Search

This present book discusses issues related to languages, cultures, and discourses by addressing a variety of topics ranging from culture and translation, cognitive and linguistic dimensions of discourse, and the role of language in political discourses and bilingualism. By focusing on multiple interconnected research subjects, the book allows us to see the intersections of language, culture, and discourse in their full diversity and to illuminate their less frequented nooks and crannies in a timely fashion.

This present book addresses language and its diverse forms in an array of professional and practical contexts. Besides discussing the intricacies of specialized settings such as legal, medical, technical or corporate, the collection also focuses on the role of education in relation to professional contexts ranging from challenges in professional university teaching and translation didactics to business environment requirements.

This book contributes to opening up disciplinary knowledge and offering connections between different approaches to language in contemporary linguistics. Rather than focusing on a particular single methodology or theoretical assumption, the volume presents part of the wealth of linguistic knowledge as an intertwined project, which combines numerous practices, positionalities and perspectives. The editors believe¸ together with the contributors to this volume¸ that it is a crucial and timely task to emphasize the relevance of linguistic knowledge on power, hospitality, social class, marginalization, mobility, history, secrecy, the structures of discourse, and the construction of meaning, as knowledge that needs to be brought together – as it is brought together in personal discussions, conversations and encounters. To work along traces of linguistic connectivity, marginalized narratives, in and on lesser studied (often stigmatized) language practices and to shed light on the tasks of linguistics in making diverse knowledges transparent—this offers spaces for critical discussion on the ethics of linguistics, its challenges, contributions and tasks. These are the approaches that are characteristic for the work of Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald, to whom this book is dedicated.

The lectures in this book are immensely Chomskyan in spirit, recursive-syntactic in nature, and tethered to a framework which takes as the null hypothesis the notion that language is an innate, pre-determined biological system—a system which by definition is multi-complex, human-specific, and analogous to a philosophy highly commensurate of Descartes'great proverbial adage which announces the calling for a ‘ghost-in-the-machine'. The book begins with a gradual assessment of the kinds of complex constructs students of syntax need to work-up. Leading to the classic ‘Four-Sentences'—each of which bears as a kind of post-mark its own decade of Chomskyan analysis—we trace the origins of generative grammar from the fields of child language acquisition (of the 1960s), to psycholinguistics (of the 1970s), to where we stand today within the Minimalist Program. Various spin-off proposals have been spawned by envisioned analyses which treat syntactic movement as the quintessential human processing—a processing which would give rise to human language. Such spin-offs include ‘Proto-language'and a new treatment of the so-called morpho-syntactic ‘Dual Mechanism Model'.

Das bilinguale mentale Lexikon weist eine komplexe netzwerkartige Struktur auf, die in diesem Buch theoretisch ergründet und empirisch untersucht wird. Sebastian Veletić diskutiert prominente Modelle des bilingualen mentalen Lexikons und entwirft auf der Grundlage eines deutsch-türkischen Bildbenennexperiments ein Modell des bilingualen mentalen Lexikons deutsch-türkischsprachiger Jugendlicher. Das Modell zeigt, wie deutsche und türkische Lexikoneinträge semantisch-konzeptuell miteinander vernetzt sind.

This book presents research into various types of professional discourse through the prism of the functional linguistics approach. Focusing mainly on practical aspects of speech, the book discusses various topics, such as structural, semantic, cognitive and pragmatic characteristics of professional discourse, argumentation strategies, humour in professional discourse, and word-building processes. It also highlights communicative effectiveness methods in professional discourse. Offering new ideas and discussing the latest findings, the book is intended for researchers, lecturers and professionals in the field.

This volume is a collection of studies on various aspects of word order variation in Turkish. As a head-final, left-branching ‘free'word order language, Turkish raises a number of significant theory-internal as well as language-particular questions regarding linearization in language. Each of the contributions in the present volume offers a fresh insight into a number of these questions, thus, while expanding our knowledge of the language-particular properties of the word order phenomena, also contribute individually to the theory of linearization in general. Turkish is a configurational language. It licenses constructions in which constituents can occur in non-canonical presubject as well as postverbal positions. Presented within the assumptions of the generative tradition, the discussion and analyses of the various aspects of the linearization facts of the language offer a novel treatment of the issues therein. The authors approach the word order phenomena from a variety of perspectives, ranging from purely syntactic treatments, to accounts as syntax-PF interface or syntax-discourse interface phenomena or as output of base generation.

This volume is the first to focus specifically on experimental studies of the semantics of gradability, scale structure and vagueness. It presents support for and challenges to current formal analyses of these phenomena in view of experimentally collected data, highlighting the ways semantic and pragmatic theory can benefit from experimental methodologies. The papers in the volume contribute to an explicit and detailed account of the use, representation, and online processing of gradable and vague expressions using various kinds of controlled speaker judgment tasks, eye tracking, and ERP. The aim is to strengthen the foundations of experimental semantics and promote interaction between linguists, psycholinguists, psychologists, and philosophers who are interested in the semantics of natural language. Using data representing different languages and a variety of nominal and adjectival constructions, including degree modification and comparatives, the contributions address scale-based classifications of gradable predicates, such as the absolute vs. relative distinction; the nature of the standards for applicability of gradable expressions and the ways in which standards are determined; the nature of dimensions and multidimensionality in the meaning of scalar expressions; and the role of embodiment, subjectivity, and sociolinguistic considerations in the use and understanding of gradable expressions.

