Search

This book takes urban Wolof beyond Senegal to consider the effects of mobility on language and examine how the diasporans engage in their daily language practices as transmigrants. The parallel between languaging and migrating underpins the author's argument, as he examines the dynamicity of languaging at both micro and macro levels, as speakers navigate across spaces and languages. Moving away from a code-based approach, the author makes a compelling case that the urbanite, rather than shuttling between codes, deploys instead idiolectal features from a unique linguistic repertoire which comprises at once semiotic, cognitive, and language features. His indigenous approach affords novel perspectives in linguistic ethnography and complements the Euro-Western methodologies.

This book facilitates constructive interdisciplinary dialogue among linguistics and philology specialists concerning various languages in Vietnam, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. The book's principal objective is to investigate the interdisciplinary nature of language change, with a particular focus on analyzing the structural and socio-cultural components of the evolution of specific linguistic phenomena over time. The book concentrates on the five primary language families in the East and Southeast Asian linguistic arena, namely Austroasiatic, Tai-Kadai, Sino-Tibetan, Austronesian, and Hmong-Mien. In doing so, it develops understanding of the extent to which language change is the result of language-internal mechanisms, prolonged contact with other languages within the same linguistic area, and the surrounding socio-cultural milieu. Given that Vietnam presents a linguistic microcosm of the East and Southeast Asia region, the book is divided into two sections. The first centers on historical linguistics relating to major languages based in Vietnam, including Vietnamese and its significant neighbors, Tay and Nung. The subsequent section examines the transformations observable in other languages prevalent across East and Southeast Asia that are historically, typologically, and geographically related to languages from Vietnam, including Chinese, Formosan, and Philippine languages, as well as Hmongic languages. A product of a workshop sponsored by the Harvard Yenching Institute held at the Institute of Sino-Nom Studies, this book encompasses a significant contribution to the field of Vietnamese historical linguistics, which has been notably underexplored in academic research. It is relevant to linguists, philologists, historians, anthropologists, and cultural scholars interested in Vietnam in particular, and the Southeast and East Asian cultural and linguistic landscape at large.

This book sets out to try to understand why segregated schooling still exists, especially in northern Italy in South Tyrol where they practice ‘separate but equal'education. Supported by the UN, the Austrian and Italian governments, the province is considered a ‘peace model'due to its consociational approach to dealing with the region's Nazi and Fascist past, which has led to a ‘negative peace'. The autonomy statutes, which derived from this ‘peace', resulted in an education system that is linguistically segregated for the purposes of protecting South Tyrol's ethnolinguistic minorities. Broken into two parts, the book begins with the background history of the province, before describing the region's geographical layout, demographics, local identity, and its three-part schooling system. By examining responses to South Tyrol's education system, and its impact on local group dynamics, this book explores the implications that segregated schooling may have on second language acquisition. This case study will be of interest to students and scholars of Italian studies, anthropology, linguistic ethnography, sociolinguistics, and second language education.

This book presents an evolutionary theory of the origin and step-by-step development of linguistic structures and cognitive abilities from the early stages of anthropogenesis to the Upper Paleolithic. Emphasizing the social nature of the human mind and using an extended version of C.Hempel's explanatory logic, the author proves that language and consciousness emerged and evolved through the daily efforts of our ancestors to overcome mutual misunderstandings in increasingly complex social orders with increasing tasks on memory, thinking, and normative regulation of behavior, with the addition of new and new communicative concerns.The book addresses questions such as the following:What unique social conditions led to the emergence of the first protosyllables and protowords?What steps enabled the crossing of the'linguistic Rubicon'(between animal communication and human speech)?Why were syllables and phonemes needed? How did ourancestors overcome the difficulties of misunderstanding?How, when, and why did ancient people learn to speak in turns? Why did they begin to talk about past and distant events? What is consciousness and how did it evolve along with language?How many original languages were there and why are there roughly 200 philas (language macrofamilies)?How and why did the number of languages and the degree of their complexity change in pre-written history?Did the Romance languages really evolve from Latin?Accordingly, the book will appeal to scholars in various disciplines who are interested in a better understanding of the cognitive aspects of anthropogenesis and the ancient origins of language and consciousness.

