Linguistics

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 brings together scholars from around the world to juxtapose the voices of classroom participants alongside the voices of ruling elites with the aim of critically linking language policy issues with classroom practice in a range of contexts. The volume is suitable for postgraduate students, researchers and educators in a range of areas.

This volume offers a representative selection of Sally McConnell-Ginet's publications on language, gender and sexuality, which circle around the following themes: language users are actively engaged in making meanings, both as speakers and listeners; languages and socio-political institutions constrain, but do not determine, communicative possibilities; attention to language deepens understanding of gender and sexuality, including connections to ethnicity, class, race, and other dimensions of social identity and inequality.

This volume comprises cutting edge research on language contact and change. The chapters present a wide scope of settings in which Spanish is in contact with other languages, such as Catalan, English, and Quechua; a large breadth of geographical areas (e.g., United States, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina); and varied participant groups, ranging from dialect contacts, second-language learners and heritage speakers to balanced bilinguals and code-switchers.

This book offers introductory entries on ideas that have shaped the study of language up to the present day. Entries are written by experts in the fields of linguistics and the philosophy of language to reflect the full range of approaches and modes of thought. Each entry includes a brief description of the idea, an account of its development, and its impact on the field of language study. The book is written in an accessible style with clear descriptions of technical terms, guides to further reading, and extensive cross-referencing between entries.

This innovative study of language and identity in recent and contemporary cases of ethnic conflict in Europe and Eurasia sets out a response to the limitations in the fields of linguistics and political science. Using examples of language policy and planning in conflict situations, it examines the functions of language as a marker of identity in ethnic conflict, and the extent to which language may be a causal factor in ethnic conflict

Language is a means we use to communicate feelings; we also reflect emotionally on the language we and others use. James Wilce analyses the signals people use to express emotion, looking at the social, cultural and political functions of emotional language around the world. His book demonstrates that speaking, feeling, reflecting, and identifying are interrelated processes and shows how desire or shame are attached to language. Drawing on nearly one hundred ethnographic case studies, it demonstrates the cultural diversity, historical emergence, and political significance of emotional language. Wilce brings together insights from linguistics and anthropology to survey an extremely broad range of genres, cultural concepts, and social functions of emotional expression.

What is ethnicity? Is there a 'white' way of speaking? Why do people sometimes borrow features of another ethnic group's language? Why do we sometimes hear an accent that isn't there? This lively overview, first published in 2006, reveals the fascinating relationship between language and ethnic identity, exploring the crucial role it plays in both revealing a speaker's ethnicity and helping to construct it. Drawing on research from a range of ethnic groups.

The claim that crosslinguistic disparities foster differences in nonlinguistic thought, often referred to as 'linguistic relativity', has for some time been the subject of intense debate. For much of that time the debate was not informed by much experimental work. Recently, however, there has been an explosion of research on linguistic relativity, carried out by numerous scholars interested in the interaction between language and nonlinguistic cognition. This book surveys the rapidly accruing research on this topic, much of it carried out in the last decade. Structured so as to be accessible to students and scholars in linguistics, psychology, and anthropology, it first introduces crucial concepts in the study of language and cognition. It then explores the relevant experimentally oriented research, focusing independently on the evidence for relativistic effects in spatial orientation, temporal perception, number recognition, color discrimination, object/substance categorization, gender construal, as well as other facets of cognition. This is the only book to extensively survey the recent work on linguistic relativity, and should serve as a critical resource for those concerned with the topic.

One of the original goals of artificial intelligence research was to endow intelligent agents with human-level natural language capabilities. Recent AI research, however, has focused on applying statistical and machine learning approaches to big data rather than attempting to model what people do and how they do it. In this book, Marjorie McShane and Sergei Nirenburg return to the original goal of recreating human-level intelligence in a machine. They present a human-inspired, linguistically sophisticated model of language understanding for intelligent agent systems that emphasizes meaning—the deep, context-sensitive meaning that a person derives from spoken or written language. With Linguistics for the Age of AI, McShane and Nirenburg offer a roadmap for creating language-endowed intelligent agents (LEIAs) that can understand,explain, and learn. They describe the language-understanding capabilities of LEIAs from the perspectives of cognitive modeling and system building, emphasizing “actionability”—which involves achieving interpretations that are sufficiently deep, precise, and confident to support reasoning about action.

This volume investigates sociolinguistic discourses, identity choices and their representations in postcolonial national and social life, and traces them to the impact of colonial contact. The chapters stitch together current voices and identities emerging within both ex-colonized and ex-colonizer communities as each copes with the social, lingual, cultural, and religious mixes triggered by colonialism. These mixes, reflected in the five thematic parts of the book - 'postcolonial identities', 'nationhood discourses', 'translating the postcolonial', 'living the postcolonial', and 'colonizing the colonizer' - call for deeper investigations of postcolonial communities using emic approaches.

This textbook introduces students to the ways in which techniques from corpus linguistics can be used to aid sociolinguistic research. Corpus linguistics shares with variationist sociolinguistics a quantitative approach to the study of variation or differences between populations. It may also complement qualitative traditions of enquiry such as interactional sociolinguistics.

Spanning Indigenous-language settings in Africa, the Americas, Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia, Central Asia and the Nordic countries, this book examines the multifaceted efforts of Indigenous peoples to reclaim and sustain their languages. Exploring political, historical and pedagogical issues, the authors foreground Indigenous knowledges and perspectives, highlighting the decolonizing aims of contemporary Indigenous language movements both inside and outside schools. The book calls for expanded discourses on language planning and policy that embrace Indigenous ways of knowing and forefront grassroots language reclamation efforts as a force for social justice and self-determination. It will be of interest to scholars, educators and students in the fields of applied linguistics, Ethnic Studies, Indigenous Studies, Indigenous education, second language learning and teaching, bilingualism and biliteracy, and comparative-international education.