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This volume comprises a selection of papers that were presented at the 24th International Conference on Historical Linguistics (ICHL24) which took place at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra from 1-5 July 2019. The volume’s aim is to reflect the breadth of research presented at the conference with each chapter representative of a workshop or themed session. A striking aspect of ICHL24 was the three-day workshop on computational and quantitative approaches to historical linguistics and two of the chapters represent different aspects of this workshop. A number of chapters present research that explores mechanisms and processes of change within specific domains of language while others explore interactions of change across linguistic domains. Two chapters represent a common theme at the conference and consider the role of historical linguistics in explaining non-linguistic histories of language diversification.

Discover the intricate dynamics of L2 prosody with this pioneering study which examines how advanced learners from Czech German and Spanish backgrounds engage with British and American English intonation. By employing a multidimensional approach - spanning phonetic phonological discourse-pragmatic and sociolinguistic perspectives - this book provides a comprehensive overview of L2 prosodic features highlighting patterns of intonational phrasing f0 range and the use of tones and uptalk. Building on foundational works by Pierrehumbert Mennen and Gut this work bridges significant gaps in the field by comparing different L1 and L2 varieties integrating diverse linguistic variables and proposing a multifactorial model of L2 prosody. Relevant for linguists language educators and researchers in SLA the findings offer valuable insights for reducing foreign accents and enhancing intelligibility making it an essential resource for improving language teaching methodologies and learner outcomes. Dive into this essential guide and elevate your understanding of L2 prosody and its impact on effective communication.

The intense language contact between Spanish and Catalan in Catalonia has led to cross-linguistic influence at all linguistic levels but its effect on the prosody of these languages has received little attention to date. Based on semi-spontaneous and read speech data from 31 Catalan–Spanish bilinguals this book provides a comprehensive analysis of the intonation of Spanish and Catalan as spoken in Girona with a focus on the speakers’ bilingualism. These contact varieties share numerous intonational properties with differences mainly in the frequency of specific tunes in certain contexts. However they also exhibit significant variation often linked to extralinguistic factors such as the bilinguals’ language dominance. Overall the intonation of these contact varieties results from substratum transfer and wholesale convergence between the prosodic systems of Spanish and Catalan.<br xmlns="http://pub2web.metastore.ingenta.com/ns/"/>The book is particularly relevant to scholars researching prosody language contact variation and multilingualism.<br/>

This book aims to address a gap in the existing literature on the relationship between vagueness and ambiguity as well as on their differences and similarities both in synchrony and diachrony and taking into consideration their relation to language use. The book is divided into two parts which address specific and broader research questions from different perspectives. The former part examines the differences between ambiguity and vagueness from a bird-eye perspective with a particular focus on their respective functions and roles in language change. It also presents innovative linguistic resources and tools for the study of these phenomena. The second part contains case studies on vagueness and ambiguity in language change and use. It considers different strategies and languages including English French German Italian Medieval Latin and Old Italian. The readership for this volume is broad encompassing scholars in a range of disciplines including pragmatics spoken discourse conversation analysis discourse genres (political commercial notarial discourse) corpus studies language change pragmaticalization and language typology.

Focusing on the growing trend of employing the present tense in storytelling this book explores present-tense narrative in contemporary fiction. Using a corpus approach speech writing and thought presentation in 21st-century present-tense narrative is compared with 20th-century past-tense narrative. An in-depth comparative analysis reveals previously undiscovered innovative features specific to how character discourse is presented in modern narratives. Notably narrative tenses have an impact on thought presentation; in present-tense narrative Free Direct Thought (FDT) emerges as frequently as Free Indirect Thought (FIT) a departure from the dominance of FIT in modern past-tense narrative. This book will be of interest to stylisticians narratologists corpus linguists and those who have found themselves absorbed in a 21st-century work of present-tense fiction.

Speakers and learners based on memory and experience implicitly know that certain language elements naturally pair together. However they also understand through abstract and frequency-independent categories why some combinations are possible and others are not. The frequency-grammar interface (FGI) bridges these two types of information in human cognition. Due to this interface the sediment of statistical calculations over the order distribution and associations of items (the regularities) and the computation over the abstract principles that allow these items to join together (the rules) are brought together in a speaker’s competence feeding into one another and eventually becoming superposed. In this volume it is argued that a specific subset of both first and second language grammar (termed ‘combinatorial grammar’) is both innate and learned. While not derived from language usage combinatorial grammar is continuously recalibrated by usage throughout a speaker’s life. In the domain of combinatorial grammar both generative and usage-based theories are correct each shedding light on just one component of the two that are necessary for any language to function: rules and regularities.

This volume aims to stretch the boundaries of text and discourse linguistics exploring organization and structuring in discourse across a variety of communication forms from written to spoken to visual in old and new media. It presents a collection of case studies ranging in focus from the micro-level discourse functions of pronouns and emojis to the macro-level structure of online interaction all from their different perspectives drawing inspiration from the notion of text as structure and process. In a world of proliferating media and discourse types the papers collected here reflect the latest scholarship in text and discourse studies highlighting the value of combining multiple approaches and suggesting future directions and possibilities for research.

Structures in Discourse will be of interest to students and researchers in pragmatics discourse analysis media studies and digitally mediated communication.

This book challenges several assumptions commonly encountered in Japanese dialectology: that the pitch-accent analysis of modern Tōkyō Japanese is an appropriate basis for describing the suprasegmental phonology of other dialects and earlier stages of Japanese; that the Kyōto-type dialects have been more conservative than dialects to their east and west; that the first split in proto-Japanese was the separation of proto-Ryūkyūan; and so on. De Boer brings together evidence from recent fieldwork premodern texts and other sources to establish a theory of dialect divergence that avoids the problems these assumptions entail. Building on De Boer 2010 this book brings the author’s theory up to date with research published in the interim explains why Japanese is best understood as a restricted tone language and why mergers in the large tone classes of nouns and verbs are especially reliable markers of dialect divergence.

This e-book is Open Access under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

This collection of original papers illustrates recent trends and new perspectives for future research in Interactional Linguistics (IL). Since the research program was started around the turn of the century it has prospered internationally. Recently however new developments have opened up new perspectives for interactional linguistic research.

IL continues to study the details of talk in social interaction with a focus on linguistic resources and structures of verbal and vocal interaction in bodily-visible interactional settings. Increasingly though it embraces methods supported by new technology and broadens its data and research questions to applications in teaching therapy etc.

The volume comprises three parts with 14 contributions: (1) Studying linguistic resources in social interaction; (2) Studying linguistic resources in embodied social interaction; and (3) Studying social interaction in institutional contexts and involving speakers with specific proficiencies.

This e-book is Open Access under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

This book offers a fresh perspective on how natural languages encode grammatical relations by delving into the interplay between oblique cases adpositions serial verbs and applicatives. This book reveals through a series of case studies the pervasive role of the 'inclusion' relator across diverse linguistic contexts. Departing from traditional views that obliques lack interpretive content this work presents a unified conceptual framework of relations in grammar. Drawing on minimalist principles the book posits a preeminence of the lexicon in syntactic projection shedding light on the underlying ontology of language. By exploring cross-categorial variation and syncretism it outlines an inventory of primitives shaping morpho-syntactic derivations.