This book argues for an approach to linguistic ethnography which departs from the singular gaze of the academic researcher, to amplify instead the voices of participants, researchers and collaborators. The authors offer an account of writing ethnography polyphonically, incorporating the complexity of individual voices. In doing so they challenge the imperative to make meaning from, and explain the culture of, ‘the other'. Together, the essays open up the emic perspective by considering the experiential, aesthetic, emotional, moral and ethical value people bring to encounters with others. The book is an essential addition to research methods courses in applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, and an invaluable contribution to knowledge about research-based drama, theatre and creative practice.

Provides an expansive view of the full field of linguistic anthropology, featuring an all-new team of contributing authors representing diverse new perspectives A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropology provides a timely and authoritative overview of the field of study that explores how language influences society and culture. Bringing together more than 30 original essays by an interdisciplinary panel of renowned scholars and younger researchers, this comprehensive volume covers a uniquely wide range of both classic and contemporary topics as well as cutting-edge research methods and emerging areas of investigation. Building upon the success of its predecessor, the acclaimed Blackwell Companion to Linguistic Anthropology, this new edition reflects current trends and developments in research and theory. Entirely new chapters discuss topics such as the relationship between language and experiential phenomena, the use of research data to address social justice, racist language and raciolinguistics, postcolonial discourse, and the challenges and opportunities presented by social media, migration, and global neoliberalism. Innovative new research analyzes racialized language in World of Warcraft, the ethics of public health discourse in South Africa, the construction of religious doubt among Orthodox Jewish bloggers, hybrid forms of sociality in videoconferencing, and more. Presents fresh discussions of topics such as American Indian speech communities, creolization, language mixing, language socialization, deaf communities, endangered languages, and language of the law Addresses recent trends in linguistic anthropological research, including visual documentation, ancient scribes, secrecy, language and racialization, global hip hop, justice and health, and language and experience Utilizes ethnographic illustration to explore topics in the field of linguistic anthropology Includes a new introduction written by the editors and an up-to-date bibliography with over 2,000 entries A New Companion to Linguistic Anthropologyis a must-have for researchers, scholars, and undergraduate and graduate students in linguistic anthropology, as well as an excellent text for those in related fields such as sociolinguistics, discourse studies, semiotics, sociology of language, communication studies, and language education.

Taking a unique approach which combines sociolinguistics with theoretical linguistics, this book presents a view of language and grammar as both a cognitive and socio-cultural phenomena. Beginning with Bakhtin's theories of conceptual grammar and lexico-grammar, this book encompasses a broad philosophical range, engaging with the ideas of key figures such as Bergson, Chomsky, Derrida and Wittgenstein. Drawing on their work, it investigates how language progresses from an inner reflection of the rational mind to develop social and ideological aspects as it interacts with culture. In doing so, it shows how identity is unitary and rational at the linguistic core whilst multiple social identities are simultaneously shaped by linguistic differences at the cultural peripheries. Encompassing theoretical linguistics, cognitive linguistics, discourse analysis, multilingualism, sociolinguistics and semiotics, Rationality and Interpretation demonstrates how the different branches of linguistics can complement each other and highlights the socio-cultural influences of language development, as well as how language development is shaped by those influences.

