Linguistics

In the early 1900s, the language of America was becoming colloquial English — the language of the businessman, manager, and professional. Since college and high school education were far from universal, many people turned to correspondence education — that era's distance learning — to learn the art of speaking and writing. By the 1920s and 1930s, thousands were ordering Sherwin Cody's 100% Self‐correcting Course in the English Language, a patented mail‐order course in English that was taken by over 150,000 people. This book tells the story of Sherwin Cody and his famous English course, situating both the man and the course in early 20th century cultural history. The book recounts how Cody became a businessman — a writer, grammatical entrepreneur, and mass‐marketer whose ads proclaimed “Good Money in Good English” and asked “Is Good English Worth 25 Cents to You?” and “Do You Make These Mistakes in English?” Sherwin Cody's home‐study approach was perhaps the most widely‐advertised English education program in history, and it provides a unique window into popular views of language and culture and their connection to ideas of success. Cody's work was also part of a larger shift of attitudes about self‐improvement and success. Using Cody's course as a reference point, this book examines the self‐improvement ethic reflected in such products as the Harvard Classics, The Book of Etiquette, the Book‐of‐the‐Month Club, the U.S. School of Music, and the Charles Atlas and Dale Carnegie courses to illustrate how culture became popular and how self‐reliance evolved into self‐improvement.

This book aims to demonstrate that an understanding of the functional and semantic aspects of impersonal verbs in Old and Middle English can shed light on questions that remain about these verbs today. The impersonal construction has been a topic of extensive research for over a hundred years. But three quandaries—their seemingly unsystematic development, the gradual loss of impersonal uses, and the difficulty of aligning this with structural changes in early English—have made explanations for their development unsatisfactory. The book offers a detailed analysis of impersonal verbs within the framework of cognitive and constructional grammar. It focuses on the loss of the impersonal construction as a consequence of a redefinition of the grammatical categories of subject and object, and describes the diachronic development of impersonal verbs as a result of the complex interaction of verbal and constructional meaning. The research carried out for this project comprises all verbs which are recorded in impersonal use in Old and Middle English, and takes account of their full range of syntactic uses.

This book addresses a question fundamental to any discussion of grammatical theory and grammatical variation: to what extent can principles of grammar be explained through language use? The book argues that there is a profound correspondence between performance data and the fixed conventions of grammars. Preferences and patterns found in the one, the book shows, are reflected in constraints and variation patterns in the other. The theoretical consequences of the proposed ‘performance-grammar correspondence hypothesis’ are far-reaching — for current grammatical formalisms, for the innateness hypothesis, and for psycholinguistic models of performance and learning. Drawing on empirical generalizations and insights from language typology, generative grammar, psycholinguistics, and historical linguistics, this book demonstrates that the assumption that grammars are immune to performance is false. It presents detailed empirical case studies and arguments for an alternative theory in which performance has shaped the conventions of grammars and thus the variation patterns found in the world’s languages. The innateness of language, the book argues, resides primarily in the mechanisms human beings have for processing and learning it.

This book introduces the rapidly evolving field of electronic lexicography. The aim is to provide a wide overview of the full process of electronic dictionary production and present some of the challenges faced by publishers, editors and lexicographers as well as the benefits offered to a wide range of users language learners, translators and professionals. Throughout the book particular focus is placed on user needs and the functionalities of electronic dictionaries that are designed to meet them. The volume contains chapters introducing some innovative dictionary projects and surveys of dictionary use. One of the hallmarks of the volume is that it is not limited to English but touches on a range of other languages (Bantu languages, French, German, Russian, Slovene, Spanish as well as sign language). Another key feature of the volume is that it embraces a wide range of lexicographic theories and practices.

