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The Mayan family of languages is ancient and unique. With their distinctive relational nouns, positionals, and complex grammatical voices, they are quite alien to English and have never been shown to be genetically related to other New World tongues. These qualities, this book shows, afford a particular opportunity for linguistic insight. This book demonstrates the value of a close, granular analysis of a small language lineage for untangling the complexities of first language acquisition. The book applies the comparative method to three Mayan languages—K'iche', Mam, and Ch'ol—showing how differences in the use of verbs are connected to differences in the subject markers and pronouns used by children and adults. The author's holistic approach allows him to observe how small differences between the languages lead to significant differences in the structure of the children's lexicon and grammar, and to learn why that is so. More than this, the author expects that such careful scrutiny of related languages' variable solutions to specific problems will yield new insights into how children acquire complex grammars. Studying such an array of related languages, the author argues, is a necessary condition for understanding how any particular language is used; studying languages in isolation, comparing them only to one's native tongue, is merely collecting linguistic curiosities.

This book explores dialects and social differences in language computationally, examining topics such as how (and how much) linguistic differences impede intelligibility, how national borders accelerate and direct change, how opinion and hearsay shape perceptions of language differences, the role of intonation (melody), the differences between variation in pronunciation and vocabulary, and techniques for recognising structure in larger collections of linguistic data. The computational investigations engage more traditional work deeply, and a panel discussion focuses on the opportunities and risks of pursuing humanities research using computational science. There is also an introduction that attempts to sketch perspectives from which to approach the individual contributions.

This is a compendium of work by scholars and activists involved in deaf matters. The introduction chapter sets up the global context; it is followed by twelve chapters, seven of which deal with the creation, context, and form of sign languages, and five of which deal with social issues and civil rights of Deaf communities. Each chapter has a response by one, or sometimes two pre-eminent people in the field, typically viewing the issue of the chapter from a different perspective or in a different geographic context. Luminaries shed light on issues and give histories and overviews that have not been written down anyplace else. The book addresses issues of interest in linguistics, psychology, economics, public policy, public health, cognitive science, anthropology, and education. The major thesis of the book is that the interaction of activists and scholars is synergistic: activists find support in the work of scholars and scholars both have a responsibility toward the community they study and do better work when they understand activists’ concerns. Thirty-one scholars and activists (sixteen deaf, one hearing of deaf parents, and fourteen hearing) contributed to this volume with the optimistic goal that the joint work can help improve our understanding of both deaf matters and the daily lives of deaf people. The chapters deal with gestures, sign languages, deaf issues, and deaf communities in Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Israel, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nicaragua, South Africa, Sweden, Thailand, and the United States. The picture that emerges shows a great amount of similarity and continuity in the Deaf World.

The Discourse of News Values breaks new ground in news media research in offering the first book-length treatment of the construction of newsworthiness through words and images. With an interdisciplinary and multi-methodological approach, it brings together corpus linguistics and multimodal discourse analysis in new empirical studies of the news media. The introduction and Parts I to II (chapters 2‒5) introduce readers to the theoretical and analytical underpinnings of the book, including an explanation of discursive news values analysis (DNVA) and a comprehensive description of frameworks for the systematic analysis of verbal and visual news discourse. Manifold examples are presented of authentic news discourse (language and images) from around the English-speaking world (across different cultures). This is followed in Part III by three chapters dedicated to empirical analysis of news discourse. Chapter 6 addresses researchers with an interest in the ideological nature of news through a corpus linguistic case study on representations of newsworthiness around cycling/cyclists. Chapters 7 and 8 fully engage with news discourse on social media, through two further case studies: one on how newsworthiness is constructed in images disseminated by news organizations through Facebook; and one on how newsworthiness is constructed through language and image in ‘most shared’ news items. Part IV explores applications of DNVA in diachronic and cross-cultural research and aims to inspire researchers to develop respective frameworks for other languages. This is a stimulating and unique book for all researchers in linguistics, semiotics, and media/journalism studies who are interested in discourse analytical approaches to the news media.