What is it about humans that makes language possible, and what is it about language that makes us human?If you are reading this, you have done something that only our species has evolved to do. You have acquired a natural language. This book asks, How has this changed us? Where scholars have long wondered what it is about humans that makes language possible, N. J. Enfield and Jack Sidnell ask instead, What is it about humans that is made possible by language? In Consequences of Language their objective is to understand what modern language really is and to identify its logical and conceptual consequences for social life. Central to this undertaking is the concept of intersubjectivity, the open sharing of subjective experience. There is, Enfield and Sidnell contend, a uniquely human form of intersubjectivity, and it is essentially intertwined with language in two ways: a primary form of intersubjectivity was necessary for language to have begun evolving in our species in the first place and then language, through its defining reflexive properties, transformed the nature of our intersubjectivity. In the authors'analysis, social accountability—the bedrock of society—is grounded in this linguistically transformed, enhanced kind of intersubjectivity.The account of the language-mind-society connection put forward in Consequences of Language is one of unprecedented reach, suggesting new connections across disciplines centrally concerned with language—from anthropology and philosophy to sociology and cognitive science—and among those who would understand the foundational role of language in making us human.

In 1885, Henri Bergson addressed a class of French high school students on the subject of politeness. Bergson would go on to become one of the most influential philosophers of his time, yet although this essay set forth a striking theory of politeness and foreshadowed aspects of his later work, it remains remarkably little-known. Rethinking Politeness with Henri Bergson offers the first English translation of Discours sur la Politesse, and brings together leading linguistic anthropologists to critically engage with and expand on Bergson's ideas. At the core of Bergson's essay is a tripartite classification of politeness acts into politesse des manières ('politeness of manners'), politesse de l'esprit ('politeness of mind/spirit'), and politesse du coeur ('politeness of the heart'). Presented along a hierarchy of intersubjective attunement and ethical aspirations, Bergson's three types call for the progressive abandonment of habits when they get in the way of our ability to help others. They can also be read as an invitation to consider politeness as a dimension of human sociability that is relevant to social theory. Collectively, the essays in this volume untangle the ideological, socio-historical, and material conditions that shape notions of the ideal social agent, and propose a rethinking of politeness that serves as a bridge to larger issues of civility, citizenship, and democracy.

What role does language play in the formation and perpetuation of our ideas about nationality and other social categories? And what role does it play in the formation and perpetuation of nations themselves, and of other human groups? Language and Nationality considers these questions and examines the consequences of the notion that a language and a nationality are intrinsically connected. Pietro Bortone illustrates how our use of language reveals more about us than we think, is constantly judged, and marks group insiders and group outsiders. Casting doubt on several assumptions common among academics and non-academics alike, he highlights how languages significantly differ among themselves in structure, vocabulary, and social use, in ways that are often untranslatable and can imply a particular culture. Nevertheless, he argues, this does not warrant the way language has been used for promoting a national outlook and for teaching us to identify with a nation. Above all, the common belief that languages indicate nationalities reflects our intellectual and political history, and has had a tremendous social cost. Bortone elucidates how the development of standardized national languages – while having merits – has fostered an unrealistic image of nations and has created new social inequalities. He also shows how it has obscured the history of many languages, artificially altered their fundamental features, and distorted the public understanding of what a language is.

This book demonstrates the power and distinctiveness of the contribution that sociolinguistics can make to our understanding of everyday communicative practice under changing social conditions. It builds on the approaches developed by Gumperz and Hymes in the 1970s and 80s, and it not only affirms their continuing relevance in analyses of the micropolitics of everyday talk in urban settings, but also argues for their value in emergent efforts to chart the heavily securitised environments now developing around us. Drawing on 10 years of collaborative work and ranging across disciplinary, interdisciplinary and applied perspectives, the book begins with guiding principles and methodology, shifts to empirically driven arguments in urban sociolinguistics, and concludes with studies of (in)securitised communication addressed to challenges ahead.

