General

Ayhan Aksu-Koc's empirical research on Turkish children's acquisition of the past tense forms the basis for this original and important contribution to the current debate among psycholinguistics on the interrelationship between language and cognitive...

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...

In this study Donna Jo Napoli takes a common-sense approach to the notions of argument and predicate. Discussions of predication within Government and Binding theory have stressed the configurational properties of the phrases involved, and Napoli argues...

Originally published in 1987, the aim of this book is to advance a fresh perspective on the presentation, philology, analysis, and interpretation of oral literature and verbal art. Developed through commentaries and analysis of a range of texts from...

This book describes the ways in which politicians, church leaders, generals, leaders of national movements and others try to influence our use of language. Professor Cooper argues that language planning is never attempted for its own sake. Rather it is...

First published in 1977, this book draws together various contributions on the area of speech used by parents with their children. Numerous perspectives on the topic include the comparison of baby talk with other simplified registers by linguists, the...

The way children learn their native language has been the subject of intense and widespread investigation in the last decades, stimulated by advances in theoretical linguistics and the behavioural sciences. For the student, this has meant a bewildering...

This 1976 book provides both a historical survey and a critical analysis of the literature in French from West and Equatorial Africa. Professor Blair begins by discussing the social, educational and political influences which led to the formation of the...

When A Functional Approach to Child Language first appeared in hardback in 1979, it was quickly recognized as a research report of the first rank and a timely, critical exposition of Piaget's views on language and thought. Whilst accepting the...

'Metaphor' is the phenomenon whereby we talk and, potentially, think about something in terms of something else. In this book Elena Semino discusses metaphor as a common linguistic occurrence, which is varied in its textual appearance, versatile in the...

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This 1986 textbook presents an account of the main concerns, problems and theoretical and practical issues raised by second language acquisition research. Research in this field had been mainly pedagogically oriented, but since the 1970s linguists and...

We live our lives in conversation, building families, societies and civilisations. In over seven thousand languages across the world, the basic infrastructure by which we communicate remains the same. This is the first ever book-length linguistic...

In the seventeenth century, a series of proposals and schemes for an artificial language intended to replace Latin as the international medium of communication gained currency. Fully developed, these schemes consisted of a classification of all known...

Old English provides a clear linguistic introduction to English between the 5th century and the Norman invasion in 1066. Tailored to suit the needs of individual course modules, it assumes no prior knowledge of the subject, and presents the basic facts...

First published in 1970, this book examines the traditional grammar, very briefly for its Greek and Latin origins, and fully during its first two hundred years as 'English' grammar. It asks when the application of Latin grammar to English was made; how...

The book presents a series of studies that probe young children's knowledge of a relatively well-defined, abstract semantic realm, that of definite and indefinite reference. Topics investigated include children's knowledge of the difference between...

Medical and scientific writing in English has evolved over more than a millennium, from its genesis in the Anglo-Saxon era to its present-day position as the 'lingua franca' of science. This 2004 volume focuses on its development as a genre in late...

How and why did grammatical gender, found in Old English and in other Germanic languages, gradually disappear from English and get replaced by a system where the gender of nouns and the use of personal pronouns depend on the natural gender of the...

Conditional constructions have long fascinated linguists, grammarians and philosophers. In this pioneering new study, Barbara Dancygier and Eve Sweetser offer a new descriptive framework for the study of conditionality, broadening the range of richly...

This 1973 text was the first detailed study of that phenomenon of the African literary scene, Onitsha market literature. Pen names and pamphlet titles adopted by Onitsha authors have often been the subject of amused comment, but it took a long time for...

Jeff Siegel's fascinating book provides a sociolinguistic history of language contact in Fiji where, from the 1860s until 1920, some 90,000 labourers from other Pacific islands and from India worked on the European-owned plantations. It focuses on the...

This study focuses on the cognitive processes involved in creole genesis - relexification, reanalysis and direct levelling - processes which the author demonstrates play a significant role in language genesis and change in general. Dr Lefebvre argues...

In this book, Nomi Erteschik-Shir develops a new theory of focus structure, integrating insights from syntax, semantics, phonology and pragmatics. She explores the role of focus structure in grammar, examining the interface between focus structure and...

Douglas Biber's new book extends and refines the research and methodology reported in his ground breaking Variation Across Speech and Writing (CUP 1988). In Dimensions of Register Variation he gives a linguistic analysis of register in four widely...

Chinese and Americans often unwittingly communicate at cross purposes because they are misled by the cultural trappings of talk. This book aims to clarify their misunderstandings by examining their different ideals and strategies of talk. It draws on...

Lexical semantics has become a major research area within computational linguistics, drawing from psycholinguistics, knowledge representation, computer algorithms and architecture. Research programmes whose goal is the definition of large lexicons are...

Alzheimer's disease is a degenerative brain disease which has major social consequences for the individuals affected and for those people who are emotionally and/or physically close to them. The role which language plays in such relationships stands at...

This is a collection of new papers by leading researchers on natural language parsing. In the past, the problem of how people parse the sentences they hear - determine the identity of the words in these sentences and group these words into larger units -...

This book develops a formal computational theory of writing systems. It offers specific proposals about the linguistic objects that are represented by orthographic elements; what levels of linguistic representation are involved and how they may differ...

Based on intensive fieldwork in an urban American junior high school, this original study explores the relationship between oral and written texts in everyday life by analysing tellings and retellings of local events, diaries, writings and discussions...

This study sheds light on the complex relationship between cognitive and linguistic categories. Challenging the view of cases as categories in cognitive space, Professor Schlesinger proposes an understanding of the concept of case. Drawing on evidence...

Language is a means we use to communicate feelings; we also reflect emotionally on the language we and others use. James Wilce analyses the signals people use to express emotion, looking at the social, cultural and political functions of emotional...

This book traces the changing conditions of literacy learning over the past century as they were felt in the lives of Americans born between 1895 and 1985. The book demonstrates what sharply rising standards for literacy have meant to successive...

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New languages are constantly emerging, as existing languages diverge into different forms. To explain this fascinating process, we need to understand how languages change and how they emerge in children. In this pioneering study, David Lightfoot explains...

This is the third edition of Chomsky's outstanding collection of essays on language and mind, first published in 2006. The first six chapters, originally published in the 1960s, made a groundbreaking contribution to linguistic theory. This edition...

English has been spoken in Ireland for over 800 years, making Irish English the oldest variety of the language outside Britain. This 2007 book traces the development of English in Ireland, both north and south, from the late Middle Ages to the present...

If the English language is a glorious garden, filled with exotic hybrids and the continuing tradition of heritage specimens, then it is no surprise that we will also find some weeds. Linguistic weeds may have pronunciations we don't want or constructions...

How do children acquire African American English? How do they develop the specific language patterns of their communities? Drawing on spontaneous speech samples and data from structured elicitation tasks, this book explains the developmental trends in...