Linguistic Universe

Linguistic Universe: An Introduction to Linguistics provides an innovative introduction to Linguistics for undergraduate university and college students who come from a variety of diverse disciplines and for those who consider majoring in Linguistics. The textbook originated in the North American university classroom experience and has been successfully tested in the classroom for five years. The book can also assist individuals outside of the university contexts to understand some fundamental facts about language origins, structure, and functions. The book is reader-friendly. It presents major linguistic concepts in a captivating and insightful way. It is aimed at motivating learners to engage into further studies of language. Exercises after each chapter assist the readers in developing their critical thinking skills and in monitoring their progress. The exercises can also help the instructors with ideas for additional activities in the classroom. Each chapter has a list of references that can be employed as secondary reading sources. The book is comprised of two parts: chapters 1-5 cover an overview of the nature of human language and the subject matter of linguistics, as well as the major sub-disciplines of linguistics: phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicology and semantics. The second part (chapters 6-10) covers some selected topics in applied linguistics and other language-related disciplines, such as language classifications and language history, sociolinguistics, language acquisition by children, acquisition of additional languages, and a comparison of animal communication with human languages. The book chapters content is quantified for an easy fit into a one-term or two-term course schedule, and can be used as needed for one introductory course, or for two introductory courses - in linguistics and in applied linguistics (or language structures and language dynamics). The linguistic material and examples come primarily from English, but also involve a wide variety of languages with different origins and typologies.

2020 Winner of The Margaret Mallett Award for Children's Non-Fiction From atoms to beehives to the movement of the planets, everything around us is buzzing with maths. So how does this language of numbers, symbols and equations make every single thing in our universe tick like an unseen clock? Visualise cosmic distances, discover the geometry in nature and marvel at the wonders of technology. Learn about mathematics in an extraordinary new light. Stunning surrealist artwork by Ximo Abadía meets easy-to-read informative text by science writer Colin Stuart to create highly engaging content that will inspire future engineers, mathematicians and scientists.

"Laura Lynne Jackson is a psychic medium and the author of the New York Times bestseller The Light Between Us. She possesses an incredible gift--the ability to communicate with loved ones who have passed, convey messages of love and healing, and impart a greater understanding of our interconnectedness. Though her abilities are exceptional, they are not unique, and that is the message at the core of this book. Understanding "the secret language of the universe" is a gift available to all. As we learn to ask for and recognize signs from the other side, we will start to find meaning where before there was only confusion, we will see light in the darkness. We may decide to change paths, push toward love, pursue joy, and engage with life in a whole new way. In Signs, Jackson is able to bring the mystical into the everyday. She relates stories of people who have experienced these uncanny revelations and instances of unexplained synchronicity, as well as those drawn from her own experience. There's the producer whose lost child appears to her as a deer that approaches her unhesitatingly at a highway rest stop; the name tag of an ER nurse that lets a terrified wife know that her husband will be okay; the Elvis Presley song that arrives at the exact time of her own father's passing; and many others. This is a book that is both inspiring and practical, deeply comforting and wonderfully motivational in asking us to see beyond ourselves to a more magnificent universal design"--

A San Francisco Chronicle and Southwest Review Best Book of the Year and A World Literature Today Notable Translation of the Year “A dreamscape of a book. I adored this compelling, wise, and utterly unique coming-of-age tale.” —Tara Conklin For seven-year-old M, the world is guided by a firm set of principles, based on her father D’s life as a traveling salesman. Enchanted by her father’s trade, M convinces him to take her along on his routes, selling hardware supplies against the backdrop of Pinochet-era Chile. As father and daughter trek from town to town in their old Renault, M’s memories and thoughts become tied to a language of rural commerce, philosophy, the cosmos, hardware products, and ghosts. M, in her innocence, barely notices the rising tensions and precarious nature of their work until she and her father connect with an enigmatic photographer, E, whose presence threatens to upend the unusual life they’ve created. María José Ferrada expertly captures a vanishing way of life and a father-daughter relationship on the brink of irreversible change. At once nostalgic, dangerous, sharply funny, and full of delight and wonder, How to Order the Universe is a richly imaginative debut and a rare work of magic and originality.