Gustave Guillaume a pris soin de conserver tous les textes préparatoires aux conférences hebdomadaires qu'il prononça de 1938 à 1960 à l'École Pratique des Hautes Étude de la Sorbonne. Le texte de ces conférences, auquel il convient d'ajouter un ensemble très varié de notes de recherche, d'essais et de mémoires, totalisent plus de 60 000 feuillets manuscrits déposés en 1960 et conservés depuis au Fonds Gustave Guillaume de l'Université Laval à Québec. En 1971, Roch Valin, légataire testamentaire des manuscrits de Guillaume, entreprend la publication de ses conférences dans une collection d'ouvrages intitulée Leçons de linguistique de Gustave Guillaume. Plus de vingt ouvrages ont paru dans cette collection. Une seconde collection d'ouvrages, destinée à la publication des essais et des mémoires du linguiste, a vu le jour en 2003. La publication des écrits de Gustave Guillaume est désormais assurée par Patrick Duffley, professeur au Département de langues, linguistique et traduction de l'Université Laval.

This book analyses the emotional message of Hungarian folksongs from a Cultural Linguistic perspective, employing a wide range of empirical devices. It combines theoretical notions with analytical devices and has a multidisciplinary essence: it relies on the latest Cultural Linguistic findings, employing spatial semantics, cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology and ethnography.The book addresses key questions including: How is nature conceptualized by a folk cultural group? How are emotions and other mental states expressed via nature imagery with respect to metaphors and construal schemas? The author argues that folksongs reflect the Hungarian peasant communities'specific treatment of emotions, captured in an underlying cultural schema ‘reservedness.'This schema is grounded in principals of morality and tradition, and governs the various levels of representation. The main topics discussed are related to two core issues: cultural metaphors and culturalschemas of construal in folksongs. It provides a detailed example, based on over 1000 folksongs, of how a cultural group's cognition can be analyzed and better understood through a representative corpus-based linguistic approach. The research is also pioneering in constructing a comprehensive analysis framework adapted to folk poetry, and offers an example of how cultural conceptualizations can be investigated in various discourse types. Last but not least, the book offers insights into the work of Hungarian linguists and folklorists concerning cultural conceptualizations, which have largely been unavailable in English.

This groundbreaking collection represents the broad scope of cutting-edge research in Cultural Linguistics, a burgeoning field of interdisciplinary inquiry into the relationships between language and cultural cognition. The materials surveyed in its chapters demonstrate how cultural conceptualisations encoded in language relate to all aspects of human life - from emotion and embodiment to kinship, religion, marriage and politics, even the understanding of life and death. Cultural Linguistics draws on cognitive science, complexity science and distributed cognition, among other disciplines, to strengthen its theoretical and analytical base. The tools it has developed have worked toward insightful investigations into the cultural grounding of language in numerous applied domains, including World Englishes, cross-cultural/intercultural pragmatics, intercultural communication, Teaching English as an International Language (TEIL), and political discourse analysis.

In The Sequential Imperative William Edmondson explains how deep study of linguistics – from phonetics to pragmatics – can be the basis for understanding the organization of behaviour in any organism with a brain. The work demonstrates that Cognitive Science needs to be anchored in a linguistic setting. Only then can Cognitive Scientists reach out to reconsider the nature of consciousness and to appreciate the functionality of all brains. The core functionality of the brain – any brain, any species, any time – is delivery and management of the unavoidable bi-directional transformation between brain states and activity – the Sequential Imperative. Making it all work requires some general cognitive principles and close attention to detail. The book sets out the case in broad terms but also incorporates significant detail where necessary.

The main thesis of this book is that abstraction, far from being confined to higher forms of cognition, language and logical reasoning, has actually been a major driving force throughout the evolution of creatures with brains. It is manifest in emotive as well as rational thought. Wending its way through the various facets of abstraction, the book attempts to clarify – and relate – the often confusing meanings of the word ‘abstract'that one may encounter even within the same discipline. The unusual synoptic approach, which draws upon research in psychology, neural network theory, child language acquisition, philosophy and consciousness studies, as well as a variety of linguistic disciplines, cannot be compared directly to other books on the market that touch upon just one particular aspect of abstraction. It is aimed at a wide readership – anyone interested in the nature of abstraction and the cognitive processing and purpose behind it. (series A)

This book discusses developments in the study of implicatures and presuppositions, drawing on recent linguistic and psycholinguistic literature. It provides original discussions of specific formal aspects of the theoretical reconstruction of these phenomena. The authors offer innovative experimental analyses in which crucial processing questions are addressed, and new experimental methodologies are introduced. The result is an advanced debate featuring broad empirical coverage of the issues, as well as an informed discussion of the connections between a Compositional Semantics and a Pragmatic Theory of Implicit Communication, in light of the empirical data coming from Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics. This book will be a worthwhile read for those with interests in both the formal and methodological aspects of these arguments.

