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This book provides an overview of approaches to language and culture, and it outlines the broad interdisciplinary field of anthropological linguistics and linguistic anthropology. It identifies current and future directions of research, including language socialization, language reclamation, speech styles and genres, language ideology, verbal taboo, social indexicality, emotion, time, and many more. Furthermore, it offers areal perspectives on the study of language in cultural contexts (namely Africa, the Americas, Australia and Oceania, Mainland Southeast Asia, and Europe), and it lays the foundation for future developments within the field. In this way, the book bridges the disciplines of cultural anthropology and linguistics and paves the way for the new book series Anthropological Linguistics.

Any behavior that arouses, as swearing does, controversy, disagreement, disdain, shock, and indignation as often as it imbues passion, sincerity, intimacy, solidarity, and jocularity should be an obvious target of in-depth scholarship. Rigorous, scholarly investigation of the practice of swearing acknowledges its social and cultural significance, and allows us to discover and better understand the historical, psychological, sociological, and linguistic aspects (among others) of swearwords and swearword usage. The present volume brings together a range of themes and issues central to the existing knowledge of swearing and considers these in two key ‘new'arenas, that is, in languages other than English, and/or in contexts and media other than spoken interaction. Many of the chapters analysed are based on large and robust collections of data, such as corpora or questionnaire responses, which allow for patterns of swearing to emerge. In other chapters, personally observed instances of swearing comprise the focus, allowing for a close analysis of the relationship between sociolinguistic context and pragmatic function. In each chapter, the cultural aspects of swearing are considered, ultimately affirming the importance of the study of swearing, and further establishing the legitimacy of swearing as a target of research.

This volume collects selected papers written by young translation scholars who were CETRA 2014 participants. This book analyses the heterogeneity of translational norms, diversity of cultures and the challenges of intercultural transfer. The authors analyze a wide array of source texts, from the translations of contemporary prose and audiovisual products into Brazilian, Japanese and Swedish, to renderings of texts more distant in time, such as the Bible and «Golestân» written in medieval Persian. The book also concentrates on selected meta-level issues, such as the integrity of the discipline and its language, as well as the development of translation competence. The norm-focused and culture-related framework offers considerable research potential for Translation Studies.

Language Structure and Environment is a broad introduction to how languages are shaped by their environment. It makes the argument that the social, cultural, and natural environment of speakers influences the structures and development of the languages they speak. After a general overview, the contributors explain in a number of detailed case studies how specific cultural, societal, geographical, evolutionary and meta-linguistic pressures determine the development of specific grammatical features and the global structure of a varied selection of languages. This is a work of meticulous scholarship at the forefront of a burgeoning field of linguistics.

This innovative and provocative work introduces complexity theory and its application to both the study of language and the study of material culture. The book begins with a wide-ranging theoretical background, covering the areas of dialect geography, the anthropological study of material culture, and a general introduction to the study of complex adaptive systems. Following this general introduction, the principles of complexity theory are demonstrated in data drawn from linguistics and material culture studies. Language and Material Culture further highlights the principles of complexity through a series of case studies, using data from the Linguistic Atlas, colonial American inventories and the Historic American Building Survey. LMC shows that language and material culture are intertwined as they interact within the same cultural complex system. The book is designed for students in courses that focus on language variation, American English and material culture, in addition to general courses on applications of complex systems.

Der Sprachforscher Georg von der Gabelentz (1840-1893) war bislang mit seinen sprachtheoretischen Ansätzen als Vorläufer der modernen Linguistik oder mit seiner'Chinesischen Grammatik'(1881) als Verfasser eines Werks in einem eigenen methodischen Konzept bekannt. Dieser Sammelband, der aus der Gabelentz-Konferenz und –Ausstellung 2010 anlässlich des 200-jährigen Jubiläums der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin entstanden ist, stellt den großen Sprachwissenschaftler, der dort von 1889 bis zu seinem frühen Tod als ordentlicher Professor für Sinologie und allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft wirkte, in einem wissenschaftsgeschichtlichen Konzept vor, das als Leitfaden zum Verstehen seines wissenschaftlichen Schaffens dienen kann. 2009 und 2013 erfolgte die Verleihung des ersten und des zweiten Georg von der Gabelentz Award der Association for Linguistic Typology, einer Disziplin, die eine neue Forschungsrichtung der Linguistik darstellt und deren Aktualität im universellen Geist Wilhelm von Humboldts begründet ist, in dessen Nachfolge Gabelentz sein Ziel als Wissenschaftler verfolgt hatte. Eine G. v. d. Gabelentz-Bibliographie ist in diesem Band enthalten.