Historical & Comparative

This book offers a large-scale quantitative investigation of referential null subjects as they occur in Old, Middle, and Early Modern English. Using corpus linguistic methods, and drawing on five corpora of early English, it empirically examines the...

This book provides a thorough investigation of the expression of sentential negation in the history of Greek. It draws on both quantitative data from texts dating from three major stages of vernacular Greek (Attic Greek, Koine, and Late Medieval Greek),...

In Motion and the English Verb, a study of the expression of motion in medieval English, Judith Huber provides extensive inventories of verbs used in intransitive motion meanings in Old and Middle English, and discusses these in terms of the...

Poetic Conventions as Cognitive Fossils offers a major theoretical statement of where poetic conventions come from. The work comprises Reuven Tsur's research in cognitive poetics to show how conventional poetic styles originate from cognitive rather than...

As the most widely documented language in human history, English holds a unique key to unlocking some of the mysteries of the uniquely human endowment of language. Yet the field of World Englishes has remained somewhat marginal in linguistic theory. This...

Although the era of European colonialism has long passed, misgivings about the inequality of the encounters between European and non-European languages persist in many parts of the postcolonial world. This unfinished state of affairs, this lingering...

This volume explores the multiple aspects of cyclical syntactic change from a wide range of empirical perspectives. The notion of 'linguistic cycle' has long been recognized as being relevant to the description of many processes of language change. In...

This volume explores word order change within the framework of diachronic generative syntax. Word order is at the core of natural language grammatical systems, linking syntax with prosody and with semantics and pragmatics. The chapters in this volume use...

Kokugaku "national study" is an academic field of study that spans a number of disciplines, including philology, poetry, literature, linguistics, history, religion, and philosophy. It began as a movement to recapture a sense of Japanese uniqueness, by...

Danilo Marcondes argues that, contrary to a traditional view maintaining that language is not given any central role in early modern philosophy, there was what could be considered an "early linguistic turn" in the seventeenth century, opening a place for...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9783954901081Author Leon GoldmanFormat HardbackPage Count 272Imprint Dr Ludwig ReichertPublisher Dr Ludwig ReichertWeight(grams) 363gDimensions(mm) 239mm *...

In this book the authors draw together work from cognitive science, linguistics, Paleolithic anthropology, art history, and semiotics, the authors offer commentary on their own process of discovery and bases for communicating the key ideas across...

The Old Prussian language has always puzzled linguists. While other Baltic languages, such as Lithuanian and Latvian, have remained in use to the present day, Old Prussian was extinguished at the beginning of eighteenth century, and the extant Old...

Based on a case study of the evolution of "finish" morphemes in Yue and Zhuang Tai-Kadai, this book examines how an internal factor (grammaticalization) and an external factor (language contact) interacted to produce the polyfunctionality of the specific...

By challenging assumptions regarding the proximity between Egyptian and Semitic Languages, Ancient Egyptian and Afroasiatic provides a fresh approach to the relationships and similarities between Ancient Egyptian, Semitic, and Afroasiatic languages. ...

From the Constitution to the Bible, from literary classics to political sound bites, our modern lives are filled with numerous texts that govern and influence our behavior and beliefs. Whether in the courtrooms of our judiciaries or over our dining room...

Elly van Gelderen provides examples of linguistic cycles from a number of languages and language families, along with an account of the linguistic cycle in terms of minimalist economy principles. A cycle involves grammaticalization from lexical to...

Poetic Conventions as Cognitive Fossils offers a major theoretical statement of where poetic conventions come from. The work comprises Reuven Tsur's research in cognitive poetics to show how conventional poetic styles originate from cognitive rather than...

The History of the English Language has been a standard university course offering for over 150 years. Yet relatively little has been written about teaching a course whose very title suggests its prodigious chronological, geographic, and disciplinary...

Case Marking and Grammatical Relations in Polynesian makes an outstanding contribution to both Polynesian and historical linguistics. It is at once a reference work describing Polynesian syntax, an investigation of the role of grammatical relations in...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781474442565Author Patrick HoneyboneFormat HardbackPage Count 320Imprint Edinburgh University PressPublisher Edinburgh University Press

?Por que? 101 Questions about Spanish is for anyone who wants to understand how Spanish really works. Standard textbooks and grammars describe the "what" of Spanish - its vocabulary, grammar, spelling, and pronunciation - but ?Por que? explains the "why"...

Is English changing? To what degree is it changing? Is this change good or bad? In answering these questions, Is English Changing? provides a lively and concise introduction to language change, refuting commonly held misconceptions about language...

The concept of politeness permeates all aspects of modern life and society. However, to what extent has this phenomenon changed over time? This book traces the elusive concept of politeness from its beginnings in the Middle Ages up to the present day...

This lively account of the making of Canadian English traces the variety's conceptual, social and linguistic developments from the twentieth century to the present. This book is not just another history of Canadian English; it is a history of the...

Combining statistical modelling and archival study, English and Empire investigates how African diasporic, Chinese, and Indian characters have been voiced in British fiction and drama produced between 1768 and 1929. The analysis connects patterns of...

Transforming Early English shows how historical pragmatics can offer a powerful explanatory framework for the changes medieval English and Older Scots texts undergo, as they are transmitted over time and space. The book argues that formal features such...

How can we unravel the evolution of language, given that there is no direct evidence about it? Rudolf Botha addresses this intriguing question in his fascinating new book. Inferences can be drawn about language evolution from a range of other phenomena,...

Binomials, such as for and against, dead or alive, to have and to hold, can be broadly defined as two words belonging to the same grammatical category and linked by a semantic relationship. They are an important phraseological phenomenon present...

Written by an international team of leading scholars, this engaging textbook on the study of English historical linguistics is uniquely organized in terms of theoretical approaches and perspectives. Each chapter features textboxes, case studies,...

This path-breaking study of the standardisation of English goes well beyond the traditional prescriptivism versus descriptivism debate. It argues that the way norms are established and enforced is the result of a complex network of social factors and...

Contributions from an international team of experts revisit and update the concept of linguistic ecology in order to critically examine current theoretical approaches to language contact. Language is understood as a part of complex...

This is the second book in a two-volume comparative history of negation in the languages of Europe and the Mediterranean. The work integrates typological, general, and theoretical research, documents patterns and directions of change in negation across...

The linguistic character of the 'biblical' Dead Sea Scrolls has been of interest to scholars since the very beginning of scrolls research. However, scholars have disagreed over the nature of the language found in those scrolls. Some argue that the...

This book presents a thorough investigation of the main diachronic changes that have taken place in the palatal sounds of the Romance languages, as well as their current patterns of synchronic variation. Andre Zampaulo draws on extensive data not only...

This volume is part of a wider project aiming at mapping the technical medical terminology as it features in medieval Hebrew medical works, especially those terms that do not feature in the current dictionaries at all, or insufficiently. In this way the...

Changing Names investigates, in relation to the ancient Greek world, the ways in which preferences in personal name-giving change: through shifts in population, cultural contact and imperialism, the popularity of new gods, celebrity status of...

This book explores the long history of the Arabic language, from pre-Islamic Arabic via the Classical era of the Arabic grammarians up to the present day. While most traditional accounts have been dominated by a linear understanding of the development of...

This volume brings together the latest diachronic research on syntactic features and their role in restricting syntactic change. The chapters address a central theoretical issue in diachronic syntax: whether syntactic variation can always be attributed...

This volume brings together an international group of linguists from a diverse range of research backgrounds to explore the cycles of change in the world's languages. Historical linguistics does not solely focus on reconstructing a language's linguistic...