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Drawing on archival, published, and oral history sources, this book analyzes the successes and limitations encountered by the East German state as it used participatory sports programs, sports festivals, and sports spectatorship to transform its population into new socialist citizens.
Is the world en route to becoming a linguistic colony of the United States? Or is this dramatic view an exaggeration, and there is no danger to linguistic diversity at all? The German language is at the center of an intensive debate on this issue. Its position in the world is under increasing pressure due to the growing importance of (American) English as the language of globalization. The articles in this volume deal with the national and international position of German in relation to English, language policies, the future of German as a language of science, German in the USA, and the intellectual and aesthetic dimensions of encountering a foreign language. They present critical assessments addressing the dangers for the future of languages other than English, as well as positions which perceive the growing importance of English as a challenge and resource rather than as a threat.
This is the first of a series of 6 books dealing with case phenomena in different languages, both Indo- and non-Indo-European, resulting from work by a team of 20 specialists at the University of Leuven. It is the first time such a large-scale investigation into case has been undertaken, and a remarkable feature of the project is the use of computer corpora of authentic material. This bibliography presents the many dimensions involved in research into case and case-related phenomena. This includes not only morphological case markers, but also the crossconstituent (semantic and grammatical) relations expressed by morphological case or by its various counterparts; morpho-syntactic processes su...
Setting out the historical national and religious characteristics of the Italians as they impact on the integration within the European Union, this study makes note of the two characteristics that have an adverse effect on Italian national identity: cleavages between north and south and the dominant role of family. It discusses how for Italians family loyalty is stronger than any other allegiance, including feelings towards their country, their nation, or the EU. Due to such subnational allegiances and values, this book notes that Italian civic society is weaker and engagement at the grass roots is less robust than one finds in other democracies, leaving politics in Italy largely in the hands of political parties. The work concludes by noting that EU membership, however, provides no magic bullet for Italy: it cannot change internal cleavages, the Italian worldview, and family values or the country’s mafia-dominated power matrix, and as a result, the underlying absence of fidelity to a shared polity—Italian or European—leave the country as ungovernable as ever.
The dimensions of time and space fundamentally cause and shape the variability of all human language. To reduce investigation of this insight to manageable proportions, researchers have traditionally concentrated on the “deepest” dialects. But it is increasingly apparent that, although most people still speak with a distinct regional coloring, the new mobility of speakers in recently industrialized and postindustrial societies and the efflorescence of communication technologies cannot be ignored. This has given rise to a reconsideration of the relationship between geographical place and cultural space, and the fundamental link between language and a spatially bounded territory. Language ...
This series of HANDBOOKS OF LINGUISTICS AND COMMUNICATION SCIENCE is designed to illuminate a field which not only includes general linguistics and the study of linguistics as applied to specific languages, but also covers those more recent areas which have developed from the increasing body of research into the manifold forms of communicative action and interaction. For "classic" linguistics there appears to be a need for a review of the state of the art which will provide a reference base for the rapid advances in research undertaken from a variety of theoretical standpoints, while in the more recent branches of communication science the handbooks will give researchers both an verview and ...
The aim of the volume is to bridge the 'cultural gap' between sociolinguistics and theoretical linguistics in the study of variation. The various contributions seek to combine corpus-based and competence-based approaches. They document the plurality
This volume provides a collection of research reports on multilingualism and language contact ranging from Romance, to Germanic, Greco and Slavic languages in situations of contact and diaspora. Most of the contributions are empirically-oriented studies presenting first-hand data based on original fieldwork, and a few focus directly on the methodological issues in such research. Owing to the multifaceted nature of contact and diaspora phenomena (e.g. the intrinsic transnational essence of contact and diaspora, and the associated interplay between majority and minoritized languages and multilingual practices in different contact settings, contact-induced language change, and issues relating t...
The Handbook of Language Contact offers systematic coverage of the major issues in this field – ranging from the value of contact explanations in linguistics, to the impact of immigration, to dialectology – combining new research from a team of globally renowned scholars, with case studies of numerous languages. An authoritative reference work exploring the major issues in the field of language contact: the study of how language changes when speakers of distinct speech varieties interact Brings together 40 specially-commissioned essays by an international team of scholars Examines language contact in societies which have significant immigration populations, and includes a fascinating cross-section of case studies drawing on languages across the world Accessibly structured into sections exploring the place of contact studies within linguistics as a whole; the value of contact studies for research into language change; and language contact in the context of work on language and society Explores a broad range of topics, making it an excellent resource for both faculty and students across a variety of fields within linguistics
Recent years have seen a growing interest in grammatical variation, a core explanandum of grammatical theory. The present volume explores questions that are fundamental to this line of research: First, the question of whether variation can always and completely be explained by intra- or extra-linguistic predictors, or whether there is a certain amount of unpredictable – or ‘free’ – grammatical variation. Second, the question of what implications the (in-)existence of free variation would hold for our theoretical models and the empirical study of grammar. The volume provides the first dedicated book-length treatment of this long-standing topic. Following an introductory chapter by the editors, it contains ten case studies on potentially free variation in morphology and syntax drawn from Germanic, Romance, Uralic and Mayan.