Three centuries of English idioms—their unusual origins and unexpected interpretations
To pay through the nose. Raining cats and dogs. By hook or by crook. Curry favor. Drink like a fish. Eat crow. We hear such phrases every day, but this book is the first truly all-encompassing etymological guide to both their meanings and origins. Spanning more than three centuries, Take My Word for It is a fascinating, one-of-a-kind window into the surprisingly short history of idioms in English. Widely known for his studies of word origins, Anatoly Liberman explains more than one thousand idioms, both popular and obscure, occurring in both American and British standard English and including many regional expressions.
The origins, and even the precise meaning, of most idioms are often obscure and lost in history. Based on a critical analysis of countless conjectures, with exact, in-depth references (rare in the literature on the subject), Take My Word for It provides not only a large corpus of idiomatic phrases but also a vast bibliography. Detailed indexes and a thesaurus make the content accessible at a glance, and Liberman’s introduction and conclusion add historical dimensions. The result of decades of research by a leading authority, this book is both instructive and absorbing for scholars and general readers, who won’t find another resource as comparable in scope or based on data even remotely as exhaustive.
Spoken by eighty million people in South Asia and a diaspora that stretches across the globe, Tamil is one of the great world languages, and one of the few ancient languages that survives as a mother tongue for so many speakers. David Shulman presents a comprehensive cultural history of Tamil—language, literature, and civilization—emphasizing how Tamil speakers and poets have understood the unique features of their language over its long history. Impetuous, musical, whimsical, in constant flux, Tamil is a living entity, and this is its biography.
Two stories animate Shulman’s narrative. The first concerns the evolution of Tamil’s distinctive modes of speaking, thinking, and singing. The second describes Tamil’s major expressive themes, the stunning poems of love and war known as Sangam poetry, and Tamil’s influence as a shaping force within Hinduism. Shulman tracks Tamil from its earliest traces at the end of the first millennium BCE through the classical period, 850 to 1200 CE, when Tamil-speaking rulers held sway over southern India, and into late-medieval and modern times, including the deeply contentious politics that overshadow Tamil today.
Tamil is more than a language, Shulman says. It is a body of knowledge, much of it intrinsic to an ancient culture and sensibility. “Tamil” can mean both “knowing how to love”—in the manner of classical love poetry—and “being a civilized person.” It is thus a kind of grammar, not merely of the language in its spoken and written forms but of the creative potential of its speakers.
Task-based language instruction has proven to be highly effective, but surprisingly underutilized. Theory can only go so far and hands-on experience can greatly speed and enhance the learning of a second language. Nineteen talented instructors who have successfully implemented task-based programs explain the principles behind the programs, discuss how problems were resolved, and share details on class activities and program design. Each chapter takes the reader through the different stages in designing and setting up such programs, adjusting them, and appraising and testing them in normal classroom conditions. This book covers TBI syllabus and program design and is based on actual classroom experience. Any one of the courses or programs discussed can serve as models for others. Many of the contributors are highly respected practitioners who are presenting their programs for the first time, while others are regular participants in today's ongoing dialogue about teaching methods.
Full of concrete, adaptable models of task-based language teaching drawn from a number of countries and eleven different languages—including Arabic, Chinese, Czech, English, French, German, Korean, Spanish, and Ukrainian—Task-Based Instruction in Foreign Language Education presents proven, real-world, practical courses and programs; and includes web-based activities. It demonstrates useful and practical ways to engage students far beyond what can be learned from reading textbook dialogue. TBI involves the student directly with the language being taught via cognitively engaging activities that reflect authentic and purposeful use of language, resulting in language-learning experiences that are pleasurable and effective.
For all instructors seeking to help their learners enhance their understanding and grasp of the foreign language they are learning, Task-Based Instruction in Foreign Language Education is a rich and rewarding hands-on guide to effective and transformative learning.
José Luis Melena Jiménez is a peerless scholar of editing the texts written in the Mycenaean writing system of the late second millennium BCE and explicating their linguistic and “historical” contents.
This volume takes up problems of script and language representation and textual interpretation, ranging from the use of punctuation markers and numbers in the Linear B tablets and the values of specific signs, to personal names and place names reflecting the ethnic composition of Mycenaean society and the dialects spoken during the proto-Homeric period of the late Bronze Age. New insights are offered into Mycenaean furniture, war chariots, pictorial vases, land cultivation, arboriculture, and shrine areas. Other papers discuss wealth finance, prestige goods, the ideology of obligatory payment, long-puzzling tax impositions, and the inevitable collapse of the palatial economic and political systems.