By highlighting relations between experimental and theoretical work, this volume explores new ways of addressing one of the central challenges in the study of language and cognition. The articles bring together work by leading scholars and younger researchers in psychology, linguistics and philosophy. An introductory chapter lays out the background on concept composition, a problem that is stimulating much new research in cognitive science. Researchers in this interdisciplinary domain aim to explain how meanings of complex expressions are derived from simple lexical concepts and to show how these meanings connect to concept representations. Traditionally, much of the work on concept composition has been carried out within separate disciplines, where cognitive psychologists have concentrated on concept representations, and linguists and philosophers have focused on the meaning and use of logical operators. This volume demonstrates an important change in this situation, where convergence points between these three disciplines in cognitive science are emerging and are leading to new findings and theoretical insights. This book is open access under a CC BY license.

A mind-expanding, deeply humane tour of language by the bestselling author of Born on a Blue Day and Thinking in Numbers. Is vocabulary destiny? Why do clocks'talk'to the Nahua people of Mexico? Will A.I. researchers ever produce true human-machine dialogue? In this mesmerizing collection of essays, Daniel Tammet answers these and many other questions about the intricacy and profound power of language. In Every Word Is a Bird We Teach to Sing, Tammet goes back in time to London to explore the numeric language of his autistic childhood; in Iceland, he learns why the name Blær became a court case; in Canada, he meets one of the world's most accomplished lip readers. He chats with chatbots; contrives an'e'-less essay on lipograms; studies the grammar of the telephone; contemplates the significance of disappearing dialects; and corresponds with native Esperanto speakers - in their mother tongue. A joyous romp through the world of words, letters, stories, and meanings, Every Word Is a Bird We Teach to Sing explores the way communication shapes reality. From the art of translation to the lyricism of sign language, these essays display the stunning range of Tammet's literary and polyglot talents.

This book gives an account of developmental language impairment from the perspective of language evolution. Components of language acquisition and specific language impairments can be mapped to stages in the evolutionary trajectory of language. Lian argues that the learning of procedural skills by early ancestors has served as pre-adaptation of grammar. The evolutionary perspective gives rise to a re-evaluation of developmental impairment with respect to diagnostic terminology and methods of treatment. Chapters within cover topics such as dyslexia, the cultural mediation of language evolution and the cross-modality of language. Turn-taking in marmoset monkeys is considered as a pre-adaptation to dialogue in humans, and the role of infant-caregiver interactions is discussed. Language Evolution and Developmental Impairments will be of interest to linguists, psychologists and neurobiologists interested in the intersection of these subjects, as well as scholars of language acquisition and language impairment.

The Linguistic Cerebellum provides a comprehensive analysis of this unique part of the brain that has the most number of neurons, each operating in distinct networks to perform diverse functions. This book outlines how those distinct networks operate in relation to non-motor language skills. Coverage includes cerebellar anatomy and function in relation to speech perception, speech planning, verbal fluency, grammar processing, and reading and writing, along with a discussion of language disorders. Discusses the neurobiology of cerebellar language functions, encompassing both normal language function and language disorders Includes speech perception, processing, and planning Contains cerebellar function in reading and writing Explores how language networks give insight to function elsewhere in the brain

The Collected Works of Lev Semonovich Vygotsky comprise a series of six volumes, originally published in Moscow by Pedagogika between 1982 and 1984 and comprising the work done by Vygotsky between 1924 and his early death in 1934. The present vol­ ume is the first of this series to appear in English but it is actually Volume 2 in the Russian series. It contains a complete rendition of Thinking and Speech (which may be known to English readers as Thought and Language, the title assigned to an abridged, interpretative translation by Hanfmann and Vakar in 1962) and five Lectures in Psy­ chology which are here published for the first time in English and essentialIy comprise Vygotsky's systematization of psychological theory and data in respect to the develop­ ment in childhood of perception, memory, thinking, emotions, imagination, and will. The volumes which are yet to appear in English are respectively concerned with: (1) theory and history of psychology; (2) problems of developmental psychology; (3) child and adolescent psychology; (4)'defectology'(or'special education'in American par­ lance); and (5) a'scientific archive'consisting of a critique of Spinoza's studies of the passions and an important essay,'Tool and Sign.'The decision by the Translator and Editors to render the title of the first segment of this volume, Mysclzlenie i Rech', as Thinking and Speech and not as Thought and Language, as it was previously translated, was a very intentional one.

Umfassende Einführung in die Psycholinguistik anhand der leitenden Fragestellung: Welche kognitiven Voraussetzungen und Prozesse machen die menschliche Sprachfähigkeit aus? Folgende Bereiche spielen dabei eine Rolle: Spracherwerb, Verstehen sprachlicher Äußerungen, Sprechen, Inhalt und Aufbau des lexikalischen Wissens sowie Störung und Krankheit des Sprachsystems.