In diesem Open-Access-Buch wird gezeigt, dass die christliche Predigt eine multimodal realisierte rekonstruktiv-prospektive kommunikative Gattung ist, die die Aufgabe hat, eine Wissens-, Glaubens- und Praktikengemeinschaft herzustellen. Diese Gattung wurde bisher nicht konzise auf allen Gattungsebenen beschrieben. Die vorliegende Arbeit schließt diese Forschungslücke mithilfe natürlicher Audio- und Videodaten. Theoretisch und methodisch bewegt sich die Arbeit an der Schnittstelle zwischen Linguistik und Soziologie. Sie greift sowohl auf das Modell der kommunikativen Gattungen nach Luckmann als auch auf das Repertoire der Multimodalen Interaktionsanalyse zurück. Zusätzlich wird ein neues, innovatives Modell für die Transkription von Multimodalität vorgestellt.

This book offers the latest insights on language documentation, a reborn, refashioned, and reenergized subfield of linguistics motivated by the urgent task of creating a record of the world's fast disappearing languages. Language documentation provides data to challenge and improve existing linguistic theory. In addition, because it requires input from various fields to be comprehensive, language documentation serves to build bridges between linguistics and other disciplines. Language documentation also provides resources for communities interested in language and culture preservation, language maintenance, and language revitalization. This book informs, evokes interest, and encourages involvement at all levels.

Food plays a central role in the production of culture and is likewise a powerful resource for the representation and organization of social order. Status is asserted or contested through both the materiality of food (its substance, its raw economics, and its manufacture or preparation) and through its discursivity (its marketing, staging, and the way it is depicted and discussed). This intersection of materiality and discursivity makes food an ideal site for examining the place of language in contemporary class formations, and for engaging cutting-edge debates in sociolinguistics on language materiality. In Elite Authenticity, Gwynne Mapes integrates theories of mediatization, materiality, and authenticity in order to explore the discursive production of elite status and class inequality in food discourse. Relying on a range of methodological approaches, Mapes examines restaurant reviews and articles published in the New York Times food section; a collection of Instagram posts from @nytfood; ethnographically-informed fieldwork in four renowned Brooklyn, NY, restaurants; and a recorded dinner conversation with six food-enthusiasts. Across these varied genres of data, she demonstrates how a discourse of'elite authenticity'represents a particular surfacing of rhetorical maneuvers in which distinction is orchestrated, avowed/disavowed, and circulated. Elite Authenticity takes a multimodal critical discourse analysis approach, drawing on theories from linguistics, food and cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, and philosophy. Its presentation and analysis of aural, visual, spatial, material, and embodied discourse will be of interest to scholars and students of communication studies, critical discourse studies, sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, and cultural geography.

This book examines the interplay and tensions between hegemonic and counter-hegemonic language policy and processes in Tigray, a regional state of Ethiopia, in the period of pre- and post-1991. Viewing language use and language policy as dynamic social and ideological processes, the book presents Ethiopia as an example of language policy creation and implementation over time, in a highly volatile political context. The case of Ethiopia is unique in that different language policies and practices were put in place as the country's leaders changed through political takeovers. Declared language policies were not always implemented, and those implemented were often protested. The book starts with an overview and review of language policy and planning, followed by a chapter on the history of such planning in Ethiopia. It then presents the methodology used for the study, and examines the appropriation of hegemonic LPP, patterns of resistance, schools and public sites as centers of resistance,and the emergence and development of specific patterns of language use in different regions of the country. The book ends with recommendations for future research, and draws the overall conclusion that since LPP is a dynamic and multilayered contextual process, official or de facto language policy is often undermined by overt or covert unofficial language policies, ideologies, mechanisms, and agents that result in different patterns of language use.

This is the first textbook on the linguistic relativity hypothesis, presenting it in user-friendly language, yet analyzing all its premises in systematic ways. The hypothesis claims that there is an intrinsic interconnection between thought, language, and society. All technical terms are explained and a glossary is provided at the back of the volume. The book looks at the history and different versions of the hypothesis over the centuries, including the research paradigms and critiques that it has generated. It also describes and analyzes the relevant research designed to test its validity in various domains of language structure and use, from grammar and discourse to artificial languages and in nonverbal semiotic systems as well. Overall, this book aims to present a comprehensive overview of the hypothesis and its supporting research in a textbook fashion, with pedagogical activities in each chapter, including questions for discussion and practical exercises on specific notions associated with the hypothesis. The book also discusses the hypothesis as a foundational notion for the establishment of linguistic anthropology as a major branch of linguistics. This essential course text inspires creative, informed dialogue and debate for students of anthropology,linguistics, cultural studies, cognitive science, and psychology.