Normally, a speaker uses a first person singular pronoun (in English, I, me, mine, myself) to refer to himself or herself. To refer to a single addressee, a speaker uses second person pronouns (you, yours, yourself). But sometimes third person nonpronominal determiner phrases (DPs) are used to refer to the speaker—for example, this reporter, yours truly, or to the addressee: my lord, the baroness, Madam (Is Madam not feeling well?). This book refers to these DPs as imposters because their third person exterior hides a first or second person core. It studies the interactions of imposters with a range of grammatical phenomena, including pronominal agreement, coordinate structures, Principle C phenomena, epithets, fake indexicals, and a property of pronominal agreement it calls homogeneity. The chapters conclude that traditional ideas about pronominal features (person, number, gender), which countenance only agreement with an antecedent or the relation of the pronoun to its referent, are much too simple. They sketch elements of a more sophisticated view and argue for its relevance and explanatory power in several data realms. The fundamental proposal of the book is that a pronoun agrees with what the book calls a source, where its antecedent constitutes only one type of source. It argues that the study of imposters (and closely related camouflage DPs) has far-reaching consequences that are inconsistent with many current theories of anaphora.

This volume brings together multiple emerging strands of interest in language and linguistics. First is increasing attention on pedagogical scholarship in linguistics, signaled by the 2013 addition to the flagship journal Language of a series on Teaching Linguistics (see for example Sanders 2016) and by many recent panels and workshops on pedagogy at linguistics conferences around the world. Additionally, public outreach has gained greater prominence in the field, with linguists becoming more active and engaged with the public on social media and in podcasts. There has also been an increase in broader public interest in constructed languages (conlangs) and how to build them, indicated by the popularity of conlangs in film and television (e.g. Star Trek, Avatar, and Game of Thrones) and by the success of relevant books (e.g. Okrent 2010; Rosenfelder 2010; Peterson 2014, 2015). This volume showcases a variety of methods which instructors can use to tap into this public interest in conlangs and conlanging to reach a broader student population, increase their engagement with course material, deepen their understanding of linguistics and its interdisciplinary relationships, and provide opportunities for public outreach. Using language invention as a pedagogical tool is an innovative way to capitalize on the effectiveness of many modern educational approaches, such as problem-based learning, collaborative learning, and active learning, especially for a diverse cohort of learners. The methods and materials presented in this volume help cultivate students’ understanding of language, linguistic diversity, linguistic analysis, and the power of creativity.

English is the common denominator that unites the work presented in this volume; it provides a focal point to illustrate the ways in which a political economic approach can account for a range of phenomena in diverse settings in which a “global” language has attained a special status as (an often perceived) tool for socioeconomic mobility. The findings reveal the complex ways in which government leaders and policymakers, as well as communities and individuals in those communities, make decisions within a global economy about the languages that will be taught as subjects or used as media of instruction in schools. English is often promoted by its advocates as a social “good” with unquestioned instrumental value; yet the introduction of English in the elementary school curriculum in low-income countries very often leads to limited literacy both in English and the national language. Synchronic contextual analyses of English in various countries and regions are snapshots of a moving target with fuzzy boundaries; this is even more so the case when the object of analysis is “lingua franca English,” a fluid, contextually realized “practice” that may be described in situ which is not stable and likely never will be. The degree to which English serves effectively as a lingua franca depends on who the interlocutors are, the situation, and the extent to which interlocutors’ interests and goals are mutually compatible and understood.

This work offers a critical guide to debates concerning linguistic meaning and interpretation in relation to legal language. Law is an ideal domain for studying fundamental questions relating to how we assign meanings to words, understand and comment on texts, and deal with socially and ideologically significant questions of interpretation. Theoretical issues of concern to linguists, philosophers, literary theorists, and others are made vivid by the demands of the legal context, since law is driven by the need for practical solutions and for determinate outcomes based on explicit reasoning. Topics covered include: the relationship between linguistics and legal theory, indeterminacy and statutory interpretation, the theory and practice of using dictionaries in law, defamation and language in the public sphere, and the distinction between perjury and deception. The book is designed as a self-contained, advanced introduction to a fascinating area of study, and the reader will gain an overall insight into issues and debates about meaning and interpretation as well as an understanding of how the legal context shapes these questions. The aim of the book is to equip the reader to go on to tackle the academic literature in relation to law and linguistics, legal interpretation and jurisprudence.

