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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 presentations from an annual international forum that focuses on topics related to the languages and cultures of Algonquian peoples. This volume 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 presentations 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 presentations 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. 

Technological revolutions have had an unquestionable, if still debatable, impact on culture and society—perhaps none more so than the written word. In the legal realm, the rise of literacy and print culture made possible the governing of large empires, the memorializing of private legal transactions, and the broad distribution of judicial precedents and legislation. Yet each of these technologies has its shadow side: written or printed texts easily become static and the textual practices of the legal profession can frustrate ordinary citizens, who may be bound by documents whose implications they scarcely understand.

Parchment, Paper, Pixels offers an engaging exploration of the impact of three technological revolutions on the law.  Beginning with the invention of writing, continuing with the mass production of identical copies of legal texts brought about by the printing press, and ending with a discussion of computers and the Internet, Peter M. Tiersma traces the journey of contracts, wills, statutes, judicial opinions, and other legal texts through the past and into the future.

Though the ultimate effects of modern technologies on our legal system remain to be seen, Parchment, Paper, Pixels offers readers an insightful guide as to how our shifting forms of technological literacy have shaped and continue to shape the practice of law today.

 

Visitors to Cuba will notice that Afro-Cuban figures and references are everywhere: in popular music and folklore shows, paintings and dolls of Santería saints in airport shops, and even restaurants with plantation themes. In Performing Afro-Cuba, Kristina Wirtz examines how the animation of Cuba’s colonial past and African heritage through such figures and performances not only reflects but also shapes the Cuban experience of Blackness. She also investigates how this process operates at different spatial and temporal scales—from the immediate present to the imagined past, from the barrio to the socialist state.
           
Wirtz analyzes a variety of performances and the ways they construct Cuban racial and historical imaginations. She offers a sophisticated view of performance as enacting diverse revolutionary ideals, religious notions, and racial identity politics, and she outlines how these concepts play out in the ongoing institutionalization of folklore as an official, even state-sponsored, category. Employing Bakhtin’s concept of “chronotopes”—the semiotic construction of space-time—she examines the roles of voice, temporality, embodiment, imagery, and memory in the racializing process. The result is a deftly balanced study that marries racial studies, performance studies, anthropology, and semiotics to explore the nature of race as a cultural sign, one that is always in process, always shifting.  

Because there have been few attempts to specify precisely what fluency is, Heidi Riggenbach has culled an impressive list of linguistic scholars and researchers representing the disciplines of psycholinguistics, socio-linguistics, and speech communication, for example, to write original papers for Perspectives on Fluency. This volume offers a historical overview of fluency and, in seeking to better define the term, focuses on both native speaker and nonnative speaker fluency.
Section 1, What Is Fluency? presents papers that all describe fluency, but in different ways.
The articles in Section 2, Essential Components of Fluency, consider features or components that contribute to impressions of fluency.
Section 3, Cognitive Processes Underlying Fluency, is devoted to an exploration of the psycholinguistic factors underlying fluency.
Three studies are presented in Section 4, Empirical Studies on Nonnative Fluency, and they exemplify the range of approaches to characterizing learners as fluent or nonfluent in their target language.
One objective of Perspectives on Fluency is to provide a starting point for language researchers interested in exploring the concept of fluency, a foundation that, until the arrival of this volume, did not exist. The book can be useful to those approaching fluency from a language assessment perspective, and those interested in the relationship of fluency to oral proficiency.

Phonetic Symbol Guide is a comprehensive and authoritative encyclopedia of phonetic alphabet symbols, providing a complete survey of the hundreds of characters used by linguists and speech scientists to record the sounds of the world's languages.

This fully revised second edition incorporates the major revisions to the International Phonetic Alphabet made in 1989 and 1993. Also covered are the American tradition of transcription stemming from the anthropological school of Franz Boas; the Bloch/Smith/Trager style of transcription; the symbols used by dialectologists of the English language; usages of specialists such as Slavicists, Indologists, Sinologists, and Africanists; and the transcription proposals found in all major textbooks of phonetics.

With sixty-one new entries, an expanded glossary of phonetic terms, added symbol charts, and a full index, this book will be an indispensable reference guide for students and professionals in linguistics, phonetics, anthropology, philology, modern language study, and speech science.

Phonology as Human Behavior brings work in human cognition, behavior, and communication to bear on the study of phonology—the theory of sound systems in language. Yishai Tobin extends the ideas of William Diver—an influential linguist whose investigations into phonology reflect the principle that language represents a constant search for maximum communication with minimal effort—as a part of a new theory of phonology as human behavior. Showing the far-reaching psycho- and sociolinguistic utility of this theory, Tobin demonstrates its applicability to the teaching of phonetics, text analysis, and the theory of language acquisition.
Tobin describes the methodological connection between phonological theory and phonetics by way of a comprehensive and insightful survey of phonology’s controversial role in twentieth-century linguistics. He reviews the work of Saussure, Jakobson, Troubetzkoy, Martinet, Zipf, and Diver, among others, and discusses issues in distributional phonology through analyses of English, Italian, Latin, Hebrew, and Yiddish. Using his theory to explain various functional and pathological speech disorders, Tobin examines a wide range of deviant speech processes in aphasia, the speech of the hearing-impaired, and other syndromes of organic origin. Phonology as Human Behavior provides a unique set of principles connecting the phylogeny, ontogeny, and pathology of sound systems in human language.

The early twentieth century was a time when steamships, international postal services and the telephone were setting the pace of an early wave of globalisation in Europe. In this increasingly international scenario, what role did language play? To address the geopolitical problem of cross-border linguistic (mis)understanding, international auxiliary languages like Esperanto were created. But what happened to a constructed language when it travelled to different places?

