General

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...

This introduction to West Indian poetry is written for readers making their first approach to poetry in English written in the Caribbean. It offers a comprehensive literary history from the 1920s to the 1980s, with particular attention to the...

Grammatical Categories and Cognition uses original, empirical data to examine the Sapir-Whorf linguistic relativity hypothesis: the proposal that the grammar of the particular language we speak affects the way we think about reality. The author compares...

This authoritative and wide-ranging book, first published in 2003, examines the history of western linguistics over a 2000-year timespan, from its origins in ancient Greece up to the crucial moment of change in the Renaissance that laid the foundations...

Many scholars of language have accepted a view of grammar as a clearly delineated and internally coherent structure which is best understood as a self-contained system. The contributors to this volume propose a very different way of approaching and...

Lexicalization, a process of language change, has been conceptualized in a variety of ways. Broadly defined as the adoption of concepts into the lexicon, it has been viewed by syntacticians as the reverse process of grammaticalization, by morphologists...

The global spread of English has resulted in the emergence of a diverse range of postcolonial varieties around the world. Postcolonial English provides a clear and original account of the evolution of these varieties, exploring the historical, social and...

Language policy is all about choices. If you are bilingual or plurilingual, you have to choose which language to use. Even if you speak only one language, you have choices of dialects and styles. Some of these choices are the result of management,...

Literacy continues to be a central issue in anthropology, but methods of perceiving and examining it have changed in recent years. In this 1995 study Niko Besnier analyses the transformation of Nukulaelae from a non-literate into a literate society using...

The importance of J. M. Coetzee in the development of twentieth-century fiction is widely recognised. His work addresses some of the key issues of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: the relationship between postmodernism and...

Hundreds of millions of people use English every day everywhere in the world, but may or may not succeed in understanding each other. Despite the success of its standard form (or forms) in many countries, the complex called 'English' is immensely diverse...

These two volumes present the methodology and results of an international research project on second language acquisition by adult immigrants. This project went beyond other studies in at least three respects: in the number of languages studied...

This thoroughly revised and updated edition of Downes' textbook is an accessible introduction to the social aspects of language and their various explanations. Topics covered include domains of language use, language change, code-switching, speech as...

This 1993 book traces language policy in Australia from World War II to the present, examining the changes in government policy over this time, and changes in major public institutions due to the presence of these languages. The major focus is on changes...

Now available to an English-speaking audience, this book is a comprehensive grammar of classical Nahuatl, the literary language of the Aztecs. It offers students of Nahuatl a complete and clear treatment of the language's structure, grammar and...

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...

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...

These two volumes present the methodology and results of an international research project on second language acquisition by adult immigrants. This project went beyond other studies in at least three respects: in the number of languages studied...

Language is regarded, at least in most intellectual traditions, as the quintessential human attribute, at once evidence and source of most that is considered transcendent in us, distinguishing ours from the merely mechanical nature of the beast. Even if...

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This book deals with the ways in which French is used in different circumstances and settings in France and abroad, with the language attitudes of French speakers and with language policy. It is concerned to examine not only the linguistic data, but also...

Without even considering the 150 Aboriginal languages still spoken, Australia has an unparalleled mix of languages other than English in common usage, languages often described by the term 'community'. Drawing on census data and other statistics, this...

This book examines the interrelations between language and society in the German-speaking countries. The questions 'what is German and who speaks it?' and 'how does the language vary dependent on social, political and geographical factors?' are addressed...

This collection of essays is a major contribution to the study of oral composition and ritual communication, and in particular to the use of 'parallelism' (the poetic ordering of words and phrases in alternative, duplicate form). The introduction by...

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...