This new interpretation of the early history of Chinese argues that Old Chinese was typologically a "mixed" language. It shows that, though its dominant word order was subject-verb-object, this coexisted with subject-object-verb. Xu describes the typological changes that have taken place since the Han period and shows how Chinese evolved into a more analytic language, supporting her exposition with abundant examples from recently discovered texts. She focusses on syntactic issues, but pays close attention to closely related changes in phonology and the writing system.

Boeckx examines the foundations and explains the underlying philosophy of the Minimalist Program for linguistic theory, the most radical version to date of Noam Chomsky's naturalistic approach to language. He exemplifies its methods, considers the significance of its results, and explores its roots and antecedents. He disentangles and clarifies current debates and shows how the Minimalist Program lies at the centre of the enterprise to understand the human language faculty. The book is written for everyone in and outside the field who wants to know about current developments in theoretical...

This book argues that language is a network of concepts which in turn is part of the general cognitive network of the mind. It challenges the widely-held view that language is an innate mental module with its own special internal organization. It shows that language has the same internal organization as other areas of knowledge such as social relations and action schemas, and reveals the rich links between linguistic elements and contextual categories.

Professor Hudson presents a new theory of how we learn and use our knowledge of language. He puts this to work in a series of extended...

Juri Apresjan unites theoretical linguistics and lexicography to produce a series of dazzling insights into lexical analysis. It will be of interest to lexicologists, lexicographers, students of linguistic pragmatics, and teachers of semantics at all university levels.

This book examines the simultaneous acquisition of Norwegian and English by two first-born children each with one American and one Norwegian parent. Lanza investigates the issue of language mixing in relation to language dominance and the children's differentiation between the two languages in relation to the communicative demands of the context. This new paperback edition contains an extensive updated bibliography.

This wide-ranging survey of experimental methods in phonetics and phonology shows the insights and results provided by different methods of investigation, including laboratory-based, statistical, psycholinguistic, computational-modeling, corpus, and field techniques. The five chapters in the first part of the book examine the recent history and interrelations of theory and method. The remaining 18 chapters are organized into parts devoted to four key current areas of research: phonological universals; phonetic variation and phonological change; maintaining, enhancing, and modeling...

Language and National Identity in Asia is a comprehensive introduction to the role of language in the construction and development of nations and national identities in Asia.

Leading scholars from all over the world investigate the role languages have played and now play in the formation of the national and social identity in countries throughout South, East, and Southeast Asia. They consider the relation of the regions' languages to national, ethnic, and cultural identity, and examine the status of and interactions between majority, official, and minority languages....

In this pioneering book Katarzyna Jaszczolt lays down the foundations of an original theory of meaning in discourse, reveals the cognitive foundations of discourse interpretation, and puts forward a new basis for the analysis of discourse processing. She provides a step-by-step introduction to the theory and its application, and explains new terms and formalisms as required. Dr. Jaszczolt unites the precision of truth-conditional, dynamic approaches with insights from neo-Gricean pragmatics into the role of speaker's intentions in communication. She shows that the compositionality of meaning...

Linguistic theory has undergone deep changes since the early 1990's, given the widespread impact of Chomsky's Minimalist Programme, Kayne's Antisymmetry Theory, and Kayne's Theory of Overt Movement. This work has brought into sharper focus questions concerning the architecture of linguistic theory that have a direct impact on our understanding of the process of change. Here, Pintzuk, Tsoulas, and Warner have brought together chapters which demonstrate the pivotal position of historical syntax within the larger domain of research into the nature, use, and acquisition of language. They show how...

Contact Linguistics is a critical investigation of what happens to the grammars of languages when bilingual speakers use both their languages in the same clause. It consolidates earlier insights and presents the new theoretical and empirical work of a scholar whose ideas have had a fundamental impact on the field. It also shows that bilingual data offer a revealing window on the structure of the language faculty. Carol Myers-Scotton examines the nature of major contact phenomena, especially lexical borrowing, grammatical convergence, codeswitching, first language attrition, mixed languages,...