ANTH 352 Anthropological Linguistics

Designed to serve as a textbook for courses in statistical analysis in linguistics, this book orients the reader to various quantitative methods and explains their implications for the field.

The next century will see more than half of the world's 6,000 languages become extinct, and most of these will disappear without being adequately recorded. Explores what humanity stands to lose as a result. Explores the unique philosophy, knowledge, and cultural assumptions of languages, and their impact on our collective intellectual heritage Questions why such linguistic diversity exists in the first place, and how can we can best respond to the challenge of recording and documenting these fragile oral traditions while they are still with us.

The rapid endangerment and death of many minority languages across the world is a matter of widespread concern, not only among linguists and anthropologists but among all concerned with issues of cultural identity in an increasingly globalized culture. By some counts, only 600 of the 6000 or so languages in the world are 'safe' from the threat of extinction. A leading commentator and popular writer on language issues, David Crystal asks the fundamental question, 'Why is language death so important?', reviews the reasons for the current crisis, and investigates what is being done to reduce its impact.

There are more than six thousand languages used around the world today, although linguists now estimate that by the year 2050 as many as half of those will be extinct. This beautifully designed, engagingly written reference takes us on a panoramic tour of the globe to explore this unique and endangered human gift.

It is commonly agreed by linguists and anthropologists that the majority of languages spoken now around the globe will likely disappear within our lifetime. Focuses on the essential question, what is lost when a language dies? What forms of knowledge are embedded in a language's structure and vocabulary? And how harmful is it to humanity that such knowledge is lost forever? Harrison spans the globe from Siberia, to North America, to the Himalayas and elsewhere, to look at the human knowledge that is slowly being lost as the languages that express it fade from sight.

With every speech act all individuals perform, to a greater or less extent, an 'act of identity', revealing through their personal use of language their sense of social and ethnic solidarity or difference. At the same time people also have powerful (if unconscious) stereotypes about the norms and standards of their own language and those of others - often at variance with observable behaviour. The view of language use proposed here derives from the authors' extensive fieldwork in the Creole-speaking Caribbean and among West Indian communities in London, and is forcefully illustrated by the data they present, which include recorded conversations and stories. The authors re-examine such concepts as 'a language', 'correct usage', 'race' and 'ethnic groups' and clearly reveal the complex role of language in establishing relationships within regional and social communities and at the state or national level.

This collection of work addresses the contribution that ethnography and linguistics make to education, and the contribution that research in education makes to anthropology and linguistics.; The first section of the book pinpoints characteristics of anthropology that most make a difference to research in education. The second section describes the perspective that is needed if the study of language is to contribute adequately to problems of education and inequality. Finally, the third section takes up discoveries about narrative, which show that young people's narratives may have a depth of form and skill that has gone largely unrecognized.

Exploring crucial issues that emerge at the intersection of linguistic diversity and education, this volume: provides an up-to-date review of sociolinguistic research and practice aimed at improving education for students who speak vernacular varieties of US English, English-based Creole languages, and non-English languages explores the impact of dialect differences and community languages on ethnolinguistically diverse studentsâe(tm) academic achievement challenges the dominant monolingual Standard language ideology presents sociolinguistically based approaches to language and literacy education that acknowledge and build on the linguistic and cultural resources students bring into the school.

This engaging text explores how everyday talk leads to the ordinary kinds of communicating that people do in schools, workplaces, and among family and friends, expresses who we are and who we want to be. The authors interweave rhetorical and cultural perspectives on the "little stuff" of conversation: what we say and how we say it, the terms used to refer to others, the content and style of stories we tell, and more.

First published in 1974, this collection of classic case studies in the ethnography of speaking had a formative influence on the field. No other volume has so successfully provided a broad, cross-cultural survey of the use, role, and function of language and speech in everyday life. The essays deal with: traditional societies in Native North, Middle, and South America, Africa, and Oceania; English, French, and Yiddish speaking communities in Europe and North America; Afro-American communities in North America and the Caribbean.

