Linguistics

English is the most widely-spoken language in the world, and it is rapidly becoming a global lingua franca. But it is not culturally neutral: like any other language, it carries with it a cultural baggage. There are many varieties of English, but there is also “Anglo” English (or what the Indian American linguist Braj Kachru has called the “English of the inner circle”). This book argues that rather than denying the existence and continued relevance of the cultural “baggage” embedded in English (“Anglo” English), it is important to explore the contents of that baggage — important for practical, as well as intellectual, reasons: for language teaching, “cultural literacy” teaching, cross-cultural training, international communication, and so on. It is important to “denaturalize” English and to identify and acknowledge the historically shaped cultural meanings embedded in it, if only so that they are no longer taken for granted as the voice of “reason” itself. To be able to reveal the cultural meanings embedded in the English language we need a suitable methodology. This book shows that such a methodology is available in the so-called “Natural Semantic Metalanguage” (NSM) approach, inaugurated by the author in her 1972 book Semantic Primitives and subsequently developed in collaboration with her Australian colleague Cliff Goddard. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) is a unique system of meaning description which uses simple words of ordinary language, instead of technical formalisms, used in other linguistic approaches. Thus, this book seeks to launch a new, meaning-based approach to the study of the English language. Its aim is to investigate English as a historically shaped universe of meaning and to reveal English's cultural underpinnings and their implications for the modern world.

The lingua franca role of English, coupled with its status as the official language of ASEAN, has important implications for language policy and language education. These include the relationship between English, the respective national languages of ASEAN, and thousands of local languages. How can the demand for English be balanced against the need for people to acquire their national language and mother tongue? While many will also need a regional lingua franca, they are learning English as the first foreign language from primary school in all ASEAN countries. Might not this early introduction of English threaten local languages and children's ability to learn? Or can English be introduced and taught in such a way that it can complement local languages rather than replace them? The aim of this book is to explore questions such as these and then make recommendations on language policy and language education for regional policymakers.

This book charts the English invasion of Europe since 1945. Sixteen contributors report on the English words and phrases that have become integral parts of their languages. Each describes the effect of English on the host language, and shows how the process of incorporation often modifies pronunciation and spelling and frequently transforms meaning and use. The languages surveyed are Icelandic, Dutch, French, Spanish, Norwegian, German, Italian, Romanian, Polish, Croatian, Finnish, Albanian, Russian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, and Greek. This book provides a systematic survey of a phenomenon that is fascinating, alarming, and apparently unstoppable.

This collection is the seventh volume in the Asian Englishes Today series. Singapore makes an interesting case study of various issues in socio-linguistics, not least because it is an ethnically and linguistically diverse society, but also because the country has a history of attempts at social engineering. The ongoing tensions between what the state envisions for the people and their actual language practices are some of the phenomena that provide the grounding for in-depth analyses. The chapters in this book revolve around four closely related themes relating to language policy in Singapore: the ecology of English in Singapore, reconceptualizing “English”, ethnicity and ownership, and English in education.

This book suggests that many linguistic, literary, and historical considerations of medieval statements on language have significantly failed to take into account the social and linguistic contexts of their production. The book explores not only medieval ideas about language but also the discursive traditions which generated them. The book draws upon a wide range of documentary evidence, including most notably the royal letters issued in 1258 prior to the Barons' War. The book also analyses the language spoken by Chaucer's pilgrims, the conversations in ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, and many other chronicles, poems, and commentaries. The book concludes with a consideration of the post-medieval history of the status of English in law, literature, and education.

This book provides a new approach to the ‘ethnosyntax’ concept — the proposition that the grammar of a language is intimately linked to the culture of its speakers. It focuses on three related issues: how far culture accounts for linguistic variation; how culture and grammar are connected; and to what extent one may constitute the other. It looks, for example, at the ways in which grammatical (including semantic) resources may be constrained by social values, and at the possible sociocultural significance of grammatical devices. The chapters add to the renewed debate among linguists and anthropologists on the relationship between grammar, culture, and cognition. The book represents a wide range of research traditions, some of which have not until now explicitly addressed the grammar and culture issue. It considers the subject in the context of a wide range of cultures in North America, Europe, and Australasia.