The importance of emotion in everyday interactions has been acknowledged by researchers in a wide variety of disciplines, including linguistics, sociology, social psychology, anthropology, and communication. This book offers a collection of original studies that explore emotion in naturally occurring spoken interaction. The chapters examine both the verbal and non-verbal resources for expressing emotional stance (lexicon, syntax, prosody, laughter, crying, facial expression), the emotional aspects of action sequences (e.g. news delivery and conflicts), and the role of emotions in institutional interaction (museums and galleries, psychotherapy, medical interaction and helpline calls). What unites the chapters is an understanding of the expression of emotion and the construction of emotional stances as a process that both shapes and is shaped by the interactional context. The chapters analyze how emotion is expressed and how its expression is responsive to the interactional context and embedded in sequences of action and structures of social interaction. The expression of emotion is constructed and managed as a collaborative process by the participants in interaction. The chapters here demonstrate how the sequential organization of action forms the key relevant unit for analyzing emotion in interaction: displays of emotion are located at specific sequential positions in interaction, and they are interpreted and responded to by reference to that context of occurrence.

This book explores challenges to linguistic vitality confronting many minority languages in the highly diverse and geographically far-flung Austronesian language family. The contributions bring together Indigenous language activists and academic researchers with a long-standing commitment to language documentation in Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, Brunei, East Timor, and Vanuatu. Working in partnership with Indigenous communities, the research in this book is the forefront of the development of innovative capacity building strategies and is part of cutting edge, practical solutions for language revitalization.

English is the most widely-spoken language in the world, and it is rapidly becoming a global lingua franca. But it is not culturally neutral: like any other language, it carries with it a cultural baggage. There are many varieties of English, but there is also “Anglo” English (or what the Indian American linguist Braj Kachru has called the “English of the inner circle”). This book argues that rather than denying the existence and continued relevance of the cultural “baggage” embedded in English (“Anglo” English), it is important to explore the contents of that baggage — important for practical, as well as intellectual, reasons: for language teaching, “cultural literacy” teaching, cross-cultural training, international communication, and so on. It is important to “denaturalize” English and to identify and acknowledge the historically shaped cultural meanings embedded in it, if only so that they are no longer taken for granted as the voice of “reason” itself. To be able to reveal the cultural meanings embedded in the English language we need a suitable methodology. This book shows that such a methodology is available in the so-called “Natural Semantic Metalanguage” (NSM) approach, inaugurated by the author in her 1972 book Semantic Primitives and subsequently developed in collaboration with her Australian colleague Cliff Goddard. The Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) is a unique system of meaning description which uses simple words of ordinary language, instead of technical formalisms, used in other linguistic approaches. Thus, this book seeks to launch a new, meaning-based approach to the study of the English language. Its aim is to investigate English as a historically shaped universe of meaning and to reveal English's cultural underpinnings and their implications for the modern world.

This book charts the English invasion of Europe since 1945. Sixteen contributors report on the English words and phrases that have become integral parts of their languages. Each describes the effect of English on the host language, and shows how the process of incorporation often modifies pronunciation and spelling and frequently transforms meaning and use. The languages surveyed are Icelandic, Dutch, French, Spanish, Norwegian, German, Italian, Romanian, Polish, Croatian, Finnish, Albanian, Russian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, and Greek. This book provides a systematic survey of a phenomenon that is fascinating, alarming, and apparently unstoppable.

This book suggests that many linguistic, literary, and historical considerations of medieval statements on language have significantly failed to take into account the social and linguistic contexts of their production. The book explores not only medieval ideas about language but also the discursive traditions which generated them. The book draws upon a wide range of documentary evidence, including most notably the royal letters issued in 1258 prior to the Barons' War. The book also analyses the language spoken by Chaucer's pilgrims, the conversations in ‘Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’, and many other chronicles, poems, and commentaries. The book concludes with a consideration of the post-medieval history of the status of English in law, literature, and education.

This book provides a new approach to the ‘ethnosyntax’ concept — the proposition that the grammar of a language is intimately linked to the culture of its speakers. It focuses on three related issues: how far culture accounts for linguistic variation; how culture and grammar are connected; and to what extent one may constitute the other. It looks, for example, at the ways in which grammatical (including semantic) resources may be constrained by social values, and at the possible sociocultural significance of grammatical devices. The chapters add to the renewed debate among linguists and anthropologists on the relationship between grammar, culture, and cognition. The book represents a wide range of research traditions, some of which have not until now explicitly addressed the grammar and culture issue. It considers the subject in the context of a wide range of cultures in North America, Europe, and Australasia.