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This book provides a cutting-edge exploration of the social meaning of phonetic variation in the Spanish-speaking world. Its 11 chapters elucidate the ways in which listeners process perceive and propagate phonetically motivated social meaning across monolingual and contact varieties including the Spanish spoken in Spain (Asturias Catalonia and Andalusia) Ecuador Colombia Argentina Chile Mexico and the United States. The book presents a wide variety of new and innovative research by renowned scholars and the chapters examine issues like the influence of visual cues bilingualism contact geographic mobility and phonotactic predictability on social and linguistic perception. Additionally the volume engages in timely discussions of intersectionality replicability and the future of the field. As the first unified reference on Spanish sociophonetic perception this volume will be useful in graduate and undergraduate classrooms in libraries and on the bookshelf of any scholar interested in Spanish sociophonetics.

The twenty-first century has seen a surge in cross-linguistic research on forms of address from increasingly diverse and complementary perspectives. The present edited collection is the inaugural volume of Topics in Address Research a series that aims to reflect that growing interest. The volume includes an overview followed by seventeen chapters organized in five sections covering new methodological and theoretical approaches variation and change address in digital and audiovisual media nominal address and self- and third-person reference. This collection includes work on Cameroonian French Czech Dutch English (from the US UK Australia and Canada) Finnish Italian Mongolian Palenquero Creole Portuguese Slovak and Spanish (in its Peninsular and American varieties). By presenting the work in English the book offers a bridge among researchers in different language families. It will be of interest to pragmatists sociolinguists typologists and anyone focused on the emergence and evolution of this central aspect of verbal communication.

This monograph proposes a comparative approach to all the ways of denoting ‘more than one’ entity from collective and aggregate nouns (with the first-ever typology) to count plurals partly substantivised adjectives and conjoined NPs. This semantic feature approach to plurality which cuts across number the count/non-count distinction and lexical/NP levels reveals a very consistent Scale of Unit Integration which establishes clear-cut boundaries for collective nouns and accommodates cases such as three elephant cattle or a chain of islands. The study also offers a refined understanding of aggregate nouns (a category nearly as large as that of collective nouns) and quantification in pseudo-partitives develops Guillaume’s notion of ‘internal plurality’ and proposes the innovative concept of ‘hyperonyms of plural classes’ (e.g. furniture). The Animacy Hierarchy is also found to be influential beyond hybrid agreement. The book aims to be accessible to scholars of any theoretical background interested in these topics.

In much of his earlier work Roger D. Sell was shaping literary studies historical perspectives and pragmatics into a fluent interdisciplinarity. This enabled him to explore the fundamentally human relationships which develop between literary writers and those who respond to them.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>Literary writers through their handling of deixis evaluative and modal expressions tellability politeness norms and genre expectations activate the same interpersonal function of language as do other language users and respondents’ hermeneutic contextualizations of literary texts are no less standard as a pragmatic procedure. Not that context is completely determinative. In Sell’s account human beings are profoundly influenced by society but can sometimes enter into co-adaptations with it. Like other people literary writers and their respondents are “social individuals” who themselves benefit from respecting each other’s relative autonomy.<br/>As well as explaining these theoretical positions the papers selected here offered critical re-assessments of some major writers including Chaucer and Dickens. They also suggested new ways of dealing with literary texts in literary and language education at all levels.

This volume explores the concepts of reference and identity in public discourses. Its contributions study discourse-specific reference and labelling patterns both from a historical and present-day perspective and discuss their impact on self- and other-representation in the construction of identity. They combine multiple methodological approaches including corpus-based quantitative as well as qualitative ones and apply them to a range of text types that are or were (intended to be) public such as letters newspapers parliamentary debates and online communication in the form of reader comments discussion pages and tweets. In addition to English the languages studied include Polish as well as European and Latin American Spanish. The volume is aimed at researchers from different research paradigms in linguistics and related disciplines such as media communication or the social and cultural sciences who are interested in the interplay of reference and identity.

