The Emergence Of Functions In Language

This volume explores the question of why languages - even those spoken in the same geographical area by people who share similar social structures, occupations, and religious beliefs - differ in the meanings expressed by their grammatical systems. Zygmunt Frajzyngier and Marielle Butters outline a new methodology to explore these differences, and to discover the motivations behind the emergence of meanings. The motivations that they identify include: the communicative need triggered when the grammatical system inherently produces ambiguities; the principle of functional transparency; the opportunistic emergence of meaning, whereby unoccupied formal niches acquire a new function; metonymic emergence, whereby a property of an existing function receives a formal means of its own, thus creating a new function; and the emergence of functions through language contact. The book offers new analyses of a range of phenomena across different languages, such as benefactives and progressives in English, and point of view of the subject and goal orientation in Chadic languages. It also draws on a wealth of data from other languages including French, Spanish, Polish, Russian, and a variety of less familiar Sino-Russian idiolects.

This volume explores the question of why languages differ in the meanings expressed by their grammatical systems. It offers a new methodology to explore the differences and the motivations behind the emergence of meanings, based on data from a wide range of languages, including English, French, Polish, Chadic languages, and Sino-Russian idiolects.

This book covers the origins of language, combining social and natural science perspectives.

Language centres serve an important role in the development and implementation of language policy and in supporting language teachers. This book describes five language centres, the Centre for Information on Language Teaching and Research (London), the European Centre for Modern Languages (Graz), the Regional Language Centre (Singapore), the National Foreign Language Center (NFLC, Washington DC), and the Centre for Applied Linguistics and Languages (CALL, Brisbane). These contrasting centres provide the basis for a discussion of the roles, functions and management of language centres and the challenges facing such centres (and universities in general) arising from tensions between the pursuit of academic excellence and the demands of commercialisation and economic rationalism. The author holds a chair in applied linguistics in Griffith University and has written extensively on language policy and its implementation and on language assessment. He has established and directed three language centres since the mid-1980s, including CALL since 1990, and is an Adjunct Fellow of NFLC.

When Pieter Verburg (1905-1989) published Taal en Functionaliteit in 1952, the work was received with admiration by linguistic scholars, though the number of those who could read the Dutch text for themselves remained limited. The title alludes to the theories of linguistic function set out in 1936 by Karl Bühler, but Verburg regards the three functions of discourse — focussing respectively on the speaker, the person addressed and the matter discussed — as no more than sub-functions of the human function of speech. His central concern is to explore the relationships between thought and language, and language and reality; and the work sets out to provide a historical analysis of views on these relationships in the period 1100 to 1800. The great strength of the work lies in the way in which the views of language are related to contemporaneous moves in philosophy and science, contrasting essentially the mediaeval acceptance of authority, the beginnings of induction in the Renaissance, the dependence of early rationalism on calculation based on axiomatic truths, and the further development of independent observation. All these trends are reflected in the way men thought about language, as well as in the way they used it. Much has been written on the history of linguistics since this book was written, but it still offers a unique view of the development of thinking about language.

This authoritative handbook explores the latest integrated theory for understanding human language, offering the most inclusive text yet published on the rapidly evolving emergentist paradigm. Brings together an international team of contributors, including the most prominent advocates of linguistic emergentism Focuses on the ways in which the learning, processing, and structure of language emerge from a competing set of cognitive, communicative, and biological constraints Examines forces on widely divergent timescales, from instantaneous neurolinguistic processing to historical changes and language evolution Addresses key theoretical, empirical, and methodological issues, making this handbook the most rigorous examination of emergentist linguistic theory ever

Prosody in English, German and Chinese is outlined as a principal component of linguistic form for communicative functions in speech interaction.