Perception verbs – such as look, see, taste, hear, feel, sound, listen, and observe – present unresolved problems for linguistic theories. This book examines the predictability of relations between their semantics and syntactic behaviour, the different kinds of polysemy they exhibit, and the role of evidentiality in verbs like seem and appear. After an opening chapter explaining the nature of the issues, there is a concise introduction to Word Grammar. Chapter 3 considers the implications of the approach for a general theory of event structure, and looks at how Word Grammar can be applied to causation, argument linking, and the modelling of polysemy. Chapter 4 explores the polysemy of see; chapter 5 looks at relations between verbs of active perception like listen, and verbs of involuntary perception such as hear; chapter 6 explores the semantics of non‐finite predicative complementation; and chapter 7 discusses verbs of appearance. Chapter 8 presents some conclusions.

This book articulates and defends a simple conception of semantic composition: when two meaningful expressions are concatenated, the result is understood as a conjunction of monadic predicates; in human languages, concatenation always signifies predicate conjunction. From this ‘Conjunctivist’ perspective, simple cases of adjunction (like ‘black cat’) are paradigms, and neo-Davidsonian event analyzes rightly associate certain grammatical relations with thematic roles. The sentence ‘Fido chased Garfield yesterday’ means, roughly, that something satisfies four conditions: its Agent was Fido, it was a chase, its Theme was Garfield, and it occurred yesterday. Such analyses, involving existential closure of a covert variable, are easily extended to examples involving negation and sentential connectives. This book contains four chapters. Chapter 1 compares elementary Conjunctivist proposals with ‘Functionist’ accounts according to which (i) predicate-argument concatenation signifies function-application, and (ii) adjuncts are accommodated by appeal to type-shifting or function-conjunction. Chapter 2 provides a Conjunctivist account of quantificational constructions, like ‘chased every cat’, in terms of a metalanguage with plural variables. This account is extended to plural noun phrases, as in ‘Three dogs chased the cats’; and this suggests a treatment of apparently nonconjunctive phrases like ‘big ants’. The resulting proposals — which explain the conservativity of determiners, and handle collective readings without quantifying over collections — are better than Functionist alternatives. Chapter 3 shows that Conjunctivism is superior to Functionism with regards to causative constructions, serial verbs, and many verbs that combine with complementizer phrases. Chapter 4 is a summary of conclusions, and discusses some difficulties facing all extant accounts of meaning.

This book proposes a novel, interface-based analysis of patterns of wh-movement in English in which constraints are stated over both syntactic and semantic representations. Firstly, a theory is presented of the internal structure of events as perceptual and cognitive units. The key question concerns the circumstances in which multiple smaller events, or subevents, can be perceived as jointly forming a single macroevent. Macroevent formation is possible if the subevents in question are perceived as related by one of two contingent relations, namely direct causation and enablement, where the latter is a relation holding among events that form part of an agent's plan. There is no single phrase-structural configuration which corresponds to enablement, so cognitive and semantic representations of event structure differ from syntactic representations of phrase structure in nontrivial ways. Certain patterns of extraction from adjuncts in English are amenable to simple descriptions stated over event-structural units and relations, but exhibit substantial differences from the patterns typically described by syntactic theories of locality. However, syntactic locality theories, as elaborated over the past 50 years, remain essential to an accurate description of the distribution of movement relations. The central challenge addressed by this work is therefore to allow syntactic and nonsyntactic factors to act jointly to constrain the syntactic operation of wh-movement without vitiating necessary assumptions about the modularity of the language faculty.

This book is based on two ideas: first, that any language—English no less than any other—represents a universe of meaning, shaped by the history and experience of the men and women who have created it; and second, that in any language certain culture-specific words act as linchpins for whole networks of meanings, and that penetrating the meanings of those key words can therefore open our eyes to an entire cultural universe. This book demonstrates that three uniquely English words—evidence, experience, and sense—are exactly such linchpins. Using a rigorous plain language approach to meaning analysis, the book unpackages the dense cultural meanings of these key words, disentangles their multiple meanings, and traces their origins back to the tradition of British empiricism. In so doing the book reveals much about cultural attitudes embedded not only in British and American English, but other global varieties of English.