Kategoria BISAC: Language Arts & Disciplines >> Linguistics - Historical & Comparative

This book introduces a new form of argumentative analysis: rhetorical heuremes. The method applies the concepts of heuristic thinking, probability, and contingency in order to develop a better understanding of complex arguments in classical oratory. A new theory is required because Greek and Roman rhetoric cannot provide detailed answers to problems of strategic argumentation in the analysis of speeches. Building on scholarship in Ciceronian oratory, this book moves beyond the extant terminology and employs a concept of heuristic reasoning derived from the psychology of decision making and...

The legends and folktales, religious and medical texts, agricultural and domestic customs translated and presented in this volume are crucial not only to an understanding of Mayan culture as it exists today but stand as our only clue eventually to deciphering the inscription of the ancient Mayans.

Whether investigating the asterisk (*) and dagger (+)--which alternately illuminated and skewered heretical verses of the early Bible--or the at sign (@), which languished in obscurity for centuries until rescued by the Internet, Keith Houston draws on myriad sources to chart the life and times of these enigmatic squiggles, both exotic () and everyday (&).

From the Library of Alexandria to the halls of Bell Labs, figures as diverse as Charlemagne, Vladimir Nabokov, and George W. Bush cross paths with marks as obscure as the interrobang (?) and as divisive as the dash (--). Ancient...

Sean Harvey explores the morally entangled territory of language and race in this intellectual history of encounters between whites and Native Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Misunderstandings about the differences between European and indigenous American languages strongly influenced whites' beliefs about the descent and capabilities of Native Americans, he shows. These beliefs would play an important role in the subjugation of Native peoples as the United States pursued its "manifest destiny" of westward expansion.

Over time, the attempts of whites to...

Le DAO est le premier dictionnaire onomasiologique de l'ancien occitan. Il suit un classement par concepts (d'apres le systeme conceptuel de Hallig-Wartburg) du lexique de la France meridionale sur la base de textes s'etalant des premiers documents jusqu'au milieu du 16e siecle. Il reunit de maniere systematique, tant sur le plan lexical que morphologique, les moyens d'expression de l'ancien occitan correspondant a une notion donnee. Cle onomasiologique des deux grands dictionnaires de Raynouard et de Levy, il completera ces derniers par un grand nombre de references nouvelles acquises...

The collected essays in this book are the result of a series of workshops held at the University of Cagliari in Italy. In this work, the authors aim at reconstructing the evolution of a key concept of traditional Indian grammar: Pāṇini's zero. The book investigates how certain patterns of description account for exceptions in the currently presupposed one-to-one symmetry between the semantic and the phono-morphological level of language. This work also deals with some powerful mechanisms of rule extension, which are valuable for different contexts of rule arrangement, such as...