One significant area of research in the multifaceted field of bilingualism over the past two decades has been the demonstration, validation, and account of the so-called ‘bilingual advantage’. This refers to the hypothesis that bilingual speakers have advanced abilities in executive functions and other domains of human cognition. Such cognitive benefits of bilingualism have an impact on the…
This open access volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 27th biennial conference of the German Society for Computational Linguistics and Language Technology, GSCL 2017, held in Berlin, Germany, in September 2017, which focused on language technologies for the digital age. The 16 full papers and 10 short papers included in the proceedings were carefully selected from 36 submissions. …
Controversies and problems with regard to language policy and language education still exist in Malaysia. Despite the attempts of language policy makers to promote multilingualism, the implementation has been marred by political and religious affiliations. Malaysia is a melting pot of many different cultures and ethnicities, the three largest being Malay, Chinese and Indian. Therefore, an analy…
While most natural languages rely on speech, humans can spontaneously generate comparable linguistic systems that utilize manual gestures. This collection of papers examines the interaction between natural language and its phonetic vessels - human speech or manual gestures. We seek to identify what linguistic aspects are invariant across signed and spoken languages, and determine how the choice…
From the first attempts at including sign language in deaf education until today, the status of sign language in deaf education has been marked by changing perspectives on deafness and the needs and abilities of deaf students. The perception of deaf individuals using a sign language and a spoken/written language as bilinguals is a relatively new phenomenon, and so is a bimodal bilingual concept…
This book provides a new analysis for the syntax of comparatives, focusing on various deletion phenomena affecting the subclause. In particular, the proposed account shows that Comparative Deletion is merely a surface phenomenon that can be drawn back to the overtness of the comparative operator and the availability of lower copies of a movement chain, and it is thus subject to both language-in…
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…
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…
This volume explores the various strategies of construing appropriate pasts in scholarship, literature, art, architecture and literature, in order to create “national”, regional or local identities, in late medieval and early modern Europe. Readership: All those interested in the reception of Antiquity and high medieval history (true and false) in early modern in literature, architecture an…
The goal of this eBook is to shed light on the non-linguistic causes of language diversity, and in particular, to explore the possibility that some aspects of the structure of languages may result from an adaptation to the natural and/or human-made environment. Traditionally, language diversity has been claimed to result from random, internally-motivated changes in language structure. However, …
In view of the current crisis of globalization, this book aims to interrogate one of its key concepts in the past decades: World Literature. In a historical moment where the established focus on transnational identities, linguistic intersections, and other cosmopolitan cultural configurations is being challenged, the contributions of this volume explore possible adjustments, critiques, reconcep…
This study on language vitalization and community empowerment in the Kosovar sign language community focuses on linguistic work taking place within the framework of a development co-operation project between two NGOs in Kosovo and Finland. The long-term objectives were to improve the status of Kosovar Sign Language (KosSL) and to guarantee the human (linguistic) rights of Deaf language users …
The work is concerned with the reconstruction of the phonemes of Proto-Malayo-Javanic, the last proto-language which is directly continued by the Sundanese, Javanese, Malay, and Madurese.
The book uses an economic lens to identify the main features of climate-smart agriculture (CSA), its likely impact, and the challenges associated with its implementation. Drawing upon theory and concepts from agricultural development, institutional, and resource economics, this book expands and formalizes the conceptual foundations of CSA. Focusing on the adaptation/resilience dimension of CSA,…
Most adults attempt to learn a second or even third language at some point in their life. Since language exposure is one of the most intense cognitive training regimes one can encounter, it is not surprising that previous research has shown that multilingualism can induce profound change in the brain or ‘neuroplasticity’.What remains unclear is the scope of such adult language learning indu…
This innovative study on the phenomenon of 'grammaticalization' and its manifestation in Chinese provides new insights into language change in Chinese and a large number of grammatical topics. Grammaticalization occurs in all of the world's languages. Xiu-Zhi Zoe Wu demonstrates general linguistic principles present and active in the phenomenon of grammaticalization whilst also describing the m…
This book presents a range of ongoing studies on atypical language development in Romance languages. Despite the steady increase in the number of studies on typical language development, there is still little research about atypical language development, especially in Romance languages. This book covers four main conditions causing atypical language development. Part I explores the linguistic a…
This book presents groundbreaking robotic experiments on how and why spatial language evolves. It provides detailed explanations of the origins of spatial conceptualization strategies, spatial categories, landmark systems and spatial grammar by tracing the interplay of environmental conditions, communicative and cognitive pressures. The experiments discussed in this book go far beyond previous …