard Theory. Robert Fiengo presents the theory in a clear and succinct way and shows how many of the leading ideas in the theory can be deepened and strengthened. It is Fiengo's central thesis that there is a syntactic level—surface structure—which constitutes the interface between syntactic, lexical, morphological and semantic components of the grammar. This thesis is defended across a broad range of problems in English grammar, resulting in a significant increase in the empirical coverage of the theory.
Although not a polemical work, Fiengo's book addresses many of the current controversies in linguistics and presents a rationale for guiding choices among competing theories. At a time when linguistic theories appear to be diverging in an explosive fashion, this lucid and current discussion is precisely what is needed.
In the last three decades the field of endangered and minority languages has evolved rapidly, moving from the initial dire warnings of linguists to a swift increase in the number of organizations, funding programs, and community-based efforts dedicated to documentation, maintenance, and revitalization. Sustaining Linguistic Diversity brings together cutting-edge theoretical and empirical work from leading researchers and practitioners in the field. Together, these contributions provide a state-of-the-art overview of current work in defining, documenting, and developing the world's smaller languages and language varieties.
The book begins by grappling with how we define endangerment—how languages and language varieties are best classified, what the implications of such classifications are, and who should have the final say in making them. The contributors then turn to the documentation and description of endangered languages and focus on best practices, methods and goals in documentation, and on current field reports from around the globe. The latter part of the book analyzes current practices in developing endangered languages and dialects and particular language revitalization efforts and outcomes in specific locations. Concluding with critical calls from leading researchers in the field to consider the human lives at stake, Sustaining Linguistic Diversity reminds scholars, researchers, practitioners, and educators that linguistic diversity can only be sustained in a world where diversity in all its forms is valued.
Part 1 offers an overview of the developmental data pertaining to a range of syntactic phenomena, including word order, subject drop, embedded clauses, wh-questions, inversion, relative clauses, passives, and anaphora. Part 2 considers the various theories that have been advanced to explain the facts of development as well as the learnability problem, reporting on work in the mainstream formalist framework but also considering the results of alternative approaches.
Covering a wide range of perspectives in the modern study of syntactic development, this book is an invaluable reference for specialists in the field of language acquisition and provides an excellent introduction to the acquisition of syntax for students and researchers in psychology, linguistics, and cognitive science.
And now available from the author! Answers to Selected Exercises.
Instructors using James D. McCawley's The Syntactic Phenomena of English, Second Edition may request a complimentary copy of Answers to Selected Exercises in The Syntactic Phenomena of English by writing on their department's letterhead to the author, James D. McCawley, Department of Linguistics, 1010 E. 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637. [Note: This material is available only from the author and is not available from the University of Chicago Press.]
And now available from the author! Answers to Selected Exercises.
Instructors using James D. McCawley's The Syntactic Phenomena of English, Second Edition may request a complimentary copy of Answers to Selected Exercises in The Syntactic Phenomena of English by writing on their department's letterhead to the author, James D. McCawley, Department of Linguistics, 1010 E. 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637. [Note: This material is available only from the author and is not available from the University of Chicago Press.]
And now available from the author! Answers to Selected Exercises.
Instructors using James D. McCawley's The Syntactic Phenomena of English, Second Edition may request a complimentary copy of Answers to Selected Exercises in The Syntactic Phenomena of English by writing on their department's letterhead to the author, James D. McCawley, Department of Linguistics, 1010 E. 59th Street, Chicago, IL 60637. [Note: This material is available only from the author and is not available from the University of Chicago Press.]
The book covers the core areas of English syntax from the last quarter century, including complementation, control, "raising constructions," passives, the auxiliary system, and the analysis of long distance dependency constructions. Syntactic Theory's step-by-step introduction to a consistent grammar in these core areas is complemented by extensive problem sets drawing from a variety of languages.
The book's theoretical perspective is presented in the context of current models of language processing, and the practical value of the constraint-based, lexicalist grammatical architecture proposed has already been demonstrated in computer language processing applications. This thoroughly reworked second edition includes revised and extended problem sets, updated analyses, additional examples, and more detailed exposition throughout.
Praise for the first edition:
"Syntactic Theory sets a new standard for introductory syntax volumes that all future books should be measured against."—Gert Webelhuth, Journal of Linguistics
The verb is, in any language, the motor of all communication: no verb, no action. In Greek, verb forms change not only with person, number, tense, and voice, but in four possible moods as well. Available now in a special reprint for the North American market, The Syntax and Semantics of the Verb in Classical Greek is an incomparable resource to students and scholars charged with the considerable task of untangling the Greek language’s many complexities. With clear, concise instruction, Albert Rijksbaron shows how the various verb forms contribute to the richness of the Greek literature as we know it, in this essential guide for both novices and experienced practitioners.
“[This study] belongs in the library of any Hellenist and any linguist interested in ancient Greek.”—Classics Newsletter (Anzeiger für die Altertumswissenschaft)
“Every use is described with concision and clarity.”—Kratylos
“The book offers an example of how the empirical thoroughness of traditional Classical scholarship can be brought into contact with general linguistic theory.”—Language
Syntax and Speech is the first extensive examination of the relation between sentence structure and the organization of speech. Combining the methods of cognitive psychology, linguistics, and acoustics, the Coopers show that a surprising amount of syntactic information is conveyed by the subtle ways a speaker times the delivery of a sentence.
Syntax and Speech provides abundant experimental evidence that the syntactic boundaries of surface phrase structure have strong effects on the timing of the speech signal.
The Coopers develop a detailed theory of structural representation to account for the location of pauses and elongated speech sounds. This work bears importantly both upon psychological theories of speech production and linguistic theories of sentence structure. Moreover, their methods of examining speech provide an admirable model of how complex human behavior can be successfully analyzed. The results, which can be applied to language pathology and communications engineering and have clear parallels in other expressive behaviors such as American Sign Language, music, and animal communication, provide the starting point for many new lines of research in cognitive science.
All together, the series will include seven volumes to be published between 2012 and 2016, each an essential addition to the library of any linguist working with Dutch.
Syntax of Dutch: Verbs and Verb Phrases consists of three volumes. Volume 1 opens with a general introduction to verbs, including a review of various verb classifications and discussions on inflection, tense, mood, modality and aspect. This is followed by a comprehensive discussion of complementation (argument structure and verb frame alternations). Volume 2 continues the discussion of complementation, but is more specifically focused on clausal complements: the reader will find detailed discussions of finite and infinitival argument clauses, complex verb constructions and verb clustering. Volume 3 concludes with a description of adverbial modification and the overall structure of clauses in relation to, e.g., word order (verb placement, wh-movement. extraposition phenomena, scrambling, etc.).
This book is the first comparative study of the syntax of Arabic dialects, based on natural language data recorded in Morocco, Egypt, Syria, and Kuwait. These four dialect regions are geographically diverse and representative of four distinct dialect groups.
Kristen E. Brustad has adopted an analytical approach that is both functional and descriptive, combining insights from discourse analysis, language typology, and pragmatics—the first time such an approach has been used in the study of spoken Arabic syntax. An appendix includes sample texts from her data.
Brustad's work provides the most nuanced description available to date of spoken Arabic syntax, widens the theoretical base of Arabic linguistics, and gives both scholars and students of Arabic tools for greater cross-dialect comprehension.
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