This new edition of R. A. Hudson's Sociolinguistics will be welcomed by students and teachers alike. To reflect changes in the field since publication of the first edition in 1980, the author has added new sections on politeness, accommodation, and prototypes; and he has expanded discussion of sex differences in language use, and the relationship between language and thought. Ample coverage of classic topics such as varieties of language, speech as social interaction, the quantitative study of speech, and linguistic and social inequality, remains.

The Amazon Basin is the least known and the most complex linguistic region in the world today. It is the home of some 300 languages many of which (often incompletely documented and mostly endangered) show properties that constitute exceptions to received ideas about linguistic universals. This book is the first in English to provide an accessible overview of this rich and exciting linguistic area. It will provide a basis for further research on Amazonian languages as well as a point of entry to important data for theoretical linguists.

The Amazon Basin is the least known and the most complex linguistic region in the world today. It is the home of some 300 languages many of which (often incompletely documented and mostly endangered) show properties that constitute exceptions to received ideas about linguistic universals. This book is the first in English to provide an accessible overview of this rich and exciting linguistic area. It will provide a basis for further research on Amazonian languages as well as a point of entry to important data for theoretical linguists.

This book presents an innovative theory of syntactic categories and the lexical classes they define. It revives the traditional idea that these are to be distinguished notionally (semantically). The author proposes a notation based on semantic features that accounts for the syntactic behavior of classes. The book also presents a case for considering this classification--again in a rather traditional vein--to be basic to determining the syntactic structure of sentences.

Athapaskan languages are of great linguistic interest due to their intricate morphology. In this clear and insightful book, Keren Rice offers a rich survey of morpheme ordering in Athapaskan verbs, with implications for both synchronic grammar and language change. She argues that verb structure is predictable across Athapaskan languages if certain abstract aspects of meaning are considered. This is the first major comparative study of its type for Athapaskan languages, combining descriptive depth with a contemporary theoretical perspective.

Referencing new developments in cognitive and functional linguistics, phonetics, and connectionist modeling, this book investigates various ways in which a speaker/hearer's experience with language affects the representation of phonology. Rather than assuming phonological representations in terms of phonemes, Joan Bybee adopts an exemplar model, in which specific tokens of use are stored and categorized phonetically with reference to variables in the context. This model allows an account of phonetically gradual sound change that produces lexical variation, and provides an explanatory account...

Psycholinguist Maya Hickmann presents an original comparative study of discourse development in English, French, German, and Chinese. Hickmann discusses the main theoretical issues in the study of first language acquisition and provides a wide review of available studies in three domains of child language: person, space and time. Her findings concern the rhythm of language acquisition, its formal and functional determinants, and its universal vs. language-specific aspects. The conclusions stress the importance of relating sentence and discourse determinants of acquisition in a crosslinguistic...

This textbook is a clear and concise introduction to the study of how new languages come into being. Starting with an overview of the field's basic concepts, it surveys the new languages that developed as a result of the European expansion to the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Long misunderstood as "bad" versions of European languages, today such varieties as Jamaican Creole English, Haitian Creole French and New Guinea Pidgin are recognized as distinct languages in their own right.

This textbook is a clear and concise introduction to the study of how new languages come into being. Starting with an overview of the field's basic concepts, it surveys the new languages that developed as a result of the European expansion to the Americas, Africa, Asia and the Pacific. Long misunderstood as "bad" versions of European languages, today such varieties as Jamaican Creole English, Haitian Creole French and New Guinea Pidgin are recognized as distinct languages in their own right.

This book offers a new and in-depth analysis of English conditional sentences. Dancygier classifies conditional constructions according to time-reference and modality. She shows how the basic meaning parameters of conditionality correlate to formal parameters of the linguistic constructions that are used to express them. Focused on English, the study also provides a framework that can be extended to a broad range of grammatical phenomena in many other languages.