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This chapter provides an overview of the Papuan and the Oceanic languages (a branch of Austronesian) in Northern Island Melanesia, as well as phenomena arising through contact between these groups. It shows how linguistics can contribute to the understanding of the history of languages and speakers, and what the findings of those methods have been. The location of the homeland of speakers of Proto-Oceanic is indicated (in northeast New Britain); many facets of the lives of those speakers are shown; and the patterns of their subsequent spread across Island Melanesia and beyond into Remote Oceania are indicated, followed by a second wave overlaying the first into New Guinea and as far as halfway through the Solomon Islands. Regarding the Papuan languages of this region, at least some are older than the 6,000-10,000 ceiling of the Comparative Method, and their relations are explored with the aid of a database of 125 non-lexical structural features. The results reflect archipelago-based clustering with the Central Solomons Papuan languages forming a clade either with the Bismarcks or with Bougainville languages. Papuan languages in Bougainville are less influenced by Oceanic languages than those in the Bismarcks and the Solomons. The chapter considers a variety of scenarios to account for their findings, concluding that the results are compatible with multiple pre-Oceanic waves of arrivals into the area after initial settlement.

This chapter explores the linguistic and interactional properties of informal asynchronous CMC in Japanese, using Bulletin Board System (BBS) messages sent to fan sites as the primary source of data. First, innovations in Japanese orthography are examined, including creative uses of the kanji, hiragana, and katakana Japanese writing systems, as well as other scripts and punctuation symbols. Taking advantage of word-processing technology and at the same time restricted by it, young Japanese BBS users attempt to recreate speech-like qualities in online text-based communication. The incorporation of spoken styles in messages and informal spoken features such as sentence-final particles are then examined. BBS users are found to employ colloquial language online as if conversing offline and to interact politely and appropriately with fellow members of the online community.

This chapter examines the linguistic features of CMC in Hong Kong, based on a 70,000-word corpus of email and ICQ messages collected mainly from undergraduate students whose first language is Cantonese, with English as their second language. Text analysis of the messages was complemented by a questionnaire survey. The study provides a comprehensive overview of CMC features in Hong Kong, including Cantonese-English code mixing and morpheme-by-morpheme literal translations. The analysis reveals that some CMC features observed in Hong Kong are different from those of other Chinese-speaking communities, such as the Taiwan-based CMC community described in Chapter 3, while other findings are comparable to those in previous studies of CMC in Chinese-speaking contexts.

This chapter presents an in-depth linguistic evaluation of a corpus of messages posted in several bilingual newsgroups in Catalonia (Spain). The social context is a situation of bilingualism and language contact where Spanish seems to be progressively overtaking Catalan as the language of daily use. The decline of Catalan might be prevented by integrating online machine translation (MT) into newsgroups, so that Catalan speakers do not feel the need or pressure to shift to using Spanish. Therefore, the main goal of this chapter is to ascertain the linguistic characteristics of the email register, in order to assess the implications for the implementation of online machine translation environments. The chapter reports to what extent different types of linguistic mistakes or deviations from the norm threaten the feasibility of online automatic translation, and offers some suggestions how to overcome the limitations of MT systems in processing “noisy” CMC input.

It is often assumed that the spatial meaning of between is only based on spatial features (geometrically definable cognitive representations). This chapter first considers how spatial features represent the meaning of between. It then considers a possible impact of visual functional features (visually perceived spatial features, like cartoon-like eyes, that invite a particular object categorization, such as ‘this is an animal’), linguistic functional features (lexical concepts inviting a particular categorization, as derived from ‘this is a thumb’), general functional features (features contributed by cognitive processes found across cognitive systems, like cognitive effort), and dynamic–kinematic features (features specifying actual or potential interactions between physical entities). After considering why between can correspond to more than one spatial prototype, the chapter discusses which of the above features are lexical features, which features are contextual features, and how features of different types may interact to specify the meaning of between in context.

This chapter started by describing the history of free verse, and stating that it is now more than a century old. The chapter also presents the implication of the claim for “neutral availability”, verse forms, whether free or otherwise, which are independent of history as well as of national and cultural context. In addition to that, the chapter states that a metrical choice is a question of individual preference and free verse is some kind of end point, an instance of writing degree zero from which the only reasonable “advance” can be a return to “normal” metrical forms. This chapter also defines the idea of free verse, and one of the definition is it is described by the lack of structuring grid based on counting of linguistic units and/or position of linguistic features.

This chapter presents a list of select books and articles on Indian English with brief annotations. The chapter is divided into sections broadly covering the areas taken up for discussion in the rest of the book. The annotated entries cover bibliographies and works that discuss general topics; and works that discuss linguistic features such as phonetics and phonology; morphosyntax; discourse, lexis and glossaries. Works related to history, education and politics, and samples and corpora are also included. The entries include works from the earliest times.

The transliterated text is based on the print version of the paribhāṣa published by P. K. Narayanan Nambiar 1980. The paribhāṣa is designated by the performers as kṛtrima-prākṛta-malayāḷam, an artificial ‘Prakrit-Malayalam’. While it is clearly stylized so as to serve representational concerns, which impact on the interpretations, it involves also dialectical and archaic linguistic features, which impact on the interpretation of the text both diachronically and synchronically. Some features are archaic, some are regional or caste-oriented and some are idiosyncratic. The author takes us through the various features in the paribhāṣa and summarizes by informing us that the dialectical features are possibly used in an attempt to render the character of the jester friendly to Malayalam speakers in the audience, regardless of their command of Sanskrit or of the hand-gesture language. The idiosyncratic features are probably aimed at ridiculing the Sanskrit enthusiast Brahmins in the audience.

This chapter explores the potential influences or entailments of nationality on authorial style. Nations have distinct linguistic habits of style. For example, the British have the propensity to drop the word the in front of certain nouns for which American speakers and writers always deploy the article. This explains why the mean relative frequency of the word the is lower in British and Irish novels than in American novels. In this chapter, an analysis of a corpus of 3,346 nineteenth-century American and British novels reveals that British authors use the word the at a rate of 5 percent, compared to 6 percent for their American counterparts. Thus, the word the is a strong indicator of author nationality, at least when trying to differentiate between British and American texts. This chapter discusses the results of author nationality analyses, along with word usage analyses, for British, American, and Irish novels. It demonstrates what stylistic or linguistic feature analyses can provide in terms of separating writers by nationality.

This chapter reviews recent work in classic literacy and the relationship between the objectification of written text and linguistic features of quotation. It shows how writing is neither equivalent to speaking nor a separate distinctive mode of communication and emphasizes the distance between expression and understanding that leads to a range of reading competencies. The chapter concludes with the use of language to reflect on language in “pure thought” fashion and why writing is important in the development of modern thought and growth of literate traditions.