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This collection of twelve essays some of which have been written specifically for this volume by well-known European and North-American sociolinguists reflects an increasing recognition within the field that sociological and theoretical innocence can no longer be underwritten by it and offers a multi-pronged and multi-methodological way to move towards a critical reflexive and theoretically responsible socio-linguistics. It explores with courage and sensitivity some very important areas in the enormous space between Bloomfieldian 'idiolect' and Chomskyan 'UG' in order to situate the human linguistic enterprise and offers valuable insights into human linguisticality and sociality. These explorations expose the limits of correlationism determinism and positivistic reificationism and offer new ways of doing sociolinguistics. Intended for both practicing and future sociolinguists it is an ideal text-book for the times particularly for graduate and advanced undergraduate students.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>

State administration in modern industrialized countries is facing major challenges to its basic institutional premises. The changing conditions of the global economy mean that the public sector needs to develop far-reaching strategies for innovation. A fundamental reform of the public sector is thus one of the most urgent issues on the international agenda. The volume examines and compares trends issues and experiences of this reform process in Sweden and Germany.

The general objective of the study is systematic examination of the processes involved in the formation and evolution of complex sentence constructions in a group of genetically related languages. The Chadic language group at about 140 languages constitutes the largest and most diversified branch of the Afroasiatic family. One of the findings of the present work is that languages starting from the same base may develop quite different morphological and syntactic structures. With respect to issues of general linguistic interest the book deals with motivations for grammaticalization: It is proposed that one of the most important motivations is satisfaction of the principle of well formedness that is that every element in an utterance must have its role transparent to the hearer either by inherent lexical properties or by grammatical means. In the present work both aspects of grammaticalization viz. the emergence of grammatical constructions and the emergence of grammatical morphemes are given equal weight. In addition to semantic metaphor and metonymy as mechanisms in the processes of grammaticalization the present work develops the notion of semiotic metonymy whereby a part of a sign performs the function of the sign. It is shown that semiotic metonymy plays an important role in the grammaticalization of grammatical morphemes and constructions into other morphemes and constructions. The book also shows that unindirectionality is not a governing principle with respect to the development of grammatical morphemes into other grammatical morphemes; rather there is considerable evidence and theoretical justification for the bidirectionality principle.

Korlai Portuguese (KP) a Portuguese-based creole only recently discovered by linguists originated around 1520 on the west coast of India. Initially isolated from its Hindu and Muslim neighbors by social and religious barriers the small Korlai community lost virtually all Portuguese contact as well after 1740. This volume is the first-ever comprehensive treatment of the formation linguistic components and rapidly changing situation of this exotic creole.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The product of ten years of research Korlai Creole Portuguese provides an exciting in-depth diachronic look at a language that is now showing the strain of intense cultural pressure from the surrounding Marathi-speaking population. Framed in Thomason and Kaufman’s 1988 model of contact-induced language change the author’s analysis is enriched by numerous comparisons with sister creoles apart from medieval Portuguese and Marathi.<br/>This book contrastively examines the following areas: <br/>phonemic inventories phonological processes stress assignment syllable structure paradigm restructuring paradigm use lexicon word formation semantic borrowing loan translations grammatical relation marking pre- and postnominal modification negation subject and object deletion embedding and word order.

This interdisciplinary work contains the most sustained attempt at developing and defending one of the few genuine theories of consciousness. Following the lead of David Rosenthal the author argues for the so-called 'higher-order thought theory of consciousness'. This theory holds that what makes a mental state conscious is the presence of a suitable higher-order thought directed at the mental state. In addition the somewhat controversial claim that “consciousness entails self-consciousness” is vigorously defended. The approach is mostly 'analytic' in style and draws on important recent work in cognitive science perception artificial intelligence neuropsychology and psychopathology. However the book also makes extensive use of numerous Kantian insights in arguing for its main theses and in turn sheds historical light on Kant's theory of mind. A detailed analysis of the relationships between (self-)consciousness behavior memory intentionality and de se attitudes are examples of the central topics to be found in this work. (Series A)

Writing is crucial to the academic world. It is the main mode of communication among scientists and scholars and also a means for students for obtaining their degrees. The papers in this volume highlight the intercultural generic and textual complexities of academic writing. Comparisons are made between various traditions of academic writing in different cultures and contexts and the studies combine linguistic analyses with analyses of the social settings in which academic writing takes place and is acquired. The common denominator for the papers is writing in English and attention is given to native-English writers’ and non-native writers’ problems in different disciplines. The articles in the book introduce a variety of methodological approaches for analyses and search for better teaching methods and ways of improving the syllabi of writing curricula. The book as a whole illustrates how linguists strive for new research methods and practical applications in applied linguistics.

This volume offers a selection of 19 papers from those read at the 8th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics in Edinburgh. Many of the writers are established authorities in the field but there are also significant contributions from a younger generation of scholars. The topics discussed span the whole history of English from the Common Germanic period to the present century and the book also includes as appropriate to the Conference venue a number of papers on aspects of the historical development of Scots and Scottish English.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>

A collection of papers in honor of Eva Hajičová who represents the continuation of the Prague School tradition in the methodological context of formal and computational linguistics. Her broadly acknowledged contribution to syntax topic-focus studies discourse analysis and natural language processing is reflected in the papers by 30 authors divided in five sections (Discourse Meaning Focus Translation Structure).

Adopting the theoretical framework of the minimalist program this study of syntactic limitations on complement configuration investigates the link between thematic external arguments and case. Using evidence from pronominal psychological experiencer and inalienable constructions it argues that both accusative and dative are structural cases in French and that this duality is reflected in a parallel limit on argument projection. Larson’s single complement hypothesis which allows a maximum of two internal arguments provides the theoretical justification for this proposal. The testing ground for the binary hypothesis is a group of nonthematic subject constructions involving undative as well as unaccusative verbs linking according to Burzio’s generalization case suspension and lack of an internal argument. The investigation of these constructions and those involving partitive case provides not only a theoretically significant contribution to our understanding of grammar but also a motivated explanation for a number of empirical problems in French.

Lexical Functions in Lexicography and Natural Language Processing is entirely devoted to the topic of Lexical Functions which have been introduced in the framework of the Meaning-Text Theory (MTT) as a means for describing restricted lexical co-occurrence and derivational relations. It provides detailed background information comparative studies of other known proposals for the representation of relations covered by Lexical Functions as well as a selection of most important works done on and with Lexical Functions in lexicography and computational linguistics. This volume provides excellent course material while it also reports on the state-of-the-art in the field.