This volume combines psycholinguistic experiments with typological investigations in order to provide a comprehensive exploration of the linguistic structure of verb-number agreement in bilingual speakers, with a particular focus on the Turkish language. It takes as its starting point the question of which linguistic structures pose difficulties for bilingual speakers, and then proceeds to evaluate the question by using the interface phenomenon of optional verb number agreement. In doing so, this volume investigates how the bilingual mind handles grammatical structures that demand high processing sources, working towards a processing-based linguistic framework for the bilingual mind. Beginning with a thorough survey of the current research of the interface phenomenon in the bilingual mind, the volume then proceeds to present two separate studies on each linguistic interface type, namely semantics-syntax interface and syntax-pragmatics interface, thus filling a number of gaps in the bilingualism research with regards to the interface phenomenon The results and conclusions of these studies are then integrated with current knowledge and research from the field within a theoretical and processing-based framework in order to explore new psycholinguistic insights for the bilingual mind, specifically the conclusion that the grammar of bilingual speakers is shaped according to cross linguistic tendencies. Ultimately, it provides a unified account and a comprehensive conclusion regarding the non-native-like patterns in grammar of bilingual speakers. Serving as a fascinating and timely resource, Competing Structures in the Bilingual Mind: An Investigation of Optional Verb Number Agreement will appeal to bilingualism researchers, clinical linguists, cognitive scientists, experimental linguists, and any linguist specializing in Turkic or Altaic languages.

How are abstract concepts and words represented in the brain? That is the central question addressed by the authors of “Words as Social Tools: An Embodied View on Abstract Concepts”. First, they focus on the difficulties in defining what abstract concepts and words are, and what they mean in psycholinguistic research. Then the authors go on to describe and critically discuss the main theories on this topic with a special emphasis on the different embodied and grounded theories proposed in cognitive psychology within the last ten years, highlighting the advantages and limitations of each of these theories. The core of this Brief consists of the presentation of a new theory developed by the authors, the WAT (Words As social Tools) view, according to which both sensorimotor (such as perception, action, emotional experiences) and linguistic experiences are at the basis of abstract concepts and of abstract word representation, processing and use. This theory assigns a major role to acquisition: one of the assumptions the authors make is that the different ways in which concrete and abstract words are acquired constrain their brain representation and their use. This view will be compared with the main existing theories on abstractness, from the theory of conceptual metaphors to the theories on multiple representation. Finally, the volume illustrates recent evidence from different areas (developmental, behavioral, cross-cultural, neuropsychological and neural) which converge with and support the authors'theory, leading to the conclusion that in order to account for representation and processing of abstract concepts and words, an extension of embodied and grounded theories is necessary.

The Nature of Language addresses one of the most fundamental questions of mankind: how did language evolve, and what are the neurobiological and cognitive foundations of language processing? These questions are explored from different perspectives to discuss the building blocks of language evolution and how they developed in the way they can be found in modern humans. Primarily, neural mapping methods of cognition presented in this research provide extremely valuable data about the neural circuitries that are involved in language processing. Thus, the book explores and illustrates cortical mapping in typical language patterns, but also cortical mapping in atypical populations that fail to process particular language aspects. A neurobiological stance is used to inquire about how language abilities of our species evolved to communicate for the purposes of conveying information such as ideas, emotions, goals, and humor.The evolutionary language model presented builds on the cognitive abilities of our ancestors, and it allows readers to draw a variety of expansive conclusions from that, including the idea that human language as an interface system provides the basis for consciousness.

Michael Cole To the unwary reader, even the table of contents of this book will appear incon­ gruous. What notion, let alone set of principles, could bring coherence to the follow­ ing concepts: playing peekaboo with small children, aging, human alienation, con­ versations with Uzbeki peasants, toolmaking, sexism, the world of the deaf, the ecology of hunting groups? After sfhe has had a chance to scan the entire set, the reader can see that this book seems to center on language. But it clearly is not a book about linguistics. It is about a notion that combines two other notions that we usually find located in very different kinds of books, language and human nature. There is no widely accepted term for this combined notion. It does not fit into those ways of thinking of the world that have gotten us where we are. Walker Percy, philosopher­ novelist, succinctly nails the source of our problem: The importance of a study of language, as opposed to a scientific study of a space-time event like a solar eclipse or rat behavior is that as soon as one scratches the surface of the familiar and comes face to face with the nature of language, one also finds himself face to face with the nature of man. (1975, p. 10) Once we reinvent this insight, its implications begin to work into our lives; our central problem becomes to figure out how to deal with the dilemmas it implies.

This work is a psycho linguistic investigation of the processing of tense (more specifically, the English past tense): When it is interpreted, how it is interpreted, and what it is interpreted with respect to. While there has been a great deal of attention paid to tense in the syntax and semantics literature, little work has been done on the details of the psychological processing of this category. The chief value and contribution of this book is to present a richly detailed in-depth study of the processing of tense in adult comprehension tasks, providing an excellent model of how to conceive of detailed experimental work against a background of sophisticated, deep, and broad linguistic theory. The discussion of the representational issues is deep and informative, and is directly brought to bear on experimental issues. The experiments aim to evaluate whether a hypothesis called'Parsimony,'a highly plausible notion that has received tentative experimental support in other domains, is the chief controlling feature of the interpretation of tense. The experimental results presented quite consistently do not confirm the apparent predictions made by Parsimony, but rather tend to be more consistent with another view (which Parsimony is aimed at opposing) which holds that actual structural factors in the syntax of a sentence are a decisive factor. Along the way, the author considers a number of other plausible hypotheses as the experimental results are presented, but evaluating Parsimony remains the chief organizing principle of the line of research presented here.

