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

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...

Since the beginning of critical scholarship biblical texts have been dated using linguistic evidence. Until now there has been no introduction to and comprehensive overview of the field. Volume 2 of Linguistic Dating of Biblical Texts contains an extensive overview of dates attributed to different books and corpora of the Hebrew Bible in modern scholarship, demonstrating the lack of consensus on the dating of biblical texts. A synthesis of the main arguments of the work is presented, drawing also on many points from volume 1, followed by 50 pages of case studies, a list of linguistic...

Prescriptivism-the view that there are correct and incorrect ways of speaking and writing-is the default view of most people. But the existence of variants of English, historical and contemporary, poses difficulties for prescriptivism. Further, a philosophical analysis of the concept of correctness shows that calling any way of using language incorrect is akin to calling a lampshade dishonest. It is what philosophers call a category mistake. This book calls for a different, more tolerant, attitude to language, one that respects the innate creativity and lust for novelty that defines Homo...

War words have embedded themselves in our collective psyche; British politicians are fond of invoking the 'Dunkirk spirit' whenever the country is faced with major crisis or even minor adversity, and Roosevelt's famous description of Pearl Harbor as 'a date which will live in infamy' was echoed by many US commentators after the 9/11 attacks.

So far, so familiar. Or is it? How many of us know, for instance, that 'Keep Calm and Carry On', far from achieving its morale-boosting aim, was considered at the time to be deeply patronizing by the people it was directed at, and so had only...

This volume addresses the following questions: What is language awareness (LA)? How can this approach be conceptualized in relation to multilingual education today? How can it be implemented with learners of all ages, from kindergarten to primary, secondary levels and with student-teachers and teachers? What kinds of methodologies are developed to teach LA, with what aims and what is the nature of the knowledge acquired through LA activities?

This book examines the seventeenth-century project for a "real" or "universal" character: a scientific and objective code. Focusing on the Essay towards a real character, and a philosophical language (1668) of the polymath John Wilkins, Fleming provides a detailed explanation of how a real character actually was supposed to work. He argues that the period movement should not be understood as a curious episode in the history of language, but as an illuminating avatar of information technology. A non-oral code, supposedly amounting to a script of things, the character was to support...