In The Leopard's Spots, Gerrit J. Dimmendaal discusses the interaction between language, cognition, and culture in an African context with special focus on the cultural construction of meaning through language. Such constructions are constrained by our cognitive system, but leave lots of space for culture-specific interpretations and thereby for tremendous typological diversity between languages. This variation reflects the adaptive nature of human language in the same way that the spots of the leopard reflect selective advantages for its natural habitat. But whereas science has...

English in Malaysia: Current Use and Status offers an account of the English language used in present-day West and East Malaysia and its status anchored in different linguistic, social and educational domains. After an Introduction giving a bird's eye view of the status of English in Malaysia, the eight main chapters offer case studies revolving around four themes: i. linguistic features, with special focus on pronunciation and language contact; ii. language attitudes; iii. English in on-line discourse; and iv. English and language policies. The chapters cover original data and topics,...

This book presents a contrastive analysis of the lexicalization of motion events in Polish in comparison with Russian. The study, set in the framework of Cognitive Linguistics, adopts a usage-based approach to language analysis. Consequently, it draws on data derived from a wide variety of sources, namely modern novels, translated texts and elicitation tasks. Besides describing the distribution of path and manner information in and outside the verb in the two languages, the book addresses questions concerning the place of Polish and Russian on the continuum of the salience of the manner of...

The Caucasus is the place with the greatest linguistic variation in Europe. The present volume explores this variation within the tense, aspect, mood, and evidentiality systems in the languages of the North-East Caucasian (or Nakh-Daghestanian) family. The papers of the volume cover the most challenging and typologically interesting features such as aspect and the complicated interaction of aspectual oppositions expressed by stem allomorphy and inflectional paradigms, grammaticalized evidentiality and mirativity, and the semantics of rare verbal categories such as the deliberative (‘May I...

Drawing on usage-based theory, neurocognition, and complex systems, Languaging Beyond Languages elaborates an elegant model accommodating accumulated insights into human language even as it frees linguistics from its two-thousand-year-old, ideological attachment to reified grammatical systems. Idiolects are redefined as continually emergent collections of context specific, probabilistic memories entrenched as a result of domain-general cognitive processes that create and consolidate linguistic experience. Also continually emergent, conventionalization and vernacularization operate across...

In proposing the use of an alternative method for generating knowledge in the field of sociolinguistics, this book presents a fresh point of view. To introduce his argument, the author gives a well-considered critique of some of the guiding principles of traditional sociolinguists. Then, conducting a small-scale study involving seven participants, he shows how a qualitative narrative approach can renew the theorisation of the relationship between language and society.

This book deals with creolization and pidginization of language, culture and identity and makes use of interdisciplinary approaches developed in the study of the latter. Creolization and pidginization are conceptualized and investigated as specific social processes in the course of which new common languages, socio-cultural practices and identifications are developed under distinct social and political conditions and in different historical and local contexts of diversity. The contributions show that creolization and pidginization are important strategies to deal with identity and difference...

Embodiment in Cross-Linguistic Studies: The ‘Head’ edited by Iwona Kraska-Szlenk adds to linguistic studies on embodied cognition and conceptualization while focusing on one body part term from a comparative perspective. The ‘head’ is investigated as a source domain for extending multiple concepts in various target domains accessed via metaphor or metonymy. The contributions in the volume provide comparative and case studies based on analyses of the first-hand data from languages representing all continents and diversified linguistic groups, including endangered languages of Africa,...

Missionary Linguistic Studies from Mesoamerica to Patagonia presents the results of in-depth studies of grammars, vocabularies and religious texts, dating from the sixteenth – nineteenth century. The researches involve twenty (extinct) indigenous Mesoamerican and South American languages: Matlatzinca, Mixtec, Nahuatl, Purépecha, Zapotec (Mexico); K’iche, Kaqchikel (Guatemala); Amage, Aymara, Cholón, Huarpe, Kunza, Mochica, Mapudungun, Proto-Tacanan, Pukina, Quechua, Uru-Chipaya (Peru); Tehuelche (Patagonia); (Tupi-)Guarani (Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay). The results of the studies...

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...