Embodied theories claim that semantic representations are grounded in sensorimotor systems, but the contribution of sensorimotor brain areas in representing meaning is still controversial. One current debate is whether activity in sensorimotor areas during language comprehension is automatic. Numerous neuroimaging studies reveal activity in perception and action areas during semantic processing that is automatic and independent of context, but increasing findings show that involvement of sensorimotor areas and the connectivity between word-form areas and sensorimotor areas can be modulated by contextual information. Context Effects on Embodied Representation of Language Concepts focuses on these findings and discusses the influences from word, phrase, and sentential contexts that emphasize either dominant conceptual features or non-dominant conceptual features. Reviews the findings about contextual modularity Clarifies the invariant and flexible features of embodied lexical-semantic processing

A revival of interest in morphology has occurred during recent years. The Yearbook of Morphology series, published since 1988, has proven to be an eminent support for this upswing of morphological research, since it contains articles on topics which are central in the current theoretical debates which are frequently referred to. The Yearbook of Morphology 2000 focuses on the relation between morphology and syntax. First, a number of articles is devoted to the ways in which morphological features can be expressed in the grammar of natural languages, both by morphological and syntactic devices. This also raises the more general issue of how we have to conceive of the relation between form and (grammatical) meaning. Several formalisms for inflectional paradigms are proposed. In addition, this volume deals with the demarcation between morphology and syntax: to which extent can syntactic principles and generalizations be used for a proper account of the morphology of a language? The languages discussed are Potawatomi, Latin, Greek, Romanian, West-Greenlandic, and German. A special feature of this volume is a section devoted to the analysis of the morphosyntax of a number of Austronesian languages, which are also relevant for deepening our insights into the relation between our morphology and syntax. Audience: Theoretical, descriptive, and historical linguists, morphologists, phonologists, computational linguists, and psycholinguists will find this book of interest.

A revival of interest in morphology has occurred during recent years. The Yearbook of Morphology series, published since 1988, has proven to be an eminent support for this upswing of morphological research, since it contains articles on topics which are central in the current theoretical debates which are frequently referred to. In the Yearbook of Morphology 2001 a number of articles is devoted to the notion of productivity, and the role of analogy in coining new words. In relation to this topic, constraints on affix ordering in a number of Germanic languages are investigated. A second topic of this volume is the necessity and the role of the paradigm in morphological analyses; arguments for and against the formal role of the paradigm are presented. Thirdly, this volume discusses a number of general issues in morphological theory such as the relation between form and meaning in morphology, the accessibility of the internal morphological structure of complex words, and the interaction of morphology and prosody in truncation processes.

A revival of interest in morphology has occurred during recent years. The Yearbook of Morphology series, published since 1988, has proven to be an eminent support for this upswing of morphological research, since it contains articles on topics which are central in the current theoretical debates which are frequently referred to. The Yearbook of Morphology 1999 focuses on diachronic morphology, and shows, in a number of articles by renowned specialists, how complicated morphological systems develop in the course of time. In addition, this volume deals with a number of hotly debated issues in theoretical morphology: its interaction with phonology (including Optimality Theory), the relation between inflection and word formation, and the formal modeling of inflectional systems. A special feature of this volume is an article on morphology in sign language, a very new and exciting area of research in linguistics. The relevant evidence comes from a wide variety of languages, amongst which Germanic, Romance, and Slavic languages are prominent. Audience: Theoretical, descriptive, and historical linguists, morphologists, phonologists, and psycholinguists will find this book of interest.

Die Untersuchung des Agrammatismus in typologisch unterschiedlichen Sprachen bildet seit einigen Jahren einen Schwerpunkt in der linguistisch orientierten Aphasieforschung. Bisherige sprachvergleichende Studien zum Agrammatismus zeigen, dass sprachstrukturelle Unterschiede eine wichtige Quelle für die Variabilität agrammatischer Symptome sind. Said Sahel stellt die Analyse von Spontansprachkorpora und elizitierten Daten von deutschsprachigen und marokkanischen Agrammatikern in den Mittelpunkt seiner Arbeit. Er untersucht insbesondere den Einfluss von morphologischen Eigenschaften einer Einzelsprache auf das Erscheinungsbild des Agrammatismus hinsichtlich der Beeinträchtigung grammatikalisch gebundener Morpheme. Die Fehleranalyse zeigt, dass die unterschiedliche Manifestation des agrammatischen Defizits in den zwei untersuchten Sprachen ihre unterschiedlichen morphologischen Systeme widerspiegelt: Das Deutsche hat eine konkatenative, das marokkanische Arabisch eine nicht-konkatenative Morphologie. Abschließend werden die Implikationen dieser Ergebnisse für gängige Agrammatismus-Definitionen diskutiert.