This book presents a multidisciplinary overview of a little known interethnic conflict in the southernmost part of the Americas: the tensions between the Mapuche indigenous people and the settlers of European descent in the Araucania region, in southern Chile. Politically autonomous during the colonial period, the Mapuche had their land confiscated, their population decimated and the survivors displaced and relocated as marginalized and poor peasants by Chilean white settlers at the end of the nineteenth century, when Araucania was transformed in a multi-ethnic region marked by numerous tensions between the marginalized indigenous population and the dominant Chileans of European descent.This contributed volume presents a collection of papers which delve into some of the intercultural dilemmas posed by these complex interethnic relations. These papers were originally published in Spanish and French and provide a sample of the research activities of the Núcleo de Estudios Interétnicos e Interculturales (NEII) at the Universidad Católica de Temuco, in the capital of Araucania. The NEII research center brings together scholars from different fields: sociocultural anthropology, sociolinguistics, ethno-literature, intercultural education, intercultural philosophy, ethno-history and translation studies to produce innovative research in intercultural and interethnic relations. The chapters in this volume present a sample of this work, focusing on three main topics: The ambivalence between the inclusion and exclusion of indigenous peoples in processes of nation-building.The challenges posed by the incorporation of intercultural practices in the spheres of language, education and justice.The limitations of a functional notion of interculturality based on eurocentric thought and neoliberal economic rationality. Intercultural Studies from Southern Chile: Theoretical and Empirical Approaches willbe of interest to anthropologists, linguists, historians, philosophers, educators and a range of other social scientists interested in intercultural and interethnic studies.

This book explores the linguistic and social practices related to same-sex desires and identities that were widely attested in the USA during the years preceding the police raid on the Stonewall Inn in 1969. The author demonstrates that this language was not a unified or standardized code, but rather an aggregate of linguistic practices influenced by gender, racial, and class differences, urban/rural locations, age, erotic desires and pursuits, and similar social descriptors. Contrary to preconceptions, moreover, it circulated widely in both public and in private domains. This intriguing book will appeal to students and academics interested in the intersections of language, sexuality and history and queer historical linguistics.

This book addresses one of the most crucial and common questions confronting planners of languages other than English, that is, how the impacts of global languages on local languages should be dealt with: internationalization or local language promotion? This empirical study examines the implementation of Iran's governmental language and terminology policy to accelerate rarely used abbreviation methods in Persian in order to preserve the language from the extensiveness of borrowed English abbreviated forms. This book provides an in-depth analysis of relevant linguistic theories as well as the structure and social context of the Persian language itself, rather than relying on personal opinions or beliefs either in favour of or against abbreviation. The text appeals to politicians, language planners, terminologists, lecturers, authors and translators of scientific works, especially those who are speakers of languages other than English and seek to promote their local languages. This book is particularly relevant to linguistics students (both undergraduate and graduate students) and language teachers and researchers in the broader areas of language education and curriculum design.

In a sweeping synthesis of new research in a number of different disciplines, this book argues that we humans are not who we think we are. As he explores the interconnections between cutting-edge work in bioanthropology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, human language and learning, and beyond, James Paul Gee advances, also, a personal philosophy of language, learning, and culture, informed by his decades of work across linguistics and the social sciences. Gee argues that our schools, institutions, legal systems, and societies are designed for creatures that do not exist, thus resulting in multiple, interacting crises, such as climate change, failing institutions, and the rise of nationalist nationalism. As Gee constructs an understanding of the human that takes into account our social, collective, and historical nature, as established by recent research, he inspires readers to reflect for themselves on the very question of who we are—a key consideration for anyone interested in society, government, schools, health, activism, culture and diversity, or even just survival.

