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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
The new edition of this popular introductory text on historical linguistics covers all areas of language change, with a focus on Australia and the Pacific. Topics include sound change, the comparative method, cultural reconstruction and morphological and syntactic change.
This volume presents selected papers from the 5th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference within the area of discourse analysis. The topics addressed include pronominal anaphora in English and Russian narratives, the subtleties of the definite article in English and Spanish, the use of discourse particles in Dutch, and the function of prosody as a marker of text structure in spoken narratives. The papers illustrate the potential of the emerging cognitive linguistic paradigm to provide fresh, revealing insights in the study of discourse.
This book addresses the complex question of how and why languages have spread across the globe. International experts in the field explore this issue using new analytical research techniques and drawing on large databases, with a focus on the language and population histories of Island Southeast Asia/Oceania, Africa, and South America.
The present work contributes to a better understanding of the English system of degree by means of a study of a number of aspects in the evolution of adjective comparison that have so far either been considered controversial or not been ccounted for at all. As will be shown, the diachronic aspects analysed will also have synchronic implications. Furthermore, unlike previous synchronic as well as diachronic accounts of adjective comparison, this monograph does not concentrate on the 'standard' comparative strategies (i.e. inflectional and periphrastic forms) only, but also deals with double periphrastic comparatives, thus providing an analysis of the whole range of comparative structures in English.
This book is a wide-ranging reference work covering the more than 550 Indigenous languages of Australia. The chapters in the book explore typology and classification; linguistic structures; sociolinguistics and language variation; and language in the community. The final part offers sketches of a selection of languages, sub-groups, and families.
Austroasiatic Syntax in Areal and Diachronic Perspective elevates historical morpho-syntax to a research priority in the field of Southeast Asian language history, transcending the traditional focus on phonology and lexicon. The volume contains eleven chapters covering a wide range of aspects of diachronic Austroasiatic syntax, most of which contain new hypotheses, and several address topics that have never been dealt with before in print, such as clause structure and word order in the proto-language, and reconstruction of Munda morphology successfully integrating it into Austroasiatic language history. Also included is a list of proto-AA grammatical words with evaluative and contextualizing comments.
This volume brings together a number of articles representative of the present outlook on the importance of metaphors, and of the work done on metaphors in several domains of (psycho)linguistics. The first part of the volume deals with metaphor and the system of language. The second part offers papers on metaphor and language use. In the third part psychological and psycholinguistic aspects of metaphor are discussed.
This book is the first full evaluation of the Proto-Australian hypothesis, which proposes that most Australian languages have a common ancestor: Proto-Australian [PA]. Using the standard methodologies of historical linguistics, the authors show that nearly all Australian languages descend from PA. Given that PA was a single language, it was spoken only in a small area of Australia. Its descendants have spread across the continent. Current theories of language spread do not offer clear motivations for large-scale spread in hunter-gatherer economies. This raises significant questions for analyses of Australian prehistory and archaeology specifically, and more widely for general theories of hunter-gatherer prehistory and language spread.
Semantic change — how the meanings of words change over time — has preoccupied scholars since well before modern linguistics emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century, ushering in a new methodological turn in the study of language change. Compared to changes in sound and grammar, semantic change is the least understood. Ever since, the study of semantic change has progressed steadily, accumulating a vast store of knowledge for over a century, encompassing many languages and language families. Historical linguists also early on realized the potential of computers as research tools, with papers at the very first international conferences in computational linguistics in the 1960s. Suc...