The Constraint Solving and Language Processing (CSLP) workshop considers the role of constraints in the representation of language and the implementation of language processing applications. This theme should be interpreted inclusively: it includes contributions from linguistics, computer science, psycholinguistics and related areas, with a particular interest in interdisciplinary perspectives. Constraints are widely used in linguistics, computer science, and psychology. How they are used, however, varies widely according to the research domain: knowledge representation, cognitive modelling, problem solving mechanisms, etc. These different perspectives are complementary, each one adding a piece to the puzzle.

Bringing the Nation Back In takes as its starting point a series of developments that shaped politics in the United States and Europe over the past thirty years: the end of the Cold War, the rise of financial and economic globalization, the creation of the European Union, and the development of the postnational. This book contends we are now witnessing a break with the post-1945 world order and with modern politics. Two competing ideas have arisen—global cosmopolitanism and populist nationalism. Contributors argue this polarization of social ethos between cosmopolitanism and nationalism is a sign of a deeper political crisis, which they explore from different perspectives. Rather than taking sides, the aim is to diagnose the origins of the current impasse and to "bring the nation back in" by expanding what we mean by "nation" and national identity and by respecting the localizing processes that have led to national traditions and struggles.

Readings in Fuzzy Sets for Intelligent Systems is a collection of readings that explore the main facets of fuzzy sets and possibility theory and their use in intelligent systems. Basic notions in fuzzy set theory are discussed, along with fuzzy control and approximate reasoning. Uncertainty and informativeness, information processing, and membership, cognition, neural networks, and learning are also considered. Comprised of eight chapters, this book begins with a historical background on fuzzy sets and possibility theory, citing some forerunners who discussed ideas or formal definitions very close to the basic notions introduced by Lotfi Zadeh (1978). The reader is then introduced to fundamental concepts in fuzzy set theory, including symmetric summation and the setting of fuzzy logic; uncertainty and informativeness; and fuzzy control. Subsequent chapters deal with approximate reasoning; information processing; decision and management sciences; and membership, cognition, neural networks, and learning. Numerical methods for fuzzy clustering are described, and adaptive inference in fuzzy knowledge networks is analyzed. This monograph will be of interest to both students and practitioners in the fields of computer science, information science, applied mathematics, and artificial intelligence.

Apart from the names of Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (1845–1929), Mikołaj Kruszewski (1851–1887), and, later, Jerzy Kuryłowicz (1895–1978), Polish linguists and Polish linguistics generally have been little known in the West. The first two were mentioned with approval by Saussure in an unpublished paper, and this reference was picked up by Roman Jakobson and others many years later. Kuryłowicz, for his part, made himself well known in the West through his important work as Indo-Europeanist, even Semiticist, and as a general linguist. The present volume is a first attempt to broaden the perspectives on the Polish contribution to linguistics both inside and outside of Poland during the past centuries. Specialists in their respective fields contributed chapters on the origins and development of general linguistics (Z. Wąsik), applied linguistics (F. Grucza), lexicology (T. Piotrowski), dialectology (St. Gogolewski), and onomastics (S. Gala), followed by five chapters presenting the theories of the arguably most remarkable Polish linguistic thinkers, from Baudouin de Courtenay (A. Adamska-Sałaciak), Kruszewski (F. M. Berezin), and Kuryłowicz (W. Smoczyński) to Mikołaj Rudnicki (1881–1978) and Ludwik Zabrocki (1907–1977) (both written by J. Bańczerowski). Detailed individual bibliographies, a full index of names (with life dates of Polish linguists from the Renaissance to the present day), and a thorough index of subjects and terms make this volume an important reference tool for anyone wishing to acquaint himself with the rich heritage of Polish linguistic thought.