This book tackles these questions by exploring the letters, postcards and activities of John Beveridge (1857–1943) and his family. This Scottish clergyman was a proficient Esperanto speaker, translator and co-founder of several Esperanto organisations. His long-standing engagement with the language left a unique archive that reveals how many Esperanto speakers exchanged letters across borders, produced literature for an international readership, organised congresses and used this language as an entry point into modernity and globalisation from their ‘marginal’ positions in the world.

By tracing this language-based form of grassroots internationalism, the book uncovers wide-reaching networks connecting a corner of Scotland with rural settings and villages in Finland, Bulgaria and Brazil. Ultimately, it asks: what do we learn about international communication and globalisation through the lens of Esperanto and postcards? Focusing on a constructed language and communication technologies that preceded the dominance of global English and social media, this book offers an alternative vantage point on the history of international communication.

Compared to many languages, English has relatively fixed word order, but the ordering among phrases following the verb exhibits a good deal of variation. This monograph explores factors that influence the choice among possible orders of postverbal elements, testing hypotheses using a combination of corpus studies and psycholinguistic experiments. Wasow's final chapters explore how studies of language use bear on issues in linguistic theory, with attention to the roles of quantitative data and Chomsky's arguments against the use of statistics and probability in linguistics.

The Practical Guide to Syntactic Analysis is a resource for students and practitioners of syntax at all levels, addressing matters that textbooks do not explain. Relatively independent sections target issues ranging from the seductive metaphors of generative grammar and the character of linguistic argumentation to practical advice about both getting started and presenting analysis. This second edition adds a reference guide to over sixty grammatical phenomena that every syntactician should be familiar with.

This collaborative monograph will commemorate the centenary of the Prague English Studies, officially inaugurated in 1912 by the appointment of Vilém Mathesius. Apart from reassessing the work of major representatives, such as Mathesius, Vladislav Vancura and others, and reviewing important developments in literature-oriented Prague English Studies with respect to Prague Structuralism. Prague English Studies and the Transformation of Philologies will focus on the methodological problems of the discipline related to the transformation of humanistic and modern philologies, searching for the links between two historically distinct interdisciplinary projects: humanist philology and structuralist semiology. 

There are multitudes of ways in which predicative constructions can be analyzed. In this book, Frank Van Eynde differentiates between the Fregean and Montagovian treatments of these constructions in order to better understand predicative constructions as a grammatical model. Although he focuses his arguments on English and Dutch, Van Eynde also includes analyses of other Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages in order to better explore phenomena that do not occur in the two primary languages of his study.

This book is about some of the phonetic events that occur in the languages of the world. The data described consist mainly of contrasts observable at the systematic phonetic level in a wide variety of languages.
 

Is it possible to identify sign languages by their prosody, that is, the rhythm and stress of sign production, and then determine if they are related to each other or other sign languages? If so, reasoned authors Donna Jo Napoli, Mark Mai, and Nicholas Gaw, perhaps they could offer such identification as a new way to typologize, or categorize sign languages by their structural features. Their new collaboration Primary Movement in Sign Languages: A Study of Six Languages traces the process and findings from this unique investigation.

Resolving on the direction of movement as the prosodic factor to track, they began their research by comparing five sign languages: American Sign Language (ASL), British Sign Language (BSL), Italian Sign Language (LIS), French Sign Language (LSF), and Australian Sign Language (Auslan). They soon discovered that the languages in their study clustered with respect to several characteristics along genetic lines, with BSL and Auslan contrasting with LSF, LIS, and ASL. They learned that sign languages with the same geographic origin evolved differently when relocated, and they isolated differences in each individual sign language. They compared four of these established sign languages with the newly emerging Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL), with the exception of ASL due to their past close contact, thereby validating their work as the first study to identify sign language relationships without depending on grammar.

The separation of syntax and morphology is a major principle in contemporary lexicalist theories. The syntactic theory of Lexical-Functional Grammar recognizes this separation on a structural level but argues that both are equal, interacting, and competing contributors in a functional setting. This book discusses the relationship between morphology and LFG, reintroducing two seminal papers on the theory's impact on morphology and presenting new material on current morphological issues, including the nature of morphosyntactic paradigms and the role of optimality theory.

The Fifth Volume in the Studies in Interpretation Series

In interpreting, professionals must be able to convey to their clients the rhythm, stress, and length of phrases used by the communicating parties to indicate their respective emotional states. Such subtleties, which can signal sarcasm and irony or whether a statement is a question or a command, are defined in linguistics as prosody. Brenda Nicodemus’s new volume, the fifth in the Studies in Interpretation series, discusses the prosodic features of spoken and signed languages, and reports the findings of her groundbreaking research on prosodic markers in ASL interpretation.
     In her study, Nicodemus videotaped five highly skilled interpreters as they interpreted a spoken English lecture into ASL. Fifty Deaf individuals viewed the videotaped interpretations and indicated perceived boundaries in the interpreted discourse. These identified points were then examined for the presence of prosodic markers that might be responsible for the perception of a boundary. Prosodic Markers and Utterance Boundaries reports on the characteristics of the ASL markers, including their frequency, number, duration, and timing. Among other findings, the results show that interpreters produce an average of seven prosodic markers at each boundary point. The markers are produced both sequentially and simultaneously and under conditions of highly precise timing. Further, the results suggest that the type of prosodic markers used by interpreters are both systematic and stylistic.

Most computer programs that analyze spoken dialogue use a spoken command grammar, which limits what the user can say when talking to the system. To make this process simpler, more automated, and effective for command grammars even at initial stages of a project, the Regulus grammar compiler was developed by a consortium of experts—including NASA scientists. This book presents a complete description of both the practical and theoretical aspects of Regulus and will be extremely helpful for students and scholars working in computational linguistics as well as software engineering.