Using debate to develop advanced competency in a second language is a method that is finding increased interest among instructors and students alike, whether in synchronous online teaching or the individual classroom. Through debate, students learn how to make hypotheses, support their conclusions with evidence, and deploy the rhetoric of persuasion in the target language. Though this method provides an exciting pedagogy for moving students from the advanced to the superior level, there is a paucity of materials available for instructors who wish to plan a curriculum focused on debate. Teaching Advanced Language Skills through Global Debate: Theory and Practice provides teachers with both the theoretical underpinnings for using debate in the foreign language classroom as well as practical advice for developing reading, listening, writing, and speaking skills through debate. It discusses task-based language learning and helps instructors design debate-related tasks for the classroom.
Teaching Advanced Language Skills through Global Debate will be useful for any instructor working at the advanced level, and particularly for those training future language instructors. One of the new digital short publications available through Georgetown University Press, it is an ideal complement to the press’s new titles on mastering languages through global debate.
Georgetown Digital Shorts—longer than an article, shorter than a book—deliver timely works of peer-reviewed scholarship in a fast-paced, agile environment. They present new ideas and original texts that are easily and widely available to students, scholars, libraries, and general readers.
This guide clearly and succinctly presents the basic tenets of teaching foreign languages specifically for Arabic teachers. Consolidating findings from second language acquisition (SLA) research and applied linguistics, it covers designing curricula, theory and methods, goals, testing, and research, and intersperses practical information with background literature in order to help teachers improve their teaching of Arabic as a foreign language (TAFL).
Karin C. Ryding, a well-regarded scholar of Arabic linguistics and former president of the American Association of Teachers of Arabic, frames the discussion with SLA literature and suggests practical and effective ways of helping students learn. Ryding discusses issues at the core of Arabic teaching effectiveness and the achievement of communicative competence, such as the teaching of pronunciation, speaking, reading, listening, and writing; teaching mixed-level classes; creative classroom organization; corrective feedback; and use of activities and exercises, with plenty of examples from Arabic and tips for teachers. She also covers materials development and proficiency testing, providing study questions and recommended readings for each chapter.
This guide, which can be used as a textbook, is the first of its kind aimed specifically at TAFL, and should be of interest to Arabic instructors-in-training, academics, graduate students, linguists, department chairs, language coordinators, and teacher trainers. It also serves as a resource for teachers of other less commonly taught languages (LCTLs), who struggle with similar issues.
Narratives are fundamental to our lives: we dream, plan, complain, endorse, entertain, teach, learn, and reminisce through telling stories. They provide hopes, enhance or mitigate disappointments, challenge or support moral order and test out theories of the world at both personal and communal levels. It is because of this deep embedding of narrative in everyday life that its study has become a wide research field including disciplines as diverse as linguistics, literary theory, folklore, clinical psychology, cognitive and developmental psychology, anthropology, sociology, and history.
In Telling Stories leading scholars illustrate how narratives build bridges among language, identity, interaction, society, and culture; and they investigate various settings such as therapeutic and medical encounters, educational environments, politics, media, marketing, and public relations. They analyze a variety of topics from the narrative construction of self and identity to the telling of stories in different media and the roles that small and big life stories play in everyday social interactions and institutions. These new reflections on the theory and analysis of narrative offer the latest tools to researchers in the fields of discourse analysis and sociolinguistics.
In this pathfinding study, Suzanne Fleischman brings together theory and methodology from various quarters to shed important new light on the linguistic structure of narrative, a primary and universal device for translating our experiences into language.
Fleischman sees linguistics as laying the foundation for all narratological study, since it offers insight into how narratives are constructed in their most primary context: everyday speech. She uses a linguistic model designed for "natural" narrative to explicate the organizational structure of "artificial" narrative texts, primarily from the Middle Ages and the postmodern period, whose seemingly idiosyncratic use of tenses has long perplexed those who study them. Fleischman develops a functional theory of tense and aspect in narrative that accounts for the wide variety of functions—pragmatic as well as grammatical—that these two categories of grammar are called upon to perform in the linguistic economy of a narration.
With authority and sensitivity Plotkin traces the close relationship between Hopkins’s poetry and the theories of language suggested in his Journals and expounded by Victorian philologists such as Max Müller and George Marsh.
Plotkin seeks to determine what changed Hopkins’s perception of language between the writing of such early poems as "The Habit of Perfection" and "Nondum" (1866) and his creation of The Wreck of the Deutschland (1875–76). Did the language of the ode, and of Hopkins’s mature poetry generally, arise as spontaneously as it appears to have done, or does it have a traceable genesis in the ways in which language as a whole was conceived and studied in mid-century England? In answer, Plotkin fixes the development of Hopkins’s singular poetic language in the philological context of his time.