In this ground-breaking new book on the Norteña and Sureña (North/South) youth gang dynamic, cultural anthropologist and linguist Norma Mendoza-Denton looks at the daily lives of young Latinas and their innovative use of speech, bodily practices, and symbolic exchanges that signal their gang affiliations and ideologies. Her engrossing ethnographic and sociolinguistic study reveals the connection of language behavior and other symbolic practices among Latina gang girls in California, and their connections to larger social processes of nationalism, racial/ethnic consciousness, and gender identity.

This lively overview, first published in 2006, reveals the fascinating relationship between language and ethnic identity, exploring the crucial role it plays in both revealing a speaker's ethnicity and helping to construct it. Drawing on research from a range of ethnic groups around the world, it shows how language contributes to the social and psychological processes involved in the formation of ethnic identity, exploring both the linguistic features of ethnic language varieties and also the ways in which language is used by different ethnic groups.

Provides a close look at the ideological factors that intervene between the desire of the Navajos to maintain their language as an important aspect of their culture and their actual linguistic practice. Based on more than ten years of fieldwork within a Navajo institution and community, it points to ideologies held by Navajo people about their unequal relationship with the dominant American society as a primary factor in the erosion of traditional language use.

An anthropological study of language and cultural change among a small group of people living in the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea. He examines why the villagers of Gapun are abandoning their vernacular in favor of Tok Pisin, the most widely spoken language in Papua New Guinea, despite their attachment to their own language as a source of identity and as a tie to their lands.

Ten leading linguistic anthropologists integrate two often segregated domains: politics (without language) and language (without politics). Their essays contribute to an understanding of the role of language ideologies and discursive practices in state formation, nationalism, and the maintenance of ethnic groups, on the one hand, and in the creation of national, ethnic, and professional identities, on the other.

Ever since Darwin, the world has been struggling with the mystery of human diversity. As the historian Peter Bowler has written, an evolutionary interpretation of the history of life on the earth must inevitably extend itself to include the origins of the human race. But this has proved to be a difficult and controversial task. Understanding human origins means accounting not only for the obvious differences between people and cultures around the world, but also for the unity of "Homo sapiens" as a single biological species. As Stephen Jay Gould has said, flexibility is the hallmark of human evolution. Because so much of who we are is learned rather than genetically predetermined, a satisfactory understanding of human evolution--to use old parlance--must account both for the human body and the human soul. At any single moment of time, it is always possible to find instances where people seem to live in their own world, speak in their own distinctive ways, and have their own exclusive cultural traits and practices. Over the course of time, however, it is not so easy to find places where these dimensions of our diversity stay together.

This book is the first to focus on the African origins of human language. It explores the origins of language and culture 250,000-150,000 years ago when modern humans evolved in Africa. Scholars from around the world address the fossil, genetic, and archaeological evidence and critically examine the ways it has been interpreted.

Language, more than anything else, is what makes us human. It appears that no communication system of equivalent power exists elsewhere in the animal kingdom. Any normal human child will learn a language based on rather sparse data in the surrounding world, while even the brightest chimpanzee, exposed to the same environment, will not. Why not? How, and why, did language evolve in our species and not in others? Since Darwin's theory of evolution, questions about the origin of language have generated a rapidly-growing scientific literature, stretched across a number of disciplines, much of it directed at specialist audiences. The diversity of perspectives - from linguistics, anthropology, speech science, genetics, neuroscience and evolutionary biology - can be bewildering.

The Evolutionary Emergence of Language covers the origins and early evolution of language. Its main purpose is to synthesize current thinking on this topic, particularly from a standpoint in theoretical linguistics. It is suitable for students of human evolution, evolutionary psychology, linguistic anthropology and general linguistics. It is the outcome of a major international conference on the evolution of language and includes contributions from many of the best known figures in this field. Very few truly interdisciplinary volumes on this topic have previously been published.

This book collects Joseph Greenberg's most important writings on the genetic classification of the world's languages.

The leading scholars in the rapidly growing field of language evolution give readable accounts of their theories on the origins of language and reflect on the most important current issues and debates. As well as providing a guide to their own published research in this area they highlight what they see as the most relevant research of others. The authors come from a wide range of disciplines involved in language evolution including linguistics, cognitive science, computational science, primatology, and archaeology.

