Browse Books

Dynamic Variation in Second Language Acquisition makes a cutting-edge contribution to knowledge about how second language learners develop their second language. Drawing comprehensively on Processability Theory’s theoretical understanding that individual variation dynamically interacts with ordered stages of language acquisition the book provides an informative critical analysis of historical and contemporary debates about the role of variation in linguistic variation particularly second language variation. Richly illustrated with a forensic year-long study of how eight adolescent learners of English vary in their acquisition of syntax and morphology this monograph shows that learners vary in their timing of development between two distinct learner types along a continuum and without skipping stages. The book uncovers how learner variation is dynamic and quite (although not entirely) systematic and how this variation contributes to change in the second language. It will be essential reading for researchers students and practitioners.

This volume is the first systematic attempt to survey current progress in the relatively new field of Experimental Arabic Linguistics. While experimental work on Arabic linguistics has appeared sporadically in several venues in the past the chapters in this book provide a more coherent picture of the exciting directions which the field is pursuing. They provide insights into the complex nature of the Arabic language and how native speakers process it using cutting-edge experimental methodologies in the fields of phonetics psycholinguistics and typical and atypical language development. This volume is of particular interest to scholars researchers and students at both the undergraduate and graduate level in the fields of linguistics and language studies and can be a point of reference for scholars and researchers in the fields of theoretical and experimental Arabic linguistics.

Adpositions are used universally to mark the roles of nominal participants in the verbal clause most commonly indirect object roles. Practically all languages seem to have such markers which begin their diachronic life as lexical words -- in this case either serial verbs or positional nouns. In many languages however adpositions also seem to have extended their diachronic life one step further becoming verbal affixes. The main focus of this book is the tail-end of the diachronic life cycle of adpositions. That is the process by which having arisen first as nominal-attached prepositions or post-positions they wind up attaching themselves to verbs. Our core puzzle is thus fairly transparent: How and why should morphemes that pertain functionally to nominals and begin their diachronic life-cycle as nominal grammatical operators wind up as verbal morphology? While the core five chapters of this book focus on the rise of verb-attached prepositions in Homeric Greek its theoretical perspective is broader perched at the intersection of three closely intertwined core components of the study of human language: (a) the communicative function of grammar; (b) the balance between universality and cross-language diversity of grammars; and (c) the diachrony of grammatical constructions how they mutate over time. While paying well-deserved homage to the traditional Classical scholarship this study is firmly wedded to the assumption indeed presupposition that Homeric Greek is just another natural language spoken before written designed as an instrument of communication and subject to the same universal constraints as all human languages. And further that those constraints--so-called language universals--express themselves most conspicuously in diachronic change. Lastly in analyzing the synchronic variation and text distribution of prepositional constructions in Homeric Greek this study relies primarily on the theory-laden method of Internal Reconstruction.

How do production and comprehension processes interact in the bilingual brain during language interaction? Most experimental and theoretical research in psycholinguistics to date has focused on investigating the mechanisms that underlie language production and language comprehension separately. Only recently have researchers started emphasizing the importance of reconciling the two modalities into a unified account through the investigation of possible connections between the two systems. Authored by key researchers in psycholinguistics neuroscience and language development this volume encompasses state of the art research on the relation between production and comprehension processes in bilingual children and adults. Articles highlight the most recent methodological approaches as well as a variety of language pairs and linguistic structures. Indispensable for students and researchers working in the areas of language acquisition and processing neurolinguistics and experimental linguistics this volume will also appeal to educators and clinicians focusing on language development and processing in multilingual children and adults. Originally published as special issue of Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 9:4/5 (2019).

Few issues in the history of the language sciences have been an object of as much discussion and controversy as linguistic categories. The eleven articles included in this volume tackle the issue of categories from a wide range of perspectives and with different foci in the context of the current debate on the nature and methodology of the research on comparative concepts – particularly the relation between the categories needed to describe languages and those needed to compare languages. While the first six papers deal with general theoretical questions the following five confront specific issues in the domain of language analysis arising from the application of categories. The volume will appeal to a very broad readership: advanced students and scholars in any field of linguistics but also specialists in the philosophy of language and scholars interested in the cognitive aspects of language from different subfields (neurolinguistics cognitive sciences psycholinguistics anthropology).

This volume contains a selection of papers from the 10th International Conference on Language Variation in Europe (ICLaVE 10) which was organized by the Fryske Akademy and held in Leeuwarden/Ljouwert (the Netherlands) in June 2019. The editors have selected thirteen papers on a wide range of language varieties geographically ranging from Dutch-Frisian contact varieties in Leeuwarden to English in Sydney Australia. The selection includes traditional quantitative and qualitative approaches to different types of linguistic variables as well as state-of-the-art techniques for the analysis of speech sounds new dialectometrical methods covariation analysis and a range of statistical methods. The papers are based on data from traditional sources such as sociolinguistic interviews speech corpora and newspapers but also on hip hop lyrics historical private letters and administrative documents as well as re-analyses of dialect atlas data and older dialect recordings. The reader will enjoy the vibrant diversity of language variation studies presented in this volume.

This book investigates phenomena at the grammar–discourse interface with a strong focus on discourse markers whose development and concrete uses in a given language tend to be based on a close interplay of grammatical and discourse-related forces. The topics range from the transition of linguistic signs “out of” sentence grammar and “into” the domain of discourse to differences between more grammatical vs. more discourse-pragmatic expressions in terms of structural behavior and cognitive processing and the different intricate ways in which the usage conditions and meanings of grammatical constituents or structural units are affected by the discourse context in which they are used. The twelve studies in this book are based on fresh empirical data from languages such as English Basque Korean Japanese and French and involve the study of linguistic expressions and structures such as pragmatic markers and particles comment clauses expletives adverbial connectors and expressives.

During an election campaign in 2008 Ken Livingstone said to a newspaper reporter “this election is not a joke”. By doing so he introduced an expectation into the discourse that someone does in fact think it is a joke. This book explores how it is that saying what is not the case communicates something about what is. Bringing together a focus on text with cognitive and pragmatic approaches a case is made for an application of linguistic negation as a tool of analysis. This tool is used to explore the ideological implications of projecting or reflecting readerly expectations. This book contributes to the growing field of Critical stylistics and aims to add to the range of stylistic insights which anchor the analysis of discourse to a consideration of the nuances of language choice.

While research on language change has formulated robust empirical generalisations about processes and motivations underlying the emergence and spread of linguistic elements their decline and loss is less well understood. So far a systematic investigation into the processes and motivations of decline and loss in language change is lacking. This book is a first step towards remedying this state of affairs. It brings together a varied set of empirical investigations into decline and loss spanning morphology syntax and the lexicon in different languages. Their authors apply diverse methodologies and represent different theoretical approaches. On the basis of this broad span of studies authors and editors propose generalisations related to decline and loss and assess similarities and differences with processes and motivations of emergence and spread. The book aims to inspire and provide hypotheses for further studies of decline and loss. It will appeal to historical linguists and others interested in language change.

This book takes an integrated approach to the fields of Corpus Linguistics Construction Grammar and World Englishes through a thorough constructional and corpus-based examination of the patterning of the versatile high-frequency verb make in British English and New Englishes. It contributes to Construction Grammar theory by adopting a verb-based rather than construction-based perspective on argument structure. This allows the probing of the interface between verb-independent generalizations and item-specificity from an underexplored angle that offers new insights into the shape of the constructicon. From a variationist perspective it seeks to (i) identify features of New Englishes and gauge whether these features exhibit traces of conventionalization and (ii) assess whether the degree of institutionalization of the New Englishes correlates with linguistic behavior both from a social and cognitive perspective thereby contributing to the budding effort to integrate the cognitive and social dimensions into the modeling of linguistic variation in World Englishes.