If one is to understand Hopkins’s writings and poetic language in the context in which they developed rather than in the terms of a present-day theory of history or textuality, then that movement in all of its complexity must be considered. Hopkins "translates" into the language of poetry patterns and categories common to Victorian language study.
The vocabulary of the past is always intriguing, especially when it is no longer used in modern English. Many of the words and phrases that were popular in Victorian England may sound foreign today, but looking to original sources and texts can yield fascinating insight, especially when we see how vocabulary was pilloried by the satirists of the day.
In That’s the Ticket for Soup!, the renowned language expert David Crystal returns to the pages of Punch magazine, England’s widely read satirical publication. Crystal has pored through the pages of Punch between its first issue in 1841 and the death of Queen Victoria in 1901 and extracted the articles and cartoons that poked fun at the jargon of the day. Here we have Victorian high and low society, with its fashionable and unfashionable slang, its class awareness on display in the vocabulary of steam engines, motor cars, and other products of the Industrial Revolution. Then, as now, people had strong feelings about the flood of new words entering English. Swearing, new street names, and the many borrowings from French provoked continual irritation and mockery, as did the Americanisms increasingly encountered in the British press. In addition to these entertaining examples, Crystal includes commentary on the context of the times and informative glossaries. This original and amusing collection reveals how many present-day feelings about words can be traced to the satire of a century ago.
In Theory and Evidence in Semantics, editors Erhard W. Hinrichs and John Nerbonne present a series of state-of-the-art papers that investigate the interface of natural language semantics with other modules of grammar—such as morphology, syntax, and pragmatics—and pursue applications of semantic theory in computational linguistics. Written by some of the leading scholars in the field, and strongly influenced by the seminal work of David R. Dowty in model-theoretical semantics, the papers provide novel accounts of highly complex sets of semantic phenomena, including anaphora, coordination, ellipsis, interrogatives, and negative and collective predicates, as well as tense and aspect.
The Theory of German Word Order from the Renaissance to the Present was first published in 1981. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
The uniquely systematic character of German word order and sentence structure has long been recognized as an important feature of the language and of its literary uses. This book is the first comprehensive survey of the way theorists and stylists have interpreted these features through the centuries. Aldo Scaglione contends that the story of this theoretical awareness is part of the emerging cultural and literary consciousness of the German nation, as well as a testing ground for contemporary linguistic typology.
German speculation on the nature of a national language is, to Scaglione, best understood as a dialogue with the prevailing models of Latin, Italian, French, and English. His account of the debates over German word order is thus grounded in the complex historical circumstances from which they emerge: Renaissance grammarians took stock of German divergencies from the Latin cultural model, and those in the seventeenth century faced the challenges of French rationalism, nineteenth-century Romanticism and the many linguistic movements of the twentieth century have all cast new light upon the peculiarities of German sentence structure. Readers interested in historical syntax, rhetorical traditions, and the history of the German language will value both Scaglione's wide-ranging knowledge and his lively style.
Volume 10 of the series explores sociolinguistics in various European Deaf communities. Editors Van Herreweghe and Vermeerbergen present a wide array of research inspired by the Sociolinguistics Symposium 14 held at Ghent University, Belgium, in April 2002. Noted contributors from Finland, Belgium, Ireland, the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Spain and the United Kingdom offer insights gleaned from the languages of their countries.
Part One of this five-part volume investigates multilingualism and language contact among Finland-Swedish Deaf People. Part Two looks at regional variation and the evolution of signs in Flemish Sign Language, as well as gender-influenced variation in Irish Sign Language. Language policy and planning receives consideration in the third part, with a study of sign language lexical variation in the Netherlands and an analysis of the risks of codification in Flemish Sign Language. Part Four examines the implementation of bilingual programs for deaf students throughout Europe, and updates research on language use visually oriented in Swedish Deaf education classrooms.
The final part of To the Lexicon and Beyond: Sociolinguistics in European Deaf Communities presents data on language attitudes, including a census of sign language users in Spain that reveal a changing language community. The last chapter of this fascinating assembly assays British Deaf communities and language identity in relation to issues of transnationality in the 21st century.
Contributors. Jianhua Chen, Nancy Chen, Alexis Dudden Eastwood, Roger Hart, Larissa Heinrich, James Hevia, Andrew F. Jones, Wan Shun Eva Lam, Lydia H. Liu, Deborah T. L. Sang, Haun Saussy, Q. S. Tong, Qiong Zhang
As access to deaf people grows around the world, a new profession has begun to emerge as well, that of Deaf translators and interpreters (T/Is). In his new study Toward a Deaf Translation Norm, Christopher Stone explores this innovation, including its antecedents and how it is manifested in public places. Most importantly, Stone investigates whether or not a translation norm has evolved for Deaf T/Is as increasing numbers of them work in the mainstream translating for websites, public services, government literature, and television media.
For his study, the sixth volume in the Studies in Interpretation series, Stone concentrated his research in the United Kingdom. Specifically, he examined the rendering of English broadcast television news into British Sign Language (BSL) by both Deaf and hearing T/Is. Segments of the data feature simultaneous Deaf and hearing in-vision T/I broadcasts. Recording these broadcasts produced a controlled product that enabled direct comparison of the Deaf and hearing T/Is. Close analysis of these examples revealed to Stone that Deaf T/s not only employ a Deaf translation norm, they take labors to shape their BSL text into a stand-alone product rather than a translation. Ultimately, Toward a Deaf Translation Norm opens up engrossing new vistas on current deliberation about neutrality in translation and interpretation.
Imagery, broadly defined as all that people may construe in cognitive models pertaining to vision, hearing, touch, taste, smell, and feeling states, precedes and shapes human language. In this pathfinding book, Gary B. Palmer restores imagery to a central place in studies of language and culture by bringing together the insights of cognitive linguistics and anthropology to form a new theory of cultural linguistics.
Palmer begins by showing how cognitive grammar complements the traditional anthropological approaches of Boasian linguistics, ethnosemantics, and the ethnography of speaking. He then applies his cultural theory to a wealth of case studies, including Bedouin lamentations, spatial organization in Coeur d'Alene place names and anatomical terms, Kuna narrative sequence, honorifics in Japanese sales language, the domain of ancestral spirits in Proto-Bantu noun-classifiers, Chinese counterfactuals, the non-arbitrariness of Spanish verb forms, and perspective schemas in English discourse.
This pioneering approach suggests innovative solutions to old problems in anthropology and new directions for research. It will be important reading for everyone interested in anthropology, linguistics, cognitive science, and philosophy.
In this forcefully argued book, the leading evolutionary theorist of language draws on evidence from evolutionary biology, genetics, physical anthropology, anatomy, and neuroscience, to provide a framework for studying the evolution of human language and cognition.
Philip Lieberman argues forcibly that the widely influential theories of language's development, advanced by Chomskian linguists and cognitive scientists, especially those that postulate a single dedicated language "module," "organ," or "instinct," are inconsistent with principles and findings of evolutionary biology and neuroscience. He argues that the human neural system in its totality is the basis for the human language ability, for it requires the coordination of neural circuits that regulate motor control with memory and higher cognitive functions. Pointing out that articulate speech is a remarkably efficient means of conveying information, Lieberman also highlights the adaptive significance of the human tongue.
Fully human language involves the species-specific anatomy of speech, together with the neural capacity for thought and movement. In Lieberman's iconoclastic Darwinian view, the human language ability is the confluence of a succession of separate evolutionary developments, jury-rigged by natural selection to work together for an evolutionarily unique ability.
Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, America was captivated by a muddled notion of “etymology.” New England Transcendentalism was only one outcropping of a nationwide movement in which schoolmasters across small-town America taught students the roots of words in ways that dramatized religious issues and sparked wordplay.
Shaped by this ferment, our major romantic authors shared the sensibility that Friedrich Schlegel linked to punning and christened “romantic irony.” Notable punsters or etymologists all, they gleefully set up as sages, creating jocular masterpieces from their zest for oracular wordplay. Their search for a primal language lurking beneath all natural languages provided them with something like a secret language that encodes their meanings. To fathom their essentially comic masterpieces we must decipher it.
Interpreting Thoreau as an ironic moralist, satirist, and social critic rather than a nature-loving mystic, Transcendental Wordplay suggests that the major American Romantics shared a surprising conservatism. In this award-winning study, Professor West rescues the pun from critical contempt and allows readers to enjoy it as a serious form of American humor.
Can language directly access what is true, or is the truth judgment affected by the subjective, perhaps even solipsistic, constructs of reality built by the speakers of that language? The construction of such subjective representations is known as veridicality, and in this book Anastasia Giannakidou and Alda Mari deftly address the interaction between truth and veridicality in the grammatical phenomena of mood choice: the indicative and subjunctive choice in the complements of modal expressions and propositional attitude verbs.
Combining several strands of analysis—formal linguistic semantics, syntactic theory, modal logic, and philosophy of language—Giannakidou and Mari’s theory not only enriches the analysis of linguistic modality, but also offers a unified perspective of modals and propositional attitudes. Their synthesis covers mood, modality, and attitude verbs in Greek and Romance languages, while also offering broader applications for languages lacking systematic mood distinction, such as English. Truth and Veridicality in Grammar and Thought promises to shape longstanding conversations in formal semantics, pragmatics, and philosophy of language, among other areas of linguistics.
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