Exploring Languages

This is a book about languages and the people who love them. Sophie Hardach is here to guide us through the strange and wonderful ways that humans have used languages throughout history. She takes us from the earliest Mesopotamian clay tablets and the 'book cemeteries' of medieval synagogues to the first sounds a child hears in their mother's womb and their incredible capacity for language learning. Along the way, Hardach explores the role of trade in transmitting words across cultures and untangles riddles of hieroglyphics, cuneiform and the ancient scripts of Crete and Cyprus. This is a book about languages, the people who love them and the linguistic threads that connect us all. 'Impeccably researched and engagingly presented... Sophie Hardach tells wonderful stories about words that have travelled vast distances in space and time to make English what it is' David Bellos, author of Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything

This book includes a selection of papers in linguistics presented at the 14th Conference on British and American Studies. Its tripartite structure reflects the main topics around which the nineteen contributions cluster. The first part, “Native language profiling: explorations and findings”, displays a variety of methodological approaches aimed at highlighting syntactic, morphological, and lexico-semantic aspects of, primarily, English and Romanian. The papers in the second section, “Aspects of language change, bilingualism, and cross-linguistic variation”, bring to the fore some of the topical issues falling within the ambit of language contact, such as mixed languages, bilingualism, and code-switching, as well as contrastive investigations of language structure. The research strand in the final part, “Meaning and communication within and across cultures”, relates to lexico-pragmatic inquiries into the construction of meaning, focusing on the “language beyond language”, as well as on the extent to which the lexical and pragmatic repertoires of various languages can be made to overlap.

This collection offers fresh perspectives on the syntax and semantics of South Asian languages, drawing on novel data from Meiteilon, Haryanavi, Punjabi, Kannada, Malayalam, and Bangla. It covers three major grammatical aspects: namely, the status of primitive categories, clausal and nominal structure, and case/phi-agreement. All the contributions here provide comprehensive descriptive discussions followed by analyses couched within the generative paradigm, thereby offering detailed and clearly presented linguistic treatments of important issues in South Asian languages.

This market-leading language reader features thought-provoking readings that explore the various interconnections between language and American society. For more than 25 years, this engaging reader has challenged students to critically examine how language affects and constructs culture and how culture constructs and affects language. This thirteenth edition maintains the integrity of past editions while reflecting the new and fascinating language issues that exist in today's culture. Provocative selections are organized around nine major topics, and then broken into stimulating sub-themes like the connections between gender and language differences, hate speech, the language of war, and censorship on campus, inviting students to debate current social and cultural issues that are inseparable from language.

This collection showcases the contributions of the study of endangered and understudied languages to historical linguistic analysis, and the broader relevance of diachronic approaches toward developing better informed approaches to language documentation and description. The volume brings together perspectives from both established and up-and-coming scholars and represents a globally and linguistically diverse range of languages.The collected papers demonstrate the ways in which endangered languages can challenge existing models of language change based on more commonly studied languages, and can generate innovative insights into linguistic phenomena such as pathways of grammaticalization, forms and dynamics of contact-driven change, and the diachronic relationship between lexical and grammatical categories. In so doing, the book highlights the idea that processes and outcomes of language change long held to be universally relevant may be more sensitive to cultural and typological variability than previously assumed. Taken as a whole, this collection brings together perspectives from language documentation and historical linguistics to point the way forward for richer understandings of both language change and documentary-descriptive approaches, making this key reading for scholars in these fields.