Historical & Comparative

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...

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Academic and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book draws on a detailed...

An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and the OAPEN library.The consequences of English's spread have become increasingly clear to its diverse speakers. Sometimes associated with a standardization...

Originally published in 1969, this book examines the factors which at different historical periods led people to use one language (Swahili) rather than another, or within a given period, to use a particular language in one set of circumstances. The...

One of the most spoken dialects in China, Southeast Asia, and globally, Cantonese was nevertheless deemed a local dialect enjoying little prestige among the intellectuals. Not much was recorded in official documents or gazetteers about the early history...

This collection of essays brings to Jewish Language Studies the conceptual frameworks that have become increasingly important to Jewish Studies more generally: transnationalism, multiculturalism, globalization, hybrid cultures, multilingualism, and...

Informative and entertaining essays on the accents, dialects, and speech patterns particular to Alabama. Thomas E. Nunnally's fascinating volume presents essays by linguists who examine with affection and curiosity the speech varieties occurring both...

Over thirty internationally recognized scholars have contributed these studies in honour of noted Anatolianist and Indo-Europeanist Norbert Oettinger, including Bernhard Forssman, Heinrich Hettrich, Michael Janda, Jean Kellens, Hartmut Matthaus, Stefan...

The third installment in the landmark LAVIS (Language Variety in the South) series, New Perspectives on Language Variety in the South: Historical and Contemporary Approaches brings together essays devoted to the careful examination and elucidation of the...

As rich as the development of the Spanish and Portuguese language has been in Latin America, no single book has attempted to chart their complex history. Gathering essays by sociohistorical linguists working across the region, Salikoko S. Mufwene does...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9788763542098Author Robert MailhammerFormat HardbackPage Count 320Imprint Museum Tusculanum PressPublisher Museum Tusculanum PressWeight(grams)...

A pioneering collection of new research that explores categories, constructions, and change in the syntax of the English language. The volume, with contributions by world-renowned scholars as well as some emerging scholars in the field, covers a wide...

This book provides a new explanation for what has long been a challenge for scholars of Biblical Hebrew: how to understand the expression of verbal tense and aspect.Working from a representative text corpus, combined with database queries of specific...

Akkadian, a Semitic language attested in writing from 2600 BCE until the first century CE, was the language of Mesopotamia for nearly three millennia. This volume examines the language from a comparative and historical linguistic perspective. Inspired by...

The Tudors are one of the best known royal families in English history. Over three generations, they constructed and maintained their status and authority during a period of social, political and religious unrest. This book examines the textual basis of...

The Hittite language is the earliest preserved member of the Indo-European family of languages. It was written on clay tablets in central Asia Minor over a five hundred year span (ca. 1650-1180 B.C.) which witnessed the rise, the floruit, and the decline...

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read on the Oxford Academic platform and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. This book provides a...

This volume is the first systematic, corpus-based examination of dative external possessors in Old and Early Middle English and their diachronic development. Modern English is unusual among European languages in not having a productive dative external...

Of outstanding value to both runologist and Anglo-Saxonist alike. EARLY MEDIEVAL EUROPE Discussion of the forms of the runic alphabet and interpretations of individual inscriptions, with consideration of wider matters on which runes throw light - magic,...

In The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution, sixty leading scholars present critical accounts of every aspect of the field. Its five parts are devoted to insights from comparative animal behaviour; the biology of language evolution; the prehistory of...

This Language, A River is an introduction to the history of English that recognizes multiple varieties of the language in both current and historical contexts. Developed over years of undergraduate teaching, the book helps students to both grasp...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781894865449Author Michael MoserFormat PaperbackPage Count 680Imprint Canadian Institute of Ukrainian StudiesPublisher Canadian Institute of Ukrainian...

What role do metaphors play in philosophical language? Are they impediments to clear thinking and clear expression, rhetorical flourishes that may well help to make philosophy more accessible to a lay audience, but that ought ideally to be eradicated in...

Sorry no description is available for this book at this time.

This book, the second volume in A Linguistic History of English, describes the development of Old English from Proto-Germanic. Like Volume I, it is an internal history of the structure of English that combines traditional historical linguistics, modern...

Writing: Theory and History of the Technology of Civilization offers a coherent system of terms and categories for the study of the complex phenomena in the world's writing systems. Tracing the origins of writing tied to speech from ancient Sumer...

This volume combines Rousseau's essay on the origin of diverse languages with Herder's essay on the genesis of the faculty of speech. Rousseau's essay is important to semiotics and critical theory, as it plays a central role in Jacques Derrida's book Of...

From fjords to mountains, schools of herring to herds of reindeer, Scandinavia is rich in astonishing natural beauty. Less well known, however, is that it is also rich in languages. Home to seven languages, Scandinavia has traditionally been understood...

How can we reconstruct the rhythms and cadences - the prosody - of past languages? Prosody in Medieval English and Norse approaches this problem by comparing two closely related languages with a long written history in the Middle Ages. Through a series...

A New Yorker Best Book of 2022 A Globe & Mail Book of the Year "A stimulating work on the politics of language." LA Review of Books As globalisation continues languages are disappearing faster than ever, leaving our planet's linguistic diversity...

From the dawn of the early modern period around 1400 until the eighteenth century, Latin was still the European language and its influence extended as far as Asia and the Americas. At the same time, the production of Latin writing exploded thanks to book...

An Introduction to Middle High German is a dedicated student edition of The Oxford Guide to Middle High German (Jones & Jones; OUP, 2019) designed for taught courses and self-study. It offers a detailed account of the language and literature of German in...

Charting the major developments in the morphology of English, this book introduces students to English inflectional and derivational morphology, presenting them with a long-range perspective of language change. The book is also built around the...

Unlike other histories of the English language, this introduction cuts away traditional divisions into old, middle and modern English to chart the rise of and changes in standard English. It covers the English and historical background, changes in...

Recognized as a finalist for the CAE 2018 Outstanding Book Award! Part historic ethnography, part linguistic case study and part a mother's memoir, Kisisi tells the story of two boys (Colin and Sadiki) who, together invented their own language, and of...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780312610494Author Guy DeutscherFormat PaperbackPage Count 320Imprint St Martin's PressPublisher St Martin's PressWeight(grams) 408gDimensions(mm) 235mm *...

Linguistic Archaeology provides students with an accessible introduction to the field of linguistic archaeology, both as theoretical framework and methodological toolkit, for understanding the conceptual foundations and practical considerations involved...

The vocabulary of past times, no longer used in English, is always fascinating, especially when we see how it was pilloried by the satirists of the day. Here we have Victorian high and low society, with its fashionable and unfashionable slang, its...