This book discusses cognitive and psycholinguistic aspects of third language acquisition and trilingualism, and explores the key role of linguistic awareness in multilingual proficiency and language learning. In view of the widespread acquisition of English by those who are already bilingual or are also acquiring a regional lingua franca, this study contributes to the current discussion of multilingualism with English in Europe and beyond, as well as the understanding of multilingual speech processing. The author supports a dynamic view of multilingualism by stressing the cognitive advantages that the contact with more languages can offer, and uses this approach as the basis for future language teaching and learning. Chapters cover topics such as performing in a third language, metalinguistic awareness in multilinguals and in multilingual education, and English as a third language in Europe.

This reanalysis of minimalist syntax considers the optimal design properties for human language. Taking as its starting point Noam Chomsky’s minimalist assumption that the syntactic component of a language generates representations for sentences that are interpreted at perceptual and conceptual interfaces, the book investigates how these representations can be generated most parsimoniously. Countering the prevailing analyses of minimalist syntax, it argues that the computational properties of human language consist only of strictly local Merge operations that lack both look-back and look-forward properties. All grammatical operations reduce to a single sort of locally defined feature-checking operation, and all grammatical properties are the cumulative effects of local grammatical operations. As the book demonstrates, reducing syntactic operations to local operations with a single property—merging lexical material into syntactic derivations—not only radically increases the computational efficiency of the syntactic component, but also optimally simplifies the design of the computational system. The book explains a range of syntactic phenomena that have long resisted previous generative theories, including that-trace effects, superiority effects, and the interpretations available for multiple-wh constructions. It also introduces the Survive Principle, an important new concept for syntactic analysis, and provides something considered impossible in minimalist syntax: a locality account of displacement phenomena.

Words are the building blocks of human communication and provide a strong foundation for the development of skilled language production and comprehension. Learning words in a language other than one’s own requires long-term commitment and substantial engagement. This book shows how learners of additional languages acquire vocabulary in instructed foreign language contexts and in English for Academic Purposes programs in the target language environment. The book provides a comprehensive description of the processes of longitudinal development in learners’ vocabulary size and depth of word knowledge. It also builds novel connections between the fields of second language acquisition and vocabulary research. Readers can learn about how individual differences between learners can influence the processes and outcomes of vocabulary learning. The book concludes with evidence-based practical guidance to language teachers on how to enhance their students’ lexical knowledge.

This book explains the usefulness of game theory in thinking about a wide range of issues in linguistics. It argues that we use grammar strategically to signal our intended meanings: our choices as speaker are conditioned by what choices the hearer will make interpreting what we say. Game theory—according to which the outcome of a decision depends on the choices of others—provides a formal system that allows us to develop theories about the kind of decision making that is crucial to understanding linguistic behavior. The book argues the only way to understand meaning is to grapple with its social nature—that it is the social that gives content to our mental lives. Game theory gives us a framework for working out these ideas. The resulting theory of use will allow us to account for many aspects of linguistic meaning, and the grammar itself can be simplified. The results are nevertheless precise and subject to empirical testing. The book offers an introduction to game theory and the study of linguistic meaning. The book includes an extended argument in favor of the social basis of meaning; a brief introduction to game theory, with a focus on coordination games and cooperation; discussions of common knowledge and games of partial information; models of games for pronouns and politeness; and the development of a system of social coordination of reference.

This book brings together six case studies of an adult multilingual speaker who acquires a new language through social interaction. It deals especially with the multilingual situation, the learner's acquisitional activities, and the involvement of background languages in the process of speaking. The book offers a coherent study of various linguistic phenomena in one individual, including patterns and functions of language switching, word search in interaction, hypothetical construction of words, and articulatory settings in speaking. The main languages involved are English (L1), German (L2), and Swedish (L3). The activation of these languages in the learner's speech is examined in a cognitive perspective in relation to current models of the speaking process. A longitudinal corpus of NNS-NS conversations covering 21 months from the beginner stage provides the main data for these studies. The book highlights the significance of prior L2 knowledge in L3 performance.

Rhetorical Style promotes a renewed appreciation of the persuasive potential of the English language by demonstrating how language choices argue. It combines advice about effective style from the rhetorical tradition with insights from stylistics and discourse analysis to provide a full spectrum of methods for text analysis. Using examples from political speeches, nonfiction works, and newspaper reports, it emphasizes the continuing relevance of rhetorical principles of stylistic analysis and their usefulness in understanding effective arguments. Rhetorical Style is comprehensive in its coverage. Part I reviews the historical layers of English, its methods of word formation, its registers and varieties. Part II covers sentence basics in a brief and accessible way, noting how sentence forms serve persuasion, especially those optimal “iconic” forms that epitomize their content. The interactive dimension of texts is covered in part III in accounts of how speakers, audiences, other voices, and even situations and occasions can be selectively presented to serve an arguer's purposes. Finally, part IV goes beyond the sentence level to passage construction, explaining how a coherent string of sentences can build into a sustained argument. The final chapter explains Amplification, the tour de force rhetorical performance that draws on features from all the levels. Throughout, the explanations and the examples from actual texts provide evidence linking language choices to argument forms and persuasive purposes. Rhetorical insights into how language argues have survived for centuries. Rhetorical Style was written to give these enduring principles wider circulation.

Indeterminacy in legal texts is pervasive.At the same time, there is a widespread misunderstanding about what indeterminacy is - especially in the law. Legal texts are particularly interesting insofar as they address a heterogeneous audience, are applied in a variety of unforeseeable circumstances and must, at the same time, lay down clear and unambiguous standards.Sometimes they fail to do so, either by accident or by intention.While many have claimed that indeterminacy facilitates flexibility and can be strategically used, few have even recognized that there are more forms of indeterminacy than vagueness and ambiguity. A comprehensive account of legal indeterminacy is called for. This book is a contribution to lift the puzzle about the role of indeterminacy in in the law andaims to answer three, related, questions. First, what are the sources of indeterminacy in law? Second, what effects do the different forms of indeterminacy have? Third, how can and should they be intentionally used?Based on an examination of the advantages and disadvantages of the different forms of indeterminacy in the wording of laws, contracts, and verdicts, this book argues for the claim that semantic vagueness is less relevant than commonly supposed in the debate, while other forms of indeterminacy (in particular, polysemy and standard-relativity) are underrated or even entirely ignored. This misconception is due to a systematic confusion between semantic vagueness and these other forms of indeterminacy. Once it is resolved, the value and functions of linguistic indeterminacy in the law can be clearly shown.

Text World Theory is a cognitive model of all human discourse processing. This introductory textbook sets out a usable framework for understanding mental representations. Text World Theory is explained using naturally occurring texts and real situations, including literary works, advertising discourse, the language of lonely hearts, horoscopes, route directions, cookery books and song lyrics. The book will therefore allow its readers to make practical use of the text-world framework in a wide range of linguistic and literary contexts.

This wide-ranging book examines where the conditions of binding theory apply and in doing so considers the nature of phrase structure (in particular how case and theta roles apply) and the nature of the lexical/functional split. It begins with a revised formulation of binding theory. The book reexamines Chomsky’s conjecture that all conditions apply at the interfaces, in particular LF (or Logical Form), and argues instead that all negative conditions, in particular Condition C, apply continuously throughout the derivation. He draws a distinction between positive and negative conditions, which have different privileges of occurrence according to the architecture of the grammar. Negative conditions, the book finds, apply homogeneously throughout the derivation; positive conditions apply solely at LF. A hole in Condition C then forces a reconsideration of the whole architecture of the grammar. The book finds that case and theta representations are split apart and are only fused at later points in the derivation, after movement has applied. This exploration of the relationship between case and theta theory reveals a relationship of greater subtlety and importance than is generally assumed.

This book tells the story of how families separated across borders write—and learn new ways of writing—in pursuit of both love and money. Over the past decades, global economic inequality has continued to promote the growth of labor migration. According to the UN, 244 million people currently live outside the countries of their birth. The human drama behind these numbers is that labor migration often separates parents from children, brothers from sisters, lovers from each other. Migration, undertaken in response to problems of the pocketbook, also poses problems for the heart. Based on field research and interviews with transnational families in Latin America (Brazil), Eastern Europe (Latvia), and North America (United States), Writing for Love and Money: How Migration Drives Literacy Learning in Transnational Families shows how families separated across borders turn to writing to address these problems. They are writing to sustain meaningful relationships across distance and to better their often impoverished circumstances. The book reveals that, despite policymakers’ concerns about brain drain, immigrants’ departures do not leave their homelands wholly educationally hobbled. Instead migration promotes experiences of literacy learning in transnational families as they write to reach the two life goals that globalization consistently threatens: economic solvency and familial intimacy. The book thus shows how migration itself can be a source of technologically savvy, emotionally attuned, globally conscious, and entrepreneurial literacy learning.