This volume explores how linguistic and cultural diversity in Greece, caused by various waves of emigration and immigration, has transformed Greek society and its educational system. It examines the country's current linguistic diversity, which is characterised by the languages of immigrants, repatriates, refugees, Roma, Muslim minorities, and Pomaks as well as linguistic varieties and dialects; and how schools and the state have designed and implemented programmes to deal with the significant educational challenges posed by these culturally and linguistically diverse groups. In this regard, the book takes into account the nature and evolution of Greek society; Greece's traditional role as a labour-exporting country with a long history of migration to other countries; and major political, economic and social developments, such as the collapse of communism, the opening of borders in Eastern Europe, and the influx of immigrants from Muslim countries.

This book addresses issues of how the cultures in Hong Kong, Singapore and Malaysia have been Englishized in postcolonial and globcalized contexts, not just in terms of language, but also in writers'/people's subjectivity. Taking a cultural-literary approach to the study of Englishized subjectivity, the book offers a unique study of hybridized literary/language forms by relating them to bilingual thinking and bicultural sensibility. Poets, novelists and playwrights have different strategies to cope with new images and new forms of expression that can capture their sense of hybridized identity, and as a result, hybridity becomes creativity.

This book is an innovative sociolinguistic study of New Australia, an Australian immigrant community in Paraguay in 1893, whose descendants today speak Guarani. Providing fresh data on a previously under-researched community who are an extremely rare case of language shifting from English heritage language to a local indigenous language, the case study is situated within the wider context of the colonial and post-colonial spread of English in Latin America over the past century. Drawing on insights from linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, Latin American studies and history, the author presents the history of the colony before closely analysing the interplay of language and identity in this uniquely diasporic setting. This book fills a longstanding gap in the World Englishes and heritage languages literature, and it will be of interest to scholars of colonial and postcolonial languages, and minority language more generally.

This book provides a critical introduction to the current views and controversies regarding language evolution. It sheds new light on hot topics such as: How ancient is language? Did Neanderthals have some form of language? Did language evolve gradually and incrementally, through stages, or suddenly, in one leap, in all its complexity? Does language evolution involve natural selection or not? This book is essential reading for scholars and students interested in language evolution, especially those in the fields of linguistics, psychology, biology, anthropology, and neuroscience.

This open access book is a novel contribution in two ways: It is a multi-disciplinary examination of the indigenous South Saami people in Fennoscandia, a social and cultural group that often is overlooked as it is a minority within the Saami minority. Based on both historical material such as archaeological evidence, 20th century newspapers, and postcard motives as well as current sources such as ongoing land-right trials and recent works of historiography, the articles highlight the culture and living conditions of this indigenous group, mapping the negotiations of different identities through the interaction of Saami and non-Saami people through the ages. By illuminating this under-researched field, the volume also enriches the more general debate on global indigenous history, and sheds light on the construction of a Scandinavian identity and the limits of the welfare state and the myth of heterogeneity and equality.

This book examines the powerful role of writing in society. The invention of writing, independently at various places and times in history, always stood at the cradle of powerful civilizations. It is impossible to imagine modern life without writing. As individuals and social groups we hold high expectations of its potential for societal and personal development. Globally, huge resources have been and are being invested in promoting literacy worldwide. So what could possibly be tyrannical about writing?The title is inspired by Ferdinand de Saussure's argument against writing as an object of linguistic research and what he called la tyrannie de la lettre. His critique denounced writing as an imperfect, distorted image of speech that obscures our view of language and its structure. The chapters of the book, written by experts in language and literacy studies, go beyond this and explore tyrannical aspects of writing in society through history and around the world: from Medieval Novgorod, the European Renaissance and 19th-century France and Germany over colonial Sudan to postcolonial Sri Lanka and Senegal and present-day Hong Kong and Central China to the Netherlands and Spain. The metaphor of'tyranny of writing'serves as a heuristic for exploring ideologies of language and literacy in culture and society and tensions and contradictions between the written and the spoken word.