This groundbreaking study of how children acquire language and the effects on language change over the generations draws on a wide range of examples. The book covers specific syntactic universals and the nature of syntactic change. It reviews the language-learning mechanisms required to acquire an existing linguistic system (accurately and to impose further structure on an emerging system) and the evolution of language(s) in relation to this learning mechanism.

'When, why, and how did language evolve?' 'Why do only humans have language?' This book looks at these and other questions about the origins and evolution of language. It does so via a rich diversity of perspectives, including social, cultural, archaeological, palaeoanthropological, musicological, anatomical, neurobiological, primatological, and linguistic. Among the subjects it considers are: how far sociality is a prerequisite for language; the evolutionary links between language and music; the relation between natural selection and niche construction; the origins of the lexicon; the role of social play in language development; the use of signs by great apes; the evolution of syntax; the evolutionary biology of language; the insights offered by Chomsky's biolinguistic approach to mind and language; the emergence of recursive language; the selectional advantages of the human vocal tract; and why women speak better than men.

Current estimates are that around 3000 of the 6000 languages now spoken may become extinct during the next century. Some 4000 of these existing languages have never been described, or described only inadequately. This book is a guide for linguistic fieldworkers who wish to write a description of the morphology and syntax of one of these many under-documented languages. It uses examples from many languages both well known and virtually unknown; it offers readers one possible outline for a grammatical description, with many questions designed to help them address the key topics. The appendices offer guidance on text and elicited data, and on sample reference grammars which readers might wish to consult.

This collection of original essays on the practice of linguistic fieldwork and language documentation by twelve leading field linguists considers the study of languages in a natural setting. Drawing on extensive research experience, the authors review those techniques that work best in practice, and discuss a variety of relevant topics, including the attitude of the linguist, the structure and content of the work session, the varied roles of native speakers, and the practical and personal challenges of doing research in an unfamiliar environment.

Conversation analysts have begun to challenge long-cherished assumptions about the relationship between gender and language, asking new questions about the interactional study of gender and providing fresh insights into the ways it may be studied empirically. Drawing on a lively set of audio- and video-recorded materials of real-life interactions, including domestic telephone calls, children's play, mediation sessions, police-suspect interviews, psychiatric assessments and calls to telephone helplines, this volume is the first to showcase the latest thinking and cutting-edge research of an international group of scholars working on topics at the intersection of gender and conversation analysis. Theoretically, it pushes forward the boundaries of our understanding of the relationship between conversation and gender, charting new and exciting territory. Methodologically, it offers readers a clear, practical understanding of how to analyse gender using conversation analysis, by presenting detailed demonstrations of this method in use.

Is language sexist? Do women and men speak different languages? Gender, Language and Discourse examines the contribution that psychological research - in particular, discursive psychology - has made to answering these questions.

Language is a fundamental tool for shaping identity and community, including the expression (or repression) of sexual desire. Speaking in Queer Tongues investigates the tensions and adaptations that occur when processes of globalization bring one system of gay or lesbian language into contact with another.Western constructions of gay culture are now circulating widely beyond the boundaries of Western nations due to influences as diverse as Internet communication, global dissemination of entertainment and other media, increased travel and tourism, migration, displacement, and transnational citizenship. The authority claimed by these constructions, and by the linguistic codes embedded in them, is causing them to have a profound impact on public and private expressions of homosexuality in locations as diverse as sub-Saharan Africa, New Zealand, Indonesia and Israel. Examining a wide range of global cultures, Speaking in Queer Tongues presents essays on topics that include old versus new sexual vocabularies, the rhetoric of gay-oriented magazines and news media, verbal and nonverbalized sexual imagery in poetry and popular culture, and the linguistic consequences of the globalized gay rights movement.

This book presents in a single volume a comprehensive history of the language sciences, from ancient times through to the twentieth century. While there has been a concentration on those traditions that have the greatest international relevance, a particular effort has been made to go beyond traditional Eurocentric accounts, and to cover a broad geographical spread. For the twentieth century a section has been devoted to the various trends, schools, and theoretical framework developed in Europe, North America and Australasia over the past seventy years. There has also been a concentration on those approaches in linguistic theory which can be expected to have some direct relevance to work being done at the beginning of the twenty-first century or those of which a knowledge is needed for the full understanding of the history of linguistic sciences through the last half of this century. The last section of this book reviews the applications of some of these findings. Based on the foundation provided by the award winning Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics this volume provides an excellent focal point of reference for anyone interested in the history of the language sciences.

This complete revision and updating of Professor Robins' classic text offers a comprehensive account of the history of linguistic thought from its European origins some 2500 years ago to the present day. It examines the independent development of linguistic science in China and Medieval Islam, and especially in India, which was to have a profound effect on European and American linguistics from the end of the eighteenth century. The fourth edition of "A Short History of Linguistics" gives a greater prominence to the work of Wilhelm von Humboldt, because of the lasting importance of his work on language in relation to general eighteenth century thinking and of its perceived relevance in the latter half of the twentieth century to several aspects of generative grammatical theory. The final section, covering the twentieth century, has been rewritten and divided into two new chapters, so as to deal effectively with the increasingly divergent development of descriptive and theoretical linguistics that took place in the latter half of this century. Readable and authoritative, Professor Robins' introduction provides a clear and up-to-date overview of all the major issues in the light of contemporary scholarly debate, and will be essential reading for undergraduate and graduate students of linguistics alike.

The Western Classical Tradition in linguistics extends from Ancient Greece to the 21st century and has spread from Europe to the other four inhabited continents. It is a story of successive stages of language study, each building upon, or reacting against, the preceding period. There is a theoretical track passing through Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics to the scholastics of the later middle ages, on to the vernacular grammarians of the renaissance, then the rationalists and universal grammarians of the 17th, 18th and 20th centuries. Joining this is a tradition relating language to thought handed on from Epicurus and Lucretius to Locke, Condillac, Humboldt, Saussure, Boas, Sapir, Whorf and today's cognitivists. There is at the same time a pedagogical track deriving from the Greek grammarians Dionysius Thrax and Apollonius Dyscolus via the Latins, Donatus, Priscian, and their commentators, a track that gives rise to prescriptivism and applied linguistics. The book's penultimate chapter examines the re-ascendancy of hypothetico-deductive theory over the inductivist theories of the early 20th century, concluding that both approaches are necessary for the proper modelling of language in the 21st century and beyond.

This book provides a vital student resource - a single-volume critical survey of the complete history of Western theoretical linguistics (grammar and semantics, including logic) from Plato till today. The volume concentrates on those issues that are of central concern to present-day theoretical linguistics, but also draws attention to episodes and issues that have unjustifiably slid into oblivion, such as the 18th century French grammarians or the great subject-predicate debate between 1850 and 1930. An effort has also been made to interpret events and developments in linguistic theory in terms of the more general cultural and economic movements of the periods concerned. It contains many expository and exegetic quotations, together with critiques of theoretical positions and, sometimes, of academic behavior. The book can serve as a basic text for a course on the history of linguistics, and as a collateral text in various courses on the theory of grammar and semantics.

A chronicle of the renaissance in kinship studies, these seventeen articles pay tribute to Per Hage, one of the founding fathers of the movement and long-time faculty member of the Department of Anthropology at the University of Utah.  With mathematician Fran Harary, Hage pioneered the use of graph theoretical models in anthropology, a systematic analysis of diverse cognitive, social, and cultural components that provides a common technical vocabulary for the entire field.  Anthropological studies have benefited from quantitative evaluation, particularly kinship, which is newly appreciated for its application to all social sciences.

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Presents a novel approach to understanding the genesis of kinship systems and how and why they change. Explores kinship in societies around the world. Special emphasis on Australian indigenous societies, which have been a source of fascination in kinship studies. One key argument in the book is that linguistic evidence for reconstruction of ancient terminologies can provide strong independent evidence to complement anthropologists' notions of structural kinship transformations and ground them in actual historical and geographical contexts.

