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Every major industry except construction uses logistics to improve its bottom line... Poor logistics is costing the construction industry at least £3 billion a year according to a report – ‘Improving Construction Logistics’ – published by the Strategic Forum for Construction. Additional costs arise as a result of operatives waiting for materials, and skilled craftsmen being used for unskilled jobs. Inadequate management of logistics also has an adverse effect on quality, causes delays to projects, and adds to the health and safety risks on site. This practical book highlights the benefits of good logistics as well as the use of consolidation centres on projects. It shows how reducti...
The present volume presents scholarly study into Old French as it is practiced today, in all of its forms, within a variety of theoretical frameworks, from Optimality Theory to Minimalism to Discourse Analysis. Many of the chapters are corpus-based, reflecting a new trend in the field, as more electronic corpora become available. The chapters contribute to our understanding of both the synchronic state and diachronic evolution, not only of Old French, but of language in general. Its breadth is extensive in that contributors pursue research on a wide variety of topics in Old French focusing on the various subsystems of language. All examples are carefully glossed and the relevant characteristics of Old French are clearly explained, which makes it uniquely accessible to non-specialists and linguists at all levels of training.
This book investigates the syntactic and semantic development of a selection of indefinite pronouns and determiners between Latin and the Romance languages. It uses data from Classical and Late Latin texts and from electronic corpora of early Romance to propose a new account of the similarities in the grammar of indefinites across Romance.
This volume offers theoretically informed surveys of topics that have figured prominently in morphosyntactic and syntactic research into Romance languages and dialects. We define syntax as being the linguistic component that assembles linguistic units, such as roots or functional morphemes, into grammatical sentences, and morphosyntax as being an umbrella term for all morphological relations between these linguistic units, which either trigger morphological marking (e.g. explicit case morphemes) or are related to ordering issues (e.g. subjects precede finite verbs whenever there is number agreement between them). All 24 chapters adopt a comparative perspective on these two fields of research, highlighting cross-linguistic grammatical similarities and differences within the Romance language family. In addition, many chapters address issues related to variation observable within individual Romance languages, and grammatical change from Latin to Romance.
This widely acclaimed textbook provides a complete introduction to the phonology of human languages ideal for readers with no prior knowledge of the subject. This skilfully written text provides a broad, yet up-to-date, introduction to phonology. Assuming no previous knowledge of phonology or linguistic theory, the authors introduce the basic concepts and build on these progressively, discussing the main theories and illustrating key points with carefully chosen examples. A wide range of phenomena are covered: speech production, segmental contrasts, tone, quantity, prosodic structure, metrical relations and intonation. The main theories, including feature geometry and optimality theory are introduced, and their contributions to our understanding of phonology, as well as their shortcomings, are discussed objectively. This new edition has been updated and revised to meet the needs of today's students. Difficult points are given fuller explanation, references have been updated, and new exercises have been introduced to enable students to consolidate their learning.
This book offers an original account of the dynamics of syntactic change and the evolving structure of Old Spanish that combines rigorous manuscript-based investigation, quantitative analysis and a syntactic approach grounded in Minimalist thinking. Its analysis of both successful and failed changes demonstrates the degree of unpredictability caused by the interaction of competing factors and will shed fresh light on the assumed unidirectionality of linguistic change. Importantly, it reveals that Old Spanish and modern Spanish are more similar to one another than is usually supposed and demonstrates that many of the differences between the two varieties are quantitative rather than qualitative. This theoretically sophisticated examination of historical corpora will provide an invaluable resource for students and scholars of Old and modern Spanish, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and syntax.
This book examines Latin word order, and in particular the relative ordering of i) lexical verbs and direct objects (OV vs VO) and ii) auxiliaries and non-finite verbs (VAux vs AuxV). In Latin these elements can freely be ordered with respect to each other, whereas the present-day Romance languages only allow for the head-initial orders VO and AuxV. Lieven Danckaert offers a detailed, corpus-based description of these two word order alternations, focusing on their diachronic development in the period from c. 200 BC until 600 AD. The corpus data reveal that some received wisdom needs to be reconsidered: there is in fact no evidence for any major increase in productivity of the order VO during...
Virtually unstudied until the 1980s, discourse markers have gone on to become a growth industry. Research on markers is central to comprehensive theories of the synchronic linguistic system as such, of the use of language in communication, and of language change. From the very beginning, linguists working on Romance languages have been at the forefront of research on discourse markers. Including among its contributors many of the foremost experts in the field, this volume not only offers substantial state-of-the-art introductions to the diverse facets of contemporary research on discourse markers, with a focus on Romance, but it achieves added value by including in each chapter original and ...
This volume in honor of Jan Terje Faarlund covers the areas in which he has contributed to linguistic theorizing, ranging from in-depth studies of Norwegian and Scandinavian grammar both synchronically and diachronically, to work on the Indian language Chiapas Zoque. The book is organized thematically with two chapters on each topic: The grammar of the Scandinavian languages (Tor A. Åfarli and Christer Platzack); language policies and sociolinguistics (Unn Røyneland and Peter Trudgill); French (Hans Petter Helland and Christine Meklenborg Salvesen); language change (Werner Abraham and Elly van Gelderen); lesser-studied languages (Alice Harris and Jerry Sadock); language acquisition (David Lightfoot and Marit Westergaard); and language evolution (Erika Hagelberg and Salikoko Mufwene). This book will be of interest to a wide range of readers, from students to scholars working on any of the areas covered.
This volume offers a collection of twelve original papers on language use and attitudes towards language from both a historical and a present-day perspective. The first part of the book focuses on the general theme of language use and on attitudes towards language use in both the past and the present. The second part concentrates on actual language use in personal and public letters from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries. The third part is mainly concerned with the possible impact of usage guides, and also addresses the problem of language and cultural misunderstanding and the apparent need for usage guides for cultural allusions. Language Use, Usage Guides and Linguistic Norms will be of interest to scholars of language use in both the past and the present, as well as to anyone interested in the interplay between actual language use and prescriptive attitudes towards language.