Includes more than 300 unique sound records of the last native speaker. Language Contact in the Danish West Indies: Giving Jack His Jacket lays bare crucial roles played by community and resistance in the refashioning of heritage languages. Robin Sabino draws on her community relationships, her fieldwork with a last speaker, and research from a range of disciplines, to advance a revisionist history that elucidates the African linguistic resources used to create community in a land those who were transhipped did not choose and from which they could not return. In parallel...

The ‘face’ is the most identifiable feature of the human body, yet the way it is entrenched in language and cognition has not previously been explored cross-linguistically. This comparative volume continues the series on embodied cognition and conceptualization with a focus on the human ‘face’. Each contribution to this volume presents descriptions and analyses of how languages name the ‘face’ and utilize metonymy, metaphor, and polysemy to extend the ‘face’ to overlapping target domains. The contributions include primary and secondary data representing languages originating...

In The Dutch Language in Japan (1600-1900) Christopher Joby offers the first book-length account of the knowledge and use of the Dutch language in Tokugawa and Meiji Japan. For most of this period, the Dutch were the only Europeans permitted to trade with Japan. Using the analytical tool of language process, this book explores the nature and consequences of contact between Dutch and Japanese and other language varieties. The processes analysed include language learning, contact and competition, code switching, translation, lexical, syntactic and graphic interference, and language shift. The...

What is cultural semantics? How to define and analyze it in the lexicon of modern Chinese? This book outlines the development and research results of cultural semantic theory, and then proposes the distinction between two types of cultural semantics at the synchronic level: conceptual gap items and items with a cultural meaning. It provides criteria for identifying these items by using detailed examples from theory and application. Finally, the two types of cultural semantics are applied to the case of modern Chinese. The criteria proposed for determining the Chinese cultural semantics apply...