In this groundbreaking monograph, Anna Maria Di Sciullo proposes that asymmetry --the irreversibility of a pair of elements in an ordered set -- is a hard-wired property ofmorphological relations. Her argument that asymmetry is central in derivational morphology, would,if true, make morphological objects regular objects of grammar just as syntactic and phonologicalobjects are. This contrasts with the traditional assumption that morphology is irregular and thusnot subject to the basic hard-wired regularities of form and interpretation.Di Sciullo argues thatthe asymmetric property of morphological relations is part of the language faculty. She proposes atheory of grammar, Asymmetry Theory, according to which generic operations have specificinstantiations in parallel derivations of the computational space. She posits that morphological andsyntactic relations share a property, asymmetry, but diverge with respect to other properties oftheir primitives, operations, and interface representations. Di Sciullo offers empirical support forher theory with examples from a variety of languages, including English, Modern Greek, African,Romance, Turkish, and Slavic.

Morphology is a lively, comprehensive introduction to morphological theory and analysis in contemporary generative grammar. It is designed to take absolute beginners to a point where they can approach the current literature in the subject. It contains numerous in-text exercises which involve the reader in doing morphology by formulating hypotheses and testing them against data from English and numerous other languages. Although primarily intended to be a course book for use on morphology courses, it will also be useful for students taking courses in the closely related sub-fields of phonology and syntax. The book is divided into three parts:. Part 1 surveys traditional and structuralist notions of word-structure which still provide the necessary background to morphological investigations. Part 2 explores the relationship between the lexicon, morphology and phonology in current generative grammar. Part 3 examines issues in the interaction between the lexicon, morphology and syntax.

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This is an updated and substantially revised edition of Peter Matthews's well-known Morphology, first published in 1974. It includes chapters on inflectional and lexical morphology, derivational processes and productivity, compounds, paradigms, and much new material on markedness and other aspects of iconicity. As in the first edition, the theoretical discussion is eclectic and critical: its scope ranges from the ancient grammarians to the work of Chomsky and his followers, the disintegration of the classical Chomskyan scheme, and the renewed standing of morphology and historical linguistics in recent years. The examples are drawn from English and other European languages, both ancient and modern. The work will appeal to both specialists in particular languages--it contains much original material--and students of general linguistics. For this new edition much now obsolete discussion has been removed and replaced by discussion of current trends, and the further reading sections have been thoroughly updated.

This is a textbook right in the thick of current interest in morphology. It proposes principles to predict properties previously considered arbitrary and brings together the psychological and the diachronic to explain the recurrent properties of morphological systems in terms of the processes that create them. For the student, the clear discussion of morphology and morphophonemics and the rich variety of data brought in on the way to the theoretical conclusion is material for a direct learning experience.

The separation of syntax and morphology is a major principle in contemporary lexicalist theories. The syntactic theory of Lexical-Functional Grammar recognizes this separation on a structural level but argues that both are equal, interacting, and competing contributors in a functional setting. This book discusses the relationship between morphology and LFG, reintroducing two seminal papers on the theory's impact on morphology and presenting new material on current morphological issues, including the nature of morphosyntactic paradigms and the role of optimality theory.

Theoretical Morphology provides a comprehensive and coherent treatment of contemporary morphological research and theory. A variety of theoretical paradigms are reviewed and illustrated by specific topics of debate within the field. The twenty-one chapters are divided into sections on inflection, function, historical/area studies, mapping to other components, and morphophonology.

Provides an interdisciplinary understanding of a new integrated field in which linguists can be competent in neurocognition and neuroscientists in structure linguistics.

Drawing on a wide variety of modern and classical sources and multiple disciplines, this book presents hypothesizes about the relationship between human language and thought to brain specialization.