This book examines how urban adolescents attending a non-mainstream learning centre in the UK use language and other semiotic practices to enact identities in their day-to-day lives. Combining variationist sociolinguistics and ethnographically-informed interactional sociolinguistics, this detailed and highly reflexive account provides rich descriptions and discussions of the linguistic processes at work in a previously underexplored research environment. In doing so, it reveals fresh insights into the changes taking place in urban British English, and into the difficulties of undertaking ethnographic, sociolinguistic research in a challenging context using a combination of methods and approaches. This interdisciplinary work will appeal to students and scholars from across the fields of sociolinguistics, ethnography, and education; as well as providing a valuable resource for teachers and trainees.

This book presents a description and analysis of sociolinguistics written from a demographer's perspective. It synthesizes the data on the materials, methods, and issues of this interdisciplinary field, pulling together the scattered materials published in this area into a coherent whole. Drawing on a wide range of sciences in addition to demography and sociolinguistics, including sociology, anthropology, statistics, psychology, neuroscience, and public policy, the book treats theoretical and applied issues, links methods and substantive findings, covers both national and international materials, and provides prehistorical, historical, and contemporary illustrations. The book treats the theoretical issue of how the language we use develops socially on a base of linguistic genetic capacity and the practical issue of how the intervention of the state and public figures may profoundly alter the natural evolution of the language. As such, this book will appeal to a wide range of users, from students to teachers and practitioners of social demography, sociolinguistics, cultural anthropology, and particularly to those social scientists interested in ethnic studies and human migration.

This book is about media, mediation, and meaning. The Art of Interpretation focuses on a set of interrelated processes whereby ostensibly human-specific modes of meaning become automated by machines, formatted by protocols, and networked by infrastructures. That is, as computation replaces interpretation, information effaces meaning, and infrastructure displaces interaction. Or so it seems. Paul Kockelman asks: What does it take to automate, format, and network meaningful practices? What difference does this make for those who engage in such practices? And what is at stake? Reciprocally: How can we better understand computational processes from the standpoint of meaningful practices? How can we leverage such processes to better understand such practices? And what lies in wait? In answering these questions, Kockelman stays very close to fundamental concerns of computer science that emerged in the first half of the twentieth-century. Rather than foreground the latest application, technology or interface, he accounts for processes that underlie each and every digital technology deployed today. In a novel method, The Art of Interpretation leverages key ideas of American pragmatism-a philosophical stance that understands the world, and our relation to it, in a way that avoids many of the conundrums and criticisms of conventional twentieth-century social theory. It puts this stance in dialogue with certain currents, and key texts, in anthropology and linguistics, science and technology studies, critical theory, computer science, and media studies.

The X figure is ubiquitous in contemporary culture, but attempts to explain our fixation with X are rare.This book argues that the origins and meanings of X go far beyond alphabets and archetypes to remembered feelings of body movements - movements best typified in the performance of “spread-eagle” as a posture or gesture. These body memories are then projected onto other patterns and dynamics to help us make sense of the world. The argument is accomplished using a blend of insights from linguistic anthropology, cognitive linguistics, rhetoric culture and process semiotics to bring together revealing clues from languages, cultures and thinkers around the world.Chief among the uses and experiences of X are its tendencies to involve us in surprising reversals and blends. In ancient times the X-pattern was discussed as “chiasmus”, a figure which, according to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, informs the most basic elements of our bodily experience, calling into question polarized dichotomies such as subject versus object. Pushed to extremes, presumed opposites like these tend to reverse suddenly. Likewise, blended experiences of our bodily extremities - arms and legs, toes and fingers, hands and feet - provide a plausible source of grounding for unique human abilities like analogy and double-scope conceptual integration. The book illustrates these dynamics by drawing attention to uses of X in history, prehistory and daily life, from sports and advertising to world mythology and languages around the world.The Semiotics of X is the first step towards developing a larger argument on the important but neglected role that chiasmus plays in cognition. It aims to inspire continued exploration on the figure, with the full expectation that chiasmus will become for the 21st century what metaphor became for the 20th century: a revolution in thinking about the way we think.