Gibt es den Agrammatismus im Koreanischen? Einerseits wird heute in Frage gestellt, ob man von'Agrammatismus'als einem syndromatischen Störungsmuster überhaupt sprechen kann, andererseits weist die koreanische Sprache Spezifika auf, die aus der Perspektive eines Adaptationsansatzes dieses Störungsbild besonders interessant machen. Jin-Ae Bae erörtert die Erklärungsansätze zum Agrammatismus, wobei sie vor allem verschiedene Ansätze der Defizit- und der Strategiehypothese beleuchtet. Im Rahmen des Adaptationsansatzes konzentriert sie sich auf die Analyse elliptischer Formen und untersucht, ob in der agrammatischen Sprache von Aphasikern sprachlich korrekte Ellipsen verwendet werden oder ob es sich eher um Auslassungen, unvollständige Phrasen und fehlerhafte Ellipsen handelt. In ihrer empirischen Studie überprüft sie die freien und elizitierten Sprachproduktionsbedingungen von zehn Aphasikern und zehn Normsprechern, analysiert Fehler auf der Phrasen- und Wortebene und entwickelt eigene Erklärungsansätze. Damit wird erstmals ein differenziertes Bild des koreanischen Agrammatismus präsentiert.

A revival of interest in morphology has occurred during recent years. The Yearbook of Morphology series, published since 1988, has proven to be an eminent support for this upswing of morphological research, since it contains articles on topics which are central in the current theoretical debates which are frequently referred to. The Yearbook of Morphology 1998 focuses on two issues: the position of inflection in the grammar, and the interaction of morphology with phonology, in particular the problem of allomorphy. In addition, this volume presents a study of the relation between transposition and argument structure, a declarative model of word formation applied to conversion in German, an analysis of Dutch verbal compounds and a study of the semantic aspects of nominalization. The relevant evidence comes from a wide variety of languages. Theoretical, descriptive, and historical linguists, morphologists, phonologists, and psycholinguists will find this book of interest.

A revival of interest in morphology has occurred during recent years. Since 1988, the Yearbook of Morphology book series has proven to be an eminent platform for the growth of morphological research, containing articles on topics that are central in the current theoretical debates. The Yearbook of Morphology 1996 focuses on the relationship between morphology and psycholinguistics. Basic questions such as the following are discussed. To what extent does the morphological structure of a word play a role in its perception and production? Are regular complex words created anew each time they are used, or are they stored in the lexicon? The relevant evidence comes from a variety of European languages. Another important theme in this yearbook is the degree of autonomy of morphology: in which respect does it differ from other modules of the grammar? The present yearbook also contains articles on periphrasis, the nature of inflectional morphology and syncretism in derivational morphology. Audience: Theoretical and historical linguists, morphologists, phonologists and psycholinguists will find this book of interest.

A revival of interest in morphology has occurred during recent years. The aim of the Yearbook of Morphology series is to support and enforce this upswing of morphological research and to give an overview of the current issues and debates at the heart of this revival. The Yearbook of Morphology 1995 focuses on an important issue in the current morphological debate: the relation between inflection and word formation. What are the criteria for their demarcation, in which ways do they interact and how is this distinction acquired by children? The papers presented here concur in rejecting the `split morphology hypothesis'that claims that inflection and word formation belong to different components of the grammar. This volume also deals with the marked phenomenon of subtractive morphology and its theoretical implications. Theoretical and historical linguists, morphologists, phonologists and psycholinguists interested in linguistic issues will find this book of interest.

Recent years have seen a revival of interest in morphology. The Yearbook of Morphology series supports and enforces this upswing of morphological research and gives an overview of the current issues and debates at the heart of this revival. The Yearbook of Morphology 1994 focuses on prosodic morphology, i.e. the interaction between morphological and prosodic structure, on the semantics of word formation, and on a number of related issues in the realm of inflection: the structure of paradigms, the relation between inflection and word formation, and patterns of language change with respect to inflection. There is also discussion of the relevance of the notion `level ordering'for morphological generalizations. All theoretical and historical linguists, morphologists, and phonologists will want to read this book.

Recent years have seen a revival of interest in morphology. The Yearbook of Morphology series supports and enforces this upswing of morphological research and gives an overview of the current issues and debates at the heart of this revival. The Yearbook of Morphology 1993 focuses on prosodic morphology, i.e. the interaction between morphological and prosodic structure, on the semantics of word formation, and on a number of related issues in the realm of inflection: the structure of paradigms, the relation between inflection and word formation, and patterns of language change with respect to inflection. There is also discussion of the relevance of the notion `level ordering'for morphological generalizations. All theoretical and historical linguists, morphologists, and phonologists will want to read this volume.

While most research on language acquisition continues to consider the individual primarily in closed-system terms, Ecology of Language Acquisition emphasizes the emergence of linguistic development through children's and learners'interactions with their environment - spatial, social, cultural, educational, and so on - bringing to light commonalities between primary language development, child and adult second-language learning, and language acquisition by robots. Such a situated, context-responsive perspective on acquisition is able to interrelate insights from a variety of paradigms and disciplines while avoiding unjustifiable appeals to normativity. The theoretical and empirical studies presented here challenge a number of dominant ideas in language acquisition theory and mark an important new research orientation. This work should be of interest to language acquisition researchers and professionals in a wide range of specialisms.