Children often mispronounce words when learning their first language. Is it because they cannot perceive the differences that adults make or is it because they can't produce the sounds involved? Neither hypothesis is sufficient on its own to explain the facts. On the basis of detailed analyses of his son's and grandson's development, Neil Smith explains the everyday miracle of one aspect of first language acquisition. Mispronunciations are now attributed to performance rather than to competence, and he argues at length that children's productions are not mentally represented. The study also highlights the constructs of current linguistic theory, arguing for distinctive features and the notion 'onset' and against some of the claims of Optimality Theory and Usage-based accounts. Smith provides an important and engaging update to his previous work, The Acquisition of Phonology, building on ideas previously developed and drawing new conclusions with the aid of fresh data.

This volume demonstrates that phonology is a subsystem of the mind/brain and explores the theoretical and practical (including medical) consequences of this insight. Written by American and European specialists at the cutting-edge of research in areas ranging from phonetics to neurology, the book addresses central questions relating to the cognitive status of phonological representation and phonetic implementation and the links between mental and physical representation of sound systems.

This book scrutinizes recent work in phonological theory from the perspective of Chomskyan generative linguistics and argues that progress in the field depends on taking seriously the idea that phonology is best studied as a mental computational system derived from an innate base, phonological Universal Grammar. Two simple problems of phonological analysis provide a frame for a variety of topics throughout the book. The competence-performance distinction and markedness theory are both addressed in some detail, especially with reference to phonological acquisition. Several aspects of Optimality Theory, including the use of Output-Output Correspondence, functionalist argumentation and dependence on typological justification are critiqued. The authors draw on their expertise in historical linguistics to argue that diachronic evidence is often mis-used to bolster phonological arguments, and they present a vision of the proper use of such evidence. Issues of general interest for cognitive scientists, such as whether categories are discrete and whether mental computation is probabilistic are also addressed. The book ends with concrete proposals to guide future phonological research. The breadth and depth of the discussion, ranging from details of current analyses to the philosophical underpinnings of linguistic science, is presented in a direct style with as little recourse to technical language as possible.

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 of the fact that many reductive sound changes affect high frequency items first.

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Phonology as Human Behavior brings work in human cognition, behavior, and communication to bear on the study of phonology-the theory of sound systems in language. Yishai Tobin extends the ideas of William Diver-an influential linguist whose investigations into phonology reflect the principle that language represents a constant search for maximum communication with minimal effort-as a part of a new theory of phonology as human behavior. Showing the far-reaching psycho- and sociolinguistic utility of this theory, Tobin demonstrates its applicability to the teaching of phonetics, text analysis, and the theory of language acquisition. Tobin describes the methodological connection between phonological theory and phonetics by way of a comprehensive and insightful survey of phonology’s controversial role in twentieth-century linguistics. He reviews the work of Saussure, Jakobson, Troubetzkoy, Martinet, Zipf, and Diver, among others, and discusses issues in distributional phonology through analyses of English, Italian, Latin, Hebrew, and Yiddish. Using his theory to explain various functional and pathological speech disorders, Tobin examines a wide range of deviant speech processes in aphasia, the speech of the hearing-impaired, and other syndromes of organic origin.Phonology as Human Behaviorprovides a unique set of principles connecting the phylogeny, ontogeny, and pathology of sound systems in human language.

Marten explores the interaction of syntax, pragmatics, and semantics in the behavior of verb phrases and how they interact with the information provided by the verb. He also considers how the component elements of linguistic theory explain what appear to be simple utterances, but whose structure is hard to analyze--how, for example, "Fran is baking Mary a cake in the oven" is different from "Fran is baking Mary a cake in the kitchen".

The author offers a theory of human communication that is both formalized through logic and empirically validated through experimental data and clinical studies. Bara argues that communication is a cooperative activity in which two ormore agents together consciously and intentionally construct the meaning of their interaction. Intrue communication (which Bara distinguishes from the mere transmission of information), all theactors must share a set of mental states. Bara takes a cognitive perspective,investigating communication not from the viewpoint of an external observer (as is the practice in linguistics and the philosophy of language) but from within the mind of the individual. Bara examines communicative interaction through the notion of behavior and dialogue games, which structure both the generation and the comprehension of the communication act (either language or gesture). He describes both standard communication and nonstandard communication (which includesdeception, irony, and "as-if" statements). Failures are analyzed in detail, with possible solutionsexplained. Bara investigates communicative competence in both evolutionary and developmental terms,tracing its emergence from hominids to Homo sapiens and defining the stages of its development in humans from birth to adulthood.

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Introduction to Pragmatics guides students through traditional and new approaches in the field, focusing particularly on phenomena at the elusive semantics/pragmatics boundary to explore the role of context in linguistic communication. Offers students an accessible introduction and an up-to-date survey of the field, encompassing both established and new approaches to pragmatics Addresses the traditional range of topics - such as implicature, reference, presupposition, and speech acts - as well as newer areas of research, including neo-Gricean theories, Relevance Theory, information structure, inference, and dynamic approaches to meaning Explores the relationship and boundaries between semantics and pragmatics Ideal for students coming to pragmatics for the first time

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This book combines theoretical work in linguistic pragmatics and sociolinguistics with empirical work based on a corpus of London adolescent conversation. It makes a general contribution to the study of pragmatic markers, as it proposes an analytical model that involves notions such as subjectivity, interactional and textual capacity, and the distinction between contextual alignment/divergence. These notions are defined according to how information contained in an utterance interacts with the cognitive environment of the hearer. Moreover, the model captures the diachronic development of markers from lexical items via processes of grammaticalisation, arguing that markerhood may be viewed as a gradient phenomenon. The empirical work concerns the use of like as a marker, as well as a characteristic use of two originally interrogative forms, innit and is it, which are used as attitudinal markers throughout the inflectional paradigm, despite the fact that they contain a third person singular neuter pronoun. The author provides an in-depth analysis of these features in terms of pragmatic functions, diachronic development and sociolinguistic variation, thus adding support to the hypothesis that adolescents play an important role in language variation and change.

The first truly multidisciplinary text of its kind, this book offers an original analysis of the current state of linguistic pragmatics. Cummings argues that no study of pragmatics can reasonably neglect the historical and contemporary influences on this discipline of neighboring fields of inquiry, particularly philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, and language pathology. By the same token, these fields can begin to address their own questions more productively by examining the insights of pragmatics. The book's range of topics and depth of analysis will be of interest to advanced undergraduate and more specialized readers in linguistics, communication studies, speech and language therapy, and cognitive science. Topics discussed include: *coverage of pragmatic concepts and theories; *criticisms of Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory, Habermas's theory of communicative competence, and Kasher's views on the modularity of pragmatics; *pragmatic deficits in a range of child and adult language disorders; and *a pragmatic analysis of argumentation in topical issues such as AIDS and BSE theories of meaning, inferences, pragmatics and AI.

Professor Recanati's book is a major new contribution to the philosophy of language. Its point of departure is a refutation of two views central to the work of speech-act theorists such as Austin & Searle: that speech acts are essentially conventional, & that the force of an utterance can be made fully explicit at the level of sentence-meaning & is in principle a matter of linguistic decoding. The author argues that no utterance can be fully understood simply in terms of its linguistic meaning, but that only a contextual inference can provide an adequate framework. In pursuit of this argument, he deals with the major issues of pragmatics & speech-act theory: conversational implicatives & indirect speech acts, the classification of illocutionary forces, the performative/constative distinction, delocutivity, locutionary meaning, non-literal uses of languages, the principle of expressibilty, & the difference between institutional & communicative illocutionary acts.

Examines through a philosophical lens the role of subject matter in meaning.

This book is an investigation into the nature of language--the social practices that distinguish us as rational, logical creatures--that revises the very terms of this inquiry. Where accounts of the relation between language and mind have traditionally rested on the concept of representation, this book sets out an alternate approach based on inference, and on a conception of certain kinds of implicit assessment that become explicit in language.

Discusses fundamental concepts for linguistic semantics.

Argues that we involuntarily experience certain physical items, certain products of human actions, and certain human actions themselves as having meaning-properties.

The aim of this book is to take students from a basic knowledge of syntax up to the point where they are able to read the primary research literature and understand the latest theoretical developments.

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 current work in historical syntax is responsive to theoretical advances in linguistic theory, language acquisition, sociolinguistics, and theories of language use, as well as to less adjacent fields such as statistical techniques and evolutionary biology.

This ground-breaking volume sets out an original model of the dynamics of language processing, which can be used to explain the structural properties of language in a simple and elegant way. The model is introduced both informally and formally, and is applied to a range of languages.

This three-volume survey brings together a team of leading scholars to explore the syntactic and morphological structures of the world's languages. Clearly organized and broad-ranging, it covers topics such as parts-of-speech, passives, complementation, relative clauses, adverbial clauses, inflectional morphology, tense, aspect, mood, and diexis. The contributors look at the major ways that these notions are realized, and provide informative sketches of them at work in a range of languages. Each volume is accessibly written and clearly explains each concept introduced. Although the volumes can be read independently, together they provide an indispensable reference work for all linguists and fieldworkers interested in cross-linguistic generalizations. Most of the chapters in the second edition are substantially revised - some on topics not covered by the first edition. Volume III covers typological distinctions in word formation, lexical typologies, inflectional morphology, gender and noun classes, aspect, tense, mood, and lexical nominalization.

This book reviews interdisciplinary work on the mental processing of syntax and morphology. It focuses on the fundamental questions at the centre of this research, for example whether language processing proceeds in a serial or a parallel manner; which areas of the brain support the processing of syntactic and morphological information; whether there are neurophysiological correlates of language processing; and the degree to which neurolinguistic findings on syntactic and morphological processing are consistent with theoretical conceptions of syntax and morphology. The authors describe the outcomes of methods in neurophysiology (for example, functional magnetic resonance imaging), behavioural psycholinguistics, and neuropsychological lesion studies, and provide brief introductions to the methods themselves. They extend basic findings at the word and sentence level by considering how the mental processing of syntax and morphology relates to prosody, discourse, semantics, and world knowledge. They have divided the work into four parts concerned with word structure, sentence structure, processing syntax and morphology at the interfaces, and a comparison of different models of syntactic and morphological processing in the neurophysiological domain.

In this book leading scholars address the issues surrounding the syntax-phonology interface. These principally concern whether the phonological component can influence syntax and if so how far and in what ways: such questions are a prominent component of current work on the biolinguistics of speech production and reception. The problematic relationship between syntax and phonology has long piqued the interest of syntacticians and phonologists: the connections between sound and structure have played a key role in generative grammar from its inception, initially relating to focus and the prosodic marking of constituent structure and more recently to word-order constraints. This book advances this work in a series of critical and interlinked presentations of the latest thinking and research. In doing so it draws on data from a wide range of languages, evidence from disordered language, and related work in language acquisition.

In this work, Ken Safir develops a comprehensive theory on the role of anaphora in syntax. First, he contends that the complementary distribution of forms that support the anaphoric readings is not accidental, contrary to most current thinking, but rather should be derived from a principle, one that he proposes in the form of an algorithm. Secondly, he maintains that dependent identity relations are always possible where they are not prohibited by a constraint. Lastly, he proposes that there are no parameters of anaphora - that all anaphora-specific principles are universal, and that the patterns of anaphora across languages arise entirely from a restricted set of lexical properties. This comprehensive consideration of anaphora redirects current thinking on the subject.

Human language seems to have arisen roughly within the last 50-100,000 years. In evolutionary terms, this is the mere blink of an eye. If this is correct, then much of what we consider distinctive to language must in fact involve operations available in pre-linguistic cognitive domains. In this book Norbert Hornstein, one of the most influential linguists working on syntax, discusses a topical set of issues in syntactic theory, including a number of original proposals at the cutting edge of research in this area. He provides a theory of the basic grammatical operations and suggests that there is only one that is distinctive to language. If this theory is correct then this narrows the evolutionary gap between verbal and non-verbal primates, thus facilitating the rapid evolutionary emergence of our linguistic capacity.

An introduction to the logic of the minimalist program - arguably the most important branch of syntax. Proposes a new theory of how long-distance dependencies are formed, with implications for theories of locality, and the minimalist program as a whole. Introduces the logic of the minimalist program by..