If as we believe the history of languages is the history of the construction of an ideal artefact that permits a specific interpretation of the linguistic reality and helps to approve and assimilate a certain zone of diversity enabling the accumulation of collective historical knowledge and making us identify it with a social community and a territory then it must be agreed that languages are extremely complex entities.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The new linguistic diversity that cultural globalisation and recent population movements have installed in most traditional linguistic territories has probably put the ideology of the national language into a state of crisis and as a consequence has made the ancient intrinsic diversity of all languages visible at least to the extent that this is still possible. <br/>Nowadays then the old linguistic diversity of dialects of parlances of local lexicons and the cultural forms that are reflected in these of varieties and previously unsuccessful linguistic entities has been given a new opportunity in a world where the cohesion of societies and the welfare of citizens must be guaranteed using all available means. Looked at this way the intricacy of languages may even open up an opportunity for local economic and social development.

This book presents a new and innovative theory on the origin of the Germanic languages. This theory presents solutions to four pivotal problems in the history of Germanic with critical implications for cultural history: the origin of the Germanic writing system (the Runic alphabet) the genesis of the Germanic strong verbs the development of the Germanic word order and etymologies for key elements of the Germanic lexicon. The book proposes that all four problems can be solved if it is hypothesized that over 2000 years ago the ancestor of all Germanic languages Proto-Germanic was in intensive contact with Punic a Semitic language from the Mediterranean. This scenario is explored by focusing on linguistic data supported by an interdisciplinary mosaic of evidence. This book is of interest to anyone working on the linguistic and cultural history of the Germanic languages.

In 2016 the Going Romance conference series celebrated its 30th edition and the Goethe University of Frankfurt (Germany) had the honor of organizing this.The edited volume at hand presents a selection of 17 peer-reviewed articles based on papers that were presented at this occasion. The volume covers a wide variety of phenomena ranging from morphosyntax to prosody. Some are discussed from a synchronic perspective others from a diachronic perspective or in the context of language acquisition. In addition to frequently-studied languages such as French Italian Portuguese Romanian and Spanish this volume features lesser-studied varieties including Aromanian Gallo and Sardinian.

This volume was originally inspired by a 2017 conference to honour the scholar and linguist Cao Xuân Hạo whose landmark work – in many diverse areas of language study – established a bridge between traditional Vietnamese scholarship and contemporary theories of grammatical organisation. The book offers the reader a closely edited collection of papers representing a wide spectrum of frameworks approaches and methods from traditional fieldwork studies of non-standard dialects to corpus-based discussions of language and gender to formal syntactic and semantic analyses of key functional morphemes to laboratory experiments and work in first language acquisition. Many of the papers present detailed analyses of original data as well as novel treatments of established facts; considered together – as well as in contrast to one another – they make a significant empirical contribution to our understanding of how Vietnamese is structured acquired and put to use. The papers should be of value to anyone interested in contemporary approaches to Vietnamese linguistics and Southeast Asian languages more generally.

This volume focuses on the relationship and interaction of language and science between 1700 and 1900. It pays particular attention to English History writing in late Modern English as compiled in the Corpus of History English Texts (CHET) a newly released sub-corpus of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing. The chapters cover methodological issues the period and the status of the discipline itself as well as pilot studies for the description of scientific discourse using CHET. They embrace topics in several linguistic fields: discourse analysis syntax semantics morpho-syntax. The studies take into account extralinguistic parameters of texts such as year of publication sex of the author geographical provenance of authors and the communicative formats/genres to which the text sample belongs. In the particular case of CHET the collected samples can be grouped in eight different categories and such categories as well as the above-mentioned metadata information can be used to search the corpus. The book is of interest for scholars specialised in corpus linguistics and historical linguistics as well as linguists in general. The metadata information used for analysis can also be of interest for historians and historians of science in particular.The Corpus of History English Texts (CHET) accompanied by the Coruña Corpus Tool (CCT) purpose-designed software by IrLab is accessible online at the Repositorio Universidade Coruña at http://hdl.handle.net/2183/21849