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Human language is viewed by some as a natural object and by other scholars as a social and cultural object. Actually it manifests itself as a tightly entangled bundle of natural and cultural features. This book proposes ways to disentangle this complex feature bundle in order to show that often what seems contradictory is really complementary.
In linguistics, as in semiotics, iconicity is the conceived similarity between the form of a linguistic sign and its meaning. This book covers all aspects of linguistic iconicity in both spoken and signed languages, including definitions of all the relevant concepts and explanations of significant iconic words and expressions, and brief summaries of the contents and main proposals of 30 significant works in the history of iconicity research. It also provides definitions and exemplifications of the principles governing linguistic iconicity and brief overviews of iconic words and expressions in 11 language families and in more than 50 spoken and signed languages all over the world. The book contains 678 entries and more than 8,500 examples drawn from 400 languages, and will appeal to scholars and students interested in general linguistics, the history of linguistics, language typology, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and semiotics.
This book discusses the nature and definition of what a word is in Linguistics. This is not an easy task since the term subsumes a wide range of phenomena explored from an even wider array of perspectives. Although words are the most accessible linguistic units from the speakerâ (TM)s introspection viewpoint, they are, at the same time, an incredibly elusive reality for the linguist. Issues such as their definition, theoretical status, limits, characteristics, and psycholinguistic reality are still controversial and open for debate. This book offers an up-to-date overview of the latest discussions on the nature of word in Modern Linguistics. It gathers together under a single collective vol...
The interest in Romani, the language of the Roma or "Gypsies", has grown considerably in recent years. Romani has drawn attention from a.o. grammarians, sociolinguists, Indologists, language contact researchers, language planners, educators, typologists and historical linguists.This Indic language is spoken by between five and ten million people world-wide. The bibliography also covers two other Indic languages spoken by peripatetic groups, Dom or Domari from the Middle East, and Lomavren or Bosha of Eastern Turkey and Armenia.The bibliography contains over 2500 titles in more than thirty languages, published between 1900 to 2003. English translations are provided for all titles written in less common languages. There are indexes for general and linguistic terms, Romani varieties, other languages and geographical terms.The book further contains a very useful "Guide to Romani Linguistics", which should enable newcomers to enter this highly interesting field by pointing to the essential titles in different subject areas.
The series is a platform for contributions of all kinds to this rapidly developing field. General problems are studied from the perspective of individual languages, language families, language groups, or language samples. Conclusions are the result of a deepened study of empirical data. Special emphasis is given to little-known languages, whose analysis may shed new light on long-standing problems in general linguistics.
Winner of the Ramon Llull International Prize Winner of the 2017 Society for Linguistic Anthropology Edward Sapir Book Prize A vibrant and surprisingly powerful civic and political movement for an independent Catalonia has brought renewed urgency to questions about what it means, personally and politically, to speak or not to speak Catalan and to claim Catalan identity. In this book, Kathryn Woolard develops a framework for analyzing ideologies of linguistic authority and uses it to illuminate the politics of language in Spain and Catalonia, where Catalan jostles with Castilian for legitimacy. Longitudinal research across decades of political autonomy contextualizes this ethnographic study o...
Research on language universals and research on linguistic typology are not antagonistic, but rather complementary approaches to the same fundamental problem: the relationship between the amazing diversity of languages and the profound unity of language. Only if the true extent of typological divergence is recognized can universal laws be formulated. In recent years it has become more and more evident that a broad range of languages of radically different types must be carefully analyzed before general theories are possible. Typological comparison of this kind is now at the centre of linguistic research. The series empirical approaches to language typology presents a platform for contributio...
The papers collected in this volume reflect the numerous interests in the field of Romance languages and Romance linguistics today. A far-ranging amount of Romance data are presented: French, Italian, and Spanish dialect data are crucial to several authors' arguments, Rumanian is the focus of two papers, and many of the papers included discuss overall Romance developments. It is noteworthy that formal approaches to syntax are here regularly applied to historical data (three papers specifically deal with pro-drop phenomena in Old French). Of the papers on phonology, syllabification and linking processes receive much attention.
Explores what multilingualism means today, in a historical moment when it is under intense discursive and technological pressure.
The historical relationship between the Catalan and Occitan languages had a definitive impact on the linguistic identity of the powerful Crown of Aragon and the emergent Spanish Empire. Drawing upon a wealth of historical documents, linguistic treatises and literary texts, this book offers fresh insights into the political and cultural forces that shaped national identities in the Iberian Peninsula and, consequently, neighboring areas of the Mediterranean during the Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. The innovative textual approach taken in these pages exposes the multifaceted ways in which the boundaries between the region’s most prestigious languages were contested, and demonstrate...