Space In Diachrony

Space is a fundamental dimension of human life and is pervasive in human experience. Research on space has highlighted the possible asymmetrical nature of spatial relations. Differences in the encoding of goals and sources of motion are a case in point, and cross-linguistic coding tendencies show that path is less frequently flagged by a dedicated case than goal, source/origin, and (static) location (locative). Interestingly, such asymmetries may correlate with certain types of landmark, as in the case of toponyms or of animate entities. Even though these issues have been focused upon both in typological and psycholinguistic research, they remain largely open. The papers in this collection aim to show that a diachronic approach may shed light on the way in which asymmetries in the space domain come about over time, thus contributing to the clarification of synchronically puzzling facts.

Space has long been a popular topic in linguistic research. Numerous books on the subject have been published over the past decade. However, none of these books were based on linguistic data from Chinese and expressions of space in Chinese have been largely neglected in past research. In this volume, not only Mandarin Chinese (the standard language) is investigated; several other dialects, as well as a minority language of China and Chinese Sign Language are studied. Cross-linguistic, synchronic and diachronic approaches are used to investigate phenomena related to space. The authors of this book present different points of view on the expression of space in language and related theoretical issues. As the contributing scholars argue, Chinese shares many common features with other languages, but also presents some particular properties. Space is a topic that is both classical and modern, of enduring interest. These studies of space give insight into not only general linguistics but also other domains such as anthropology and psychology.

This book presents a comprehensive survey of historically attested relative clause constructions from a diachronic typological perspective. Systematic integration of historical data and a typological approach demonstrates how typology and historical linguistics can each benefit from attention to the other. The diachronic behaviour of relative clauses is mapped across a broad range of genetically and geographically diverse languages. Central to the discussion is the strength of evidence for what have previously been claimed to be ‘natural’ or even ‘universal’ pathways of change. While many features of relative clause constructions are found to be remarkably stable over long periods of time, it is shown that language contact seems to be the crucial factor that does trigger change when it occurs. These results point to the importance of incorporating the effects of language contact into models of language change rather than viewing contact situations as exceptional. The findings of this study have implications for the definition of relative clauses, their syntactic structures and the relationships between the different ‘subtypes’ of this construction, as well as offering new directions for the integration of typological and historical linguistic research.

This book offers a novel and interdisciplinary exploration of revolution as situated protest in Tunisia. Larbi Sadiki and Layla Saleh present extensive local evidence to demonstrate that popular resistance has been a mainstay of modern Tunisia before, during, and after colonialism. Protest makes peoplehood, and peoplehood makes protest: neither is self-contained. The book explores the rich history and diversity of insurrectionary politics in Tunisia from the onset of protests in the 1960s up to the 2011 Arab Spring revolution and beyond, exploring bottom-up activism (hirak) and revolution (thawrah). The six protestscapes presented in the volume (unions, student activists, the phosphate uprising, the 2010-11 revolution, Kamour, and football ultras) offer a novel way of examining partial 'moving snapshots' that are crucial to understanding revolution. They counter the prevailing narrative of revolution as leaderless, a spontaneous surprise with no historical pedigree or inherited learning, and depict instead an active citizenry whose collective memories are stamped by trials of anti-colonial and anti-dictatorial rebellion.

Questioning the implicit assumptions that we make about space, this text considers conventional notions of social science, as well as demonstrating how a vigorous understanding of space can impact on political consequences.

This two-volume set constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Industrial and Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence and Expert Systems, IEA/AIE-98, held in Benicassim, Castellon, Spain, in June 1998.The two volumes present a total of 187 revised full papers selected from 291 submissions. In accordance with the conference, the books are devoted to new methodologies, knowledge modeling and hybrid techniques. The papers explore applications from virtually all subareas of AI including knowledge-based systems, fuzzyness and uncertainty, formal reasoning, neural information processing, multiagent systems, perception, robotics, natural language processing, machine learning, supervision and control systems, etc..

Now available in paperback for the first time since its original publication, the material in this book provides a broad, accessible guide to semantic typology, crosslinguistic semantics and diachronic semantics. Coming from a world-leading team of authors, the book also deals with the concept of meaning in psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics, and the understanding of semantics in computer science. It is packed with highly cited, expert guidance on the key topics in the field, making it a bookshelf essential for linguists, cognitive scientists, philosophers, and computer scientists working on natural language.

This collection arises from the Fifth International Scientific Conference, “Language and Speech in Synchrony and Diachrony”, held in Taganrog, Russia, devoted to the memory of Russian linguist and philosopher Professor P.V. Chesnokov. It examines the functioning of different levels of linguistic units and categories of speech with regard to intra-and cross-cultural communication in pragmatics of speech. The theory of language and speech is represented not only in synchrony, but in diachrony, in the comparative and typological aspects of languages from various groups, including non-literate Yenisei languages. A further subject of discussion within is the problem of translation, and the relation of language and speech, text and discourse. The volume consists of six parts: Part I: Language and its grammatical categories in diachronic aspect; Part II: Grammar and other subsystems of the language; Part III: Cross-cultural communication and translation; Part IV: Problems of linguistic and diachronic typology; Part V: Pragmalinguistics and speech; and Part VI: Text, discourse, speech in anthropocentric paradigm. The book will be of interest to scholars of philology, linguistics, culture and humanities, as well as those interested in issues of language, culture and language teaching methods.