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In this outstanding book leading scholars from around the world examine the history of linguistics from ancient origins to the present. They consider every aspect of the field from language origins to neurolinguistics, explore linguistic traditions in east and west, chronicle centuries of explanations for language structures, meanings, and usage, and look at how it has been practically applied. The book is organized in six parts. The first looks at the origins of language, the invention of writing, the nature of gesture, and sign languages. Part II examines the history of the analysis and description of sound systems. Part III considers the history of linguistics in China, Korea, Japan, Indi...
Usage-based linguistics, which is currently very popular, bases its understanding of language on two key points: Languages are cognitive-social constructs (i.e., learned vs genetically endowed), and, in order for communication and meaning to happen, speakers must find a way to meet/understand each other, overcoming various differences (lexicon, social, register, etc.) to arrive there. In this book, high-level contributors combine research from various usage-based perspectives to explore these questions: How do proficient speakers accomplish 'mental contact' or communication through the available semiotic linguistic resources they share with other members of their discourse community? How do young children learn to accomplish this? And how do speakers of multiple languages learn to accomplish this across languages?
The thesis shows that the Song of Songs can be read as a circular sequence of sub-poems, that follow logically from one another if they are understood as contributing to two main points, made in a woman's voice. The woman urges men to take romantic initiative to be committed exclusively and for life, and urges women three times to wait until they are approached by such men. If this reading is the best explanation of the text of the Song, then the Song is a unified work centered on a woman singing about human romantic love from a woman's perspective.
A new reading strategy for the Thanksgiving Hymns Hasselbalch asserts that current theories about the social background of Thanksgiving Hymns are unable to explain its heterogeneous character. Instead the author suggests a reading strategy that leaves presumptions about the underlying social contexts aside to instead consider the collection’s hybridity as a clue to understanding the collection as a whole. Features: Systemic Functional Linguistics applied to four Hodayot Analysis that highlights the role of a mediator in the agency of God An approach that highlights the unity of the collection
This cutting-edge study of linguistic theory by one of the world's leading authors in the field of semiotics will be of interest to academics and postgraduates researching applied linguistics and advanced semiotics. In his foreword M. A. K. Halliday explains the importance of Paul J. Thibault's work to linguistics. Book jacket.
Currently there is a movement in linguistics towards careful use of corpora in linguistic and text analysis, which has involved both written and spoken corpora and those which combine spoken and written text. Most text analyses address written texts - often literary works - but detailed discussion of the language of a single oral text from multiple perspectives has rarely been published. This book is among the first to integrate the analysis of the language of spoken and written texts. It describes language as a network of functional relations involving a context which is also a network of functional relations. The essays in Part One present several perspectives on the theory of language as functional relations; those in Part Two discuss a single oral text using a variety of functional perspectives. All of the essays are by linguists interested in oral and written texts, who have achieved international recognition in their fields. Illustrated in this book are cognitive, social construction, social praxis and anthropological approaches to the description of text.
This book features a collection of 10 interviews with Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen, who is a key figure in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and has collaborated closely with M.A.K. Halliday since the 1980s. As noted by Professor Chang Chenguang, Editor of the M.A.K. Halliday Library Functional Linguistics Series, “this collection of interviews serves as an important reference for scholars and students of SFL. It provides a unique perspective on the theoretical development and future outlooks of SFL, as well as Matthiessen’s own interpretations of the theory. It also enriches our understanding of SFL and is a very useful addition to the series.” Written in an engaging dialogic format, the book paints a vivid picture of SFL thriving among the landscape of general linguistics and of SFL as an important tool now being applied in various areas.
This volume focuses on the relation between theory and description by examining aspects of transitivity in different languages. Transitivity or case grammar, to use the popular term has always occupied a centre-stage position in linguistics, not least because of its supposedly privileged relation to states of affairs in the real world. Using a systemic functional perspective, the ten papers in this volume make a contribution to this scholarship by focusing on the transitivity patterns in language as the expression of the experiential metafunction. Through a study of different languages English, Dutch, German, Finnish, Chinese and Pitjantjatjara the contributors provide functional...
This truly multidisciplinary book explores how culture-founding terms like ‘space’ and ‘place’ have been reconsidered, re-elaborated and how they have acquired new meanings through academic research that crosses the traditional borderline between the humanities and social sciences. All chapters explore from different perspectives how the notions of space and place are still modelling our sense of reality by investigating social and cultural phenomena of various types that evolved between the 20th and 21st centuries. The essays collected here provide evidence of the growing necessity of building bridges across disciplines to allow knowledge, in general, and academic work, in particular, to work towards new forms of epistemology. The book will be of particular interest to scholars and students in the areas of cultural studies, discourse analysis, multimodality, communication and media, linguistics, literary and film studies, anthropology and ethnography.
Language in Use creatively brings together, for the first time, perspectives from cognitive linguistics, language acquisition, discourse analysis, and linguistic anthropology. The physical distance between nations and continents, and the boundaries between different theories and subfields within linguistics have made it difficult to recognize the possibilities of how research from each of these fields can challenge, inform, and enrich the others. This book aims to make those boundaries more transparent and encourages more collaborative research. The unifying theme is studying how language is used in context and explores how language is shaped by the nature of human cognition and social-cultu...