Suzanne Flynn and Wayne O'Neil Massachusetts Institute of Technology I. INTRODUCTION The theory of Universal Grammar (UG) as explicated e. g. in Chomsky, 1986, has led to explosive developments in the study of natural language as well as to significant advances in the study of first language (L I) acquisition. Most recently. the theory of UG has led to important theore­ tical and empirical advances in the field of adult second language (L2) acquisition as well. The principle impetus for this development can be traced to the work in linguistics which shifted the study'from behavior or the products of behavior to states of the mind/brain that enter into behavior'(Chomksy. 1986:3). Grammars within this framework are conceived of as theoretical accounts of'the state of the mind/brain of the person who knows a particular language'(Chomsky. 1986:3). Research within fields of language acquisition seeks to isolate and specify the properties of the underlying competence necessary for language learning. Full development of a theory of UG demands study and understanding of the nature of both the formal properties of language and of the language acquisition process itself. However. while there is a tradition of debate and dialogue established between theoretical linguistics and Ll acquisition research. relatively few connections have been made between linguistic theory and L2 acquisition research.

This book is an introduction to the statistical analysis of word frequency distributions, intended for linguists, psycholinguistics, and researchers work­ ing in the field of quantitative stylistics and anyone interested in quantitative aspects of lexical structure. Word frequency distributions are characterized by very large numbers of rare words. This property leads to strange statisti­ cal phenomena such as mean frequencies that systematically keep changing as the number of observations is increased, relative frequencies that even in large samples are not fully reliable estimators ofpopulationprobabilities, and model parameters that emerge as functions of the text size. Special statistical techniques for the analysis of distributions with large numbers of rare events can be found in various technical journals. The aim of this book is to make these techniques more accessible for non-specialists. Chapter 1 introduces some basic concepts and notation. Chapter 2 describes non-parametricmethods for the analysis ofword frequency distributions. The next chapterdescribes in detail three parametricmodels, the lognormal model, the Yule-Simon Zipfian model, and the generalized inverse Gauss-Poisson model. Chapter 4 introduces the concept of mixture distributions. Chapter 5 explores the effectofnon-randomness inword use on the accuracy of the non­ parametric and parametric models, all of which are based on the assumption that words occur independently and randomly in texts. Chapter 6 presents examples of applications.

How children acquire competence in verb placement in languages in which verb placement in matrix clauses does not coincide with that in embedded clauses is not well understood. Verb-Second languages like German and Dutch display the verb-final pattern in embedded clauses, which can be confusing for a developing child. This book addresses this problem in the context of Swiss German, itself a Germanic dialect. Numerous examples are given of natural language produced by two children who were consistently followed between the ages of 4 and 6. Unexpectedly, since previous literature has suggested that children master verb placement very early in their linguistic development, these children move the verb in any type of embedded clause, leading to many verb-placement errors. After introducing the problem and describing the data in detail, a technical analysis is developed in terms of a minimally split-CP, which is rather successful in accounting for these data. The book should interest advanced students and researchers in both language acquisition and syntax.

Through the lens of cognitive science, Jokes and the Linguistic Mind investigates jokes that play on some aspect of the structure and function of language. In so doing, Debra Aarons shows that these'linguistic jokes'can evoke our tacit knowledge of the language we use. Analyzing hilarious examples from movies, plays and books, Jokes and the Linguistic Mind demonstrates that tacit linguistic knowledge must become conscious for linguistic jokes to be understood. The book examines jokes that exploit pragmatic, semantic, morphological, phonological and semantic features of language, as well as jokes that use more than one language and jokes that are about language itself. Additionally, the text explores the relationship between cryptic crossword clues and linguistic jokes in order to demonstrate the difference between tacit knowledge of language and rules of language use that are articulated for a particular purpose. With its use of jokes as data and its highly accessible explanations of complex linguistic concepts, this book is an engaging supplementary text for introductory courses in linguistics, psycholinguistics and cognitive science. It will also be of interest to scholars in translation studies, applied linguistics and philosophy of language.

MARK ARONOFF The articles included in this section represent recent research on morpholog­ ical classes which has been independently performed by a number of investi­ gators. This work was presented at a symposium that was organized as part of the 1990-1991 annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America in Chicago in January 1991. Our aim in presenting this work is twofold: on the one hand, we would like to encourage others interested in morphology to pursue the types of research that we present. This is especially important in the study of morphological classes, which, while they are widespread among the languages of the world, are also highly diverse and often quite complex. On the other hand, we hope to convince researchers in adjacent areas to provide a place for autonomous morphology in their general picture of the workings of language and to pay closer attention to the intricacies of the interactionbetweenmorphologyand theseareas.

Bilingual Selection of Syntactic Knowledge motivates a more formal approach in theoretical linguistics by investigating the parameters of syntactic variation and simultaneous acquisition of multiple languages. Taking the behavior of the Null Subject Parameter (NSP) across languages as an illustration, the book raises important questions concerning the adequacy of standard parameter-setting models in the face of compelling evidence from both mono- and bilingual child speech data. Teresa Satterfield argues convincingly that so-called `universal'premises guiding well-known parametric approaches greatly complicate attempts to construct an economical bilingual analysis. Further, she demonstrates the compatibility of more recent formulations in linguistic theory (i.e. the Minimalist Program) and studies on language learnability (Clark, 1992, 1993; Kapur, 1994) which present the view that while initially convincing, standard parameter models are potentially costly and less than effective in terms of monolinguals as well. Using Clark's application of the Genetic Algorithm as a point of departure, Bilingual Selection of Syntactic Knowledge describes a number of computational simulations. These simulations not only demonstrate the robustness of the GA-as-language-learner, they offer a more detailed account of the parameter-setting task confronting the bilingual child while also making more precise predictions regarding the process of syntactic knowledge.

GERT RIJLAARSDAM UniversityofAmsterdam & Utrecht University, the Netherlands Multilingualism is becoming the default in our global world. The present-day global citizens use different languages in different situations. Apart from their mother tongue, they learn languages that give them access to other regions, nations, and worlds. In all countries ofthe European Union, for instance, at least one foreign lan­ guage is mandatory in secondary schools. Most students are taught English as a for­ eign language, the lingua franca in Europe. In large parts of the USA, students move from Spanish to English schooling. In parts of Canada, bilingual education is stan­ dard. In Catalonia (Spain) children learn Catalonian and Spanish, in Hong Kong English and Chinese. The smaller the world becomes, the more languages are used and learned. For writing process research, this development into multilingualism entails at least two challenges. First ofall, studying the relation between writing in L1 and L2 provides an opportunity for collaborative studies, in different language settings. Second, the issue ofgeneralization of findings comes to the fore. It becomes evident now that we have unjustly neglected this issue in writing process research. We for­ got to ask whether it is feasible to talk about'writing processes'in general, without referring to the language of the written texts, and without taking into account the educational and linguistic culture in which these texts originate.

While experimental data collection has been common in psycholinguistics for some time, only relatively recently have experimental methods been employed to collect data for research in formal linguistics. Experimental methods can be particularly useful for investigating phenomena at the interfaces of the components of grammar, where the sources of multiple types of information need to be carefully controlled. Experiments at the Interfaces, edited by Jeffrey T. Runner from the University of Rochester, brings together recent experimental research examining a variety of issues within syntax and semantics, and their interfaces with each other and with other domains of language. The volume showcases a wide range of experimental methods and illustrates how they can be applied to critical questions relevant to formal linguistics.Contributors are: Sergey Avrutin, Molly Diesing, Sam Featherston, Micah B. Goldwater, Martin Hackl, Justin Halberda, Edwin Howard, Tim Hunter, Arnout W. Koornneef, Hadas Kotek, Ellen F. Lau, Jeffrey Lidz, Darko Odic, Colin Phillips, Paul Pietroski, Eric Reuland, Jeffrey T. Runner, Yasutada Sudo, Klaus von Heusinger, Matthew W. Wagers, Hanna Weiland, Frank Wijnen, Draga Zec.

Located at the intersection of phonology, psycholinguistics and phonetics, this volume offers the latest research findings in key areas of prosodic theory, including: •The relationship between intonation and pragmatics in speech production •Sentence modality prosody characterization •The role of pitch in quantity-based sound systems •Consonant-conditioned tone depression phonology across languages •The encoding of intonational contrasts in both intonational and tonal languages Featuring new data and ground-breaking results, the papers draw on empirical approaches that analyze production, perception and comprehension experiments such as the prepared speech paradigm and semantic scaling tasks. These are discussed in a variety of languages, some underrepresented in the literature (such as French and Estonian) while others, such as Shekgalagari, are examined in this way for the first time. This collection of cutting-edge material will be of interest to a broad range of language researchers.

This book is the first collection of studies on an important yet under-investigated linguistic phenomenon, the processing and production of head-final syntactic structures. Until now, the remarkable progress made in the field of human sentence processing had been achieved largely by investigating head-initial languages such as English. The goal of the present volume is to deepen our understanding by examining head-final languages and offering a comparison of those results to findings from head-initial languages. This book brings together cross-linguistic investigations of languages with prominent head-final structures such as Basque, Chinese, German, Japanese, Korean, and Hindi. It will inform readers of linguistics with both theoretical and experimental backgrounds, as it provides accounts of previous studies, offers experimentally-based theoretical discussions, and includes experimental stimuli in the original languages.

'A brilliant, witty, and altogether satisfying book.'— New York Times Book ReviewThe classic work on the development of human language by the world's leading expert on language and the mindIn The Language Instinct, the world's expert on language and mind lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, and how it evolved. With deft use of examples of humor and wordplay, Steven Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling story: language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution. The Language Instinct received the William James Book Prize from the American Psychological Association and the Public Interest Award from the Linguistics Society of America. This edition includes an update on advances in the science of language since The Language Instinct was first published.