The many facets of grammatical gender remain one of the most fruitful areas of linguistic research, and pose fascinating questions about the origins and development of complexity in language. The present work is a two-volume collection of 13 chapters on the topic of grammatical gender seen through the prism of linguistic complexity. The contributions discuss what counts as complex and/or simple…
An Anthology of Asemic Handwriting is the first book-length publication to collect the work of a community of writers on the edges of illegibility. Asemic writing is a galaxy-sized style of writing, which is everywhere yet remains largely unknown. For human observers, asemic writing may appear as lightning from a storm, a crack in the sidewalk, or the tail of a comet. But despite these observat…
This text is a practical guide for linguists, and programmers, who work with data in multilingual computational environments. We introduce the basic concepts needed to understand how writing systems and character encodings function, and how they work together at the intersection between the Unicode Standard and the International Phonetic Alphabet. Although these standards are often met with fru…
Research in linguistics, as in most other scientific domains, is usually approached in a modular way – narrowing the domain of inquiry in order to allow for increased depth of study. This is necessary and productive for a topic as wide-ranging and complex as human language. However, precisely because language is a complex system, tied to perception, learning, memory, and social organization, …
This study undertakes to examine the problem of the tenses in Classical Arabic. While aware of the long tradition which shaped the discussion of this subject, and building, in fact, on some important insights offered by medieval and modern grammarians, this study attempts to redefine the discussion and propose a new analysis of the tenses, based on a functional text-oriented investigation of a …
LANGSCAPE is a plurilingual and multicultural international research network on language acquisition and language education. The current research focus is on Identity Construction in Language Education. This volume summarizes some research results of the last four years by presenting empirical research projects as well as theoretical concepts. The contributions all deal with topics linked to pl…
This volume is the first ever collection devoted to the field of proof-theoretic semantics. Contributions address topics including the systematics of introduction and elimination rules and proofs of normalization, the categorial characterization of deductions, the relation between Heyting's and Gentzen's approaches to meaning, knowability paradoxes, proof-theoretic foundations of set theory, Du…
"During the recent decades Conversation Analysis has developed into a distinctive method for analyzing talk in interaction. The method is utilized in several disciplines sharing an interest in social interaction, like anthropology, linguistics, social psychology, and sociology, and it has been applied to a great variety of languages and types of interaction. Conversation Analysis then is coming…
Corpus linguistics has much to offer history, being as both disciplines engage so heavily in analysis of large amounts of textual material. This book demonstrates the opportunities for exploring corpus linguistics as a method in historiography and the humanities and social sciences more generally. Focusing on the topic of prostitution in 17th-century England, it shows how corpus methods can ass…
How can students be empowered to communicate professionally – as translators, journalists and CCOs? How can professionals engaged in crucial language interactions do the same – pilots, nurses, lawyers and many others? This volume gives answers to these questions, providing insights into critical situations and good practices from many years of research and teaching in a practice-oriented, r…
Writing has changed due to the affordances of digital technologies, and writing assessment has changed as well. As writing programs integrate more digital writing work, students, teachers, and administrators face the rewards and challenges of assessing and evaluating multimodal and networked writing projects. Whether classroom-based or program-level; whether in first-year writing, technical com…
This volume highlights writing development and its relation to other cognitive domains, such as language and reading, for individuals who struggle to acquire writing proficiency, including those with specific learning disorders (SLD; e.g., dyslexia, dysgraphia, and specific language impairment) which affect writing skills (e.g., handwriting, composition). Writing and writing development are pre…
With increasing numbers of computers and penetration of the Internet around the world, localization of the technology and the content it carries into the many languages people speak is becoming an ever more important area for discussion and action. Localization, simply put, includes translation and cultural adaptation of user interfaces and software applications, as well as creation and transla…
The present volume examines the usefulness of a particular set of concepts and processes of change studying their applicability to a range of linguistic changes in Spanish and Latin that cannot be easily or can only be partially accounted for within the framework of grammaticalization. Rather than challenging the insights of grammaticalization theory, the different contributions to this monogra…
This book explores the Agree operation and its morphological realisations (agreement and case), specifically focusing on the connection between Agree and other syntactic dependencies such as movement, binding and control. The chapters in this volume examine a diverse set of cross-linguistic phenomena involving agreement and case from a variety of theoretical perspectives, with a view to elucida…
Case-systems all over the world exhibit striking similarities. In most lan- guages intransitive subjects (S) receives less overt marking than one of the two transitive arguments (agent-like A or patient-like P); the other one of these two arguments is usually encoded by the same form as S. In some languages the amount of overt marking is identical between S, A, and P. But hardly ever does the S…
This book deals with the effects of three different learning contexts mainly on adult, but also on adolescent, learners’ language acquisition. The three contexts brought together in the monograph include i) a conventional instructed second language acquisition (ISLA) environment, in which learners receive formal instruction in English as a Foreign Language (EFL); ii) a Study Abroad (SA) conte…
This book traces the precise origin of the early English lexical and lexico-phonetic influences in Sranan, an English-based creole spoken in Suriname. Sranan contains "fossilised" linguistic remnants of an early English colonial period. The book discusses whether Sranan’s English influence(s) originated from a single dialect from the general London area, as proposed by Norval Smith in 1987, o…
This book deals with discursive aspects of specialised communication, looking in particular at the role and scope of language and discourse in professional practice across a variety of fields and modes. Its chapters are diverse in their outlooks, analytical procedures, and object of enquiry, and span across different specialised domains, settings, genres, and media (from face-to-face communicat…
Carl Strehlow’s comparative dictionary manuscript is a unique item of Australian cultural heritage; it is a large collection of circa 7,600 Aranda, 6,800 Loritja (Luritja) and 1,200 Dieri to German entries compiled at the beginning of the twentieth century at the Hermannsburg Mission in central Australia. It is an integral part of Strehlow’s ethnographic work on Aboriginal cultures that his…