Historical and comparative linguistics Books

Book SynopsisThis book provides a pioneering introduction to heritage languages and their speakers, written by one of the founders of this new field. Using examples from a wide range of languages, it covers all the main components of grammar, including phonetics and phonology, morphology and morphosyntax, semantics and pragmatics, and shows easy familiarity with approaches ranging from formal grammar to typology, from sociolinguistics to child language acquisition and other relevant aspects of psycholinguistics. The book offers analysis of resilient and vulnerable domains in heritage languages, with a special emphasis on recurrent structural properties that occur across multiple heritage languages. It is explicit about instances where, based on our current knowledge, we are unable to reach a clear decision on a particular claim or analytical point, and therefore provides a much-needed resource for future research.Trade Review'Maria Polinsky has written a comprehensive and authoritative work that will be an indispensable point of reference for future research on heritage languages. Her book takes a very detailed look at heritage languages, but it never loses sight of a central question for all linguists: what does it mean to be a speaker of a language?' Grant Goodall, University of California, San Diego'This volume is thorough, comprehensive, and multifaceted, capturing the uniqueness, complexities and subtleties that characterize heritage language. A plethora of concrete research evidence from numerous languages is provided to illustrate the points made.' Mitsuyo Sakamoto, LINGUIST ListTable of Contents1. Introduction; 2. Heritage English; 3. How to study heritage speakers: some observations on the methodologies and approaches; 4. Phonetics and phonology; 5. Morphology and morphosyntax; 6. Syntax; 7. Semantics and pragmatics; 8. Heritage speakers in unexpected places; Conclusions.

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Book Synopsis1 English the working tongue of the global village. -PART I: History of an island language.- 2 The first 500 years.- 3 1066 and All That.- 4 Modern English in the making.- PART II: The spread of English around the world.- 5 English goes to the New World. -6 English transplanted.- 7 English varieties in the British Isles.- 8 American and British English.- 9 English, pidgins and creoles.- PART III: A changing language in changing times.- 10 The standard language today.- 11 Linguistic change in progress: Back to the Inner Circle.- 2 Electronic English.- 13 English into the future.- Notes: Comments and References.- References.- Index of people.- Index of topics.- Pronunciation.                                     Trade Review Table of Contents

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Book SynopsisConstanze Weth is at the Institute for Research on Multilingualism, University of Luxembourg, LuxembourgKasper Juffermans is at the Institute for Research on Multilingualism, University of Luxembourg, LuxembourgTrade ReviewA fascinating collection of studies of conflict between writing and speech. * Linguistic Landscape *Taking its readers from medieval Russia to nineteenth century Western Europe and further to present settings in Africa, Asia and Europe ... This edited volume is an interesting and valuable publication for researchers and scholars dealing with (standard) language ideologies especially in bi- or multilingual settings as well as researchers interested in language standardization processes and the power of writing and writing systems within this context. * LINGUIST List *Table of ContentsPreface 1. The tyranny of writing in language and society, Constanze Weth (University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg) and Kasper Juffermans (University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg) 2. Revisiting the 'tyranny of writing', Florian Coulmas (University of Duisburg-Essen, Germany) 3. How to write a birch-bark letter: Vernacular orthography in medieval Novgorod, Daniel Buncic (University of Cologne, Germany) 4. The end of the standard language: The rise and fall of a European language culture, Joop van der Horst (University of Leuven, Belgium) 5. The tyranny of Orthography: Multilingualism and Frenchification at primary schools in late 19th-century France, Manuela Böhm (University of Kassel, Germany) 6. Ideologies of language and literacy in the German educational reform movement at the end of the long 19th century, Ulrich Mehlem (Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany) 7. When God is a linguist: Missionary orthographies as a site of social differentiation and the technology of location, Ashraf Abdelhay (Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, Qatar), Busi Makoni (Pennsylvania State University, USA) and Sinfree Makoni (Pennsylvania State University, USA and University of South Africa, South Africa) 8. Standard English, cricket, nationalism and tyrannies of writing in Sri Lanka, Harshana Rambukwella (Open University of Sri Lanka, Sri Lanka) 9. Escaping the tyranny of writing: West African regimes of writing as a model for multilingual literacy, Friederike Lupke (SOAS, University of London, UK) 10. Writing Chinese: A challenge for Cantonese-L1 and South Asian Hongkongers, David C. S. Li (Hong Kong Polytechnic University) 11. Fangyan and the linguistic landscapes of authenticity: Normativity and innovativity of writing in Globalizing China, Xuan Wang (Tilburg University, Netherlands) 12. Dialect authenticity upside down: Brabantish writing practices of a black comedian on Twitter, Jos Swanenberg (Tilburg University, Netherlands) 13. Salty politics and linguistics in the Balearic Islands: Tracing a nonstandard iconization in metalinguistic Facebook communities, Lucas Duane (University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg and Open University of Catalonia, Spain) Contributors Index

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Book SynopsisAre you more likely .. .to take the bull by the horns or beat around the bush? Don’t let anyone call you on the carpet for failing to put your best foot forward. That would be a bitter pill to swallow. In the long run, it’s easier to just bite the bullet and get your ducks in a row. After all, nobody likes the taste of humble pie.You’ve likely uttered at least one of these adages within the last week, but have you ever stopped to consider where such conversational staples originated? Why You Say It reveals the backstory of more than six hundred words and phrases that pepper our everyday dialogue. This catalog of our language’s most colorful expressions delivers an illuminating read for anyone curious about the evolution of words.

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This study embarks on the intriguing quest for the origins of the Caribbean creole language Papiamentu. In the literature on the issue, widely diverging hypotheses have been advanced, but scholars have not come close to a consensus. The present study casts new and long-lasting light on the issue, putting forward compelling interdisciplinary evidence that Papiamentu is genetically related to the Portuguese-based creoles of the Cape Verde Islands, Guinea-Bissau, and Casamance (Senegal). Following the trans-Atlantic transfer of native speakers to Curaçao in the latter half of the 17th century, the Portuguese-based proto-variety underwent a far-reaching process of relexification towards Spanish, affecting the basic vocabulary while leaving intact the original phonology, morphology, and syntax. Papiamentu is thus shown to constitute a case of 'language contact reduplicated' in that a creole underwent a second significant restructuring process (relexification). These explicit claims and their rigorous underpinning will set standards for both the study of Papiamentu and creole studies at large and will be received with great interest in the wider field of contact linguistics.

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Book SynopsisThis volume is a grammatical sketch of Hainan Cham, an endangered tonal Austronesian language. The study focuses on three areas: social background and contact history, the grammar (including all the recorded vocabulary), and a description of the sound system (including acoustic description). The appendixes also include the wordlist of Sanya Chinese forms and four analyzed texts.

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Book SynopsisThis dictionary provides a systematic analysis of Russian word derivations, describing the etymology of 1500 central words in the language. In the introduction, the author traces the development of Russian vocabulary and focuses on factors that have affected semantic and lexical change. In the main part of the book, a typical entry gives the present meaning of the word, the dates of the first appearance in the language and of subsequent meaning changes, and details of orthographical, phonetic and social factors that have affected its development. Cognate words in Russian and other languages help to place each word in its linguistic context. The dictionary is designed to be user-friendly, facilitating the task of learning vocabulary and raising the language awareness of students. It presents an interesting anaylsis of word derivation at the same time as revealing factors that affect lexical development and establishing links with other languages.

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