This book celebrates the bicentenary of Schleiermacher's famous Berlin conference'On the Different Methods of Translating'(1813). It is the product of an international Call for Papers that welcomed scholars from many international universities, inviting them to discuss and illuminate the theoretical and practical reception of a text that is not only arguably canonical for the history and theory of translation, but which has moreover never ceased to be present both in theoretical and applied Translation Studies and remains a mandatory part of translator training. A further reason for initiating this project was the fact that the German philosopher and theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, though often cited in Translation Studies up to the present day, was never studied in terms of his real impact on different domains of translation, literature and culture.

The political shocks of the 2014 Ukrainian crisis have been felt in many former Soviet countries, not least Latvia, where over 35 per cent of the population are native Russian speakers. At a time when analysts and commentators are unsure about Russia's future plans to intervene on behalf of their ‘compatriots', this study provides a detailed political and cultural analysis of Russian-speaking identity in Latvia. By using Russian-speakers in Latvia as a specific case study, this volume also offers a fresh methodological approach to the study of discourses and discursive strategies. It outlines a coherent methodology to study the evolution of discourses over time, rather than a single de-contextualised and static time period. Drawing on media analysis, elite interviews, focus groups and survey data, this volume situates the identity strategies of Russian speakers within the transformations of the post-Soviet era. By assessing political, cultural and economic links with their home state (Latvia) and their potential kin-state (Russia), it offers important insights into the complex identity positions of Latvia's Russian speakers, and how these positions have evolved in Latvia since the late Soviet period. At a historical moment when many will question the loyalty of Russian speakers to their various ‘host states', this book provides a timely, scholarly account of ethnic politics in Latvia. It also offers a methodological framework that allows for the mapping of trends in discursive strategies, exploring how they evolve through time.

These in-depth case studies provide novel insights in to the fast-changing language situation in multilingual China, and how it changes the meanings of language identity and language learning. This linguistic ethnographic study of language attitudes and identities in contemporary China in the era of multilingualism provides a comprehensive and critical review of the state of the art in the field of language-attitude research, and situates attitudes towards Chinese regional dialects in their social, historical as well as local contexts. The role of language policies and the links between the interactional phenomena and other contextual factors are investigated through the multi-level analysis of linguistic ethnographic data. This study captures the long-term language socialisation process and the moment-to-moment construction of language attitudes at a level of detail that is rarely seen. The narrative is presented in a highly readable style, without compromising the theoretical sophistication and sociolinguistic complexities.

Language is central to human experience and our understanding of who we are, whether written or unwritten, sung or spoken. But what is language and how do we record it? Where does it reside? Does it exist and evolve within written sources, in performance, in the mind or in speech? For too long, ethnographic, aesthetic and sociolinguistic studies of language have remained apart from analyses emerging from traditions such as literature and performance. Where is Language? argues for a more complex and contextualized understanding of language across this range of disciplines, engaging with key issues, including orality, literacy, narrative, ideology, performance and the human communities in which these take place. Eminent anthropologist Ruth Finnegan draws together a lifetime of ethnographic case studies, reading and personal commentary to explore the roles and nature of language in cultures across the world, from West Africa to the South Pacific. By combining research and reflections, Finnegan discusses the multi-modality of language to provide an account not simply of vocabulary and grammar, but one which questions the importance of cultural settings and the essence of human communication itself.

The Body in Language: Comparative studies of Linguistic Embodiment provides new insights into the theory of linguistic embodiment in its universal and cultural aspects. The contributions of the volume offer theoretical reflections on grammaticalization, lexical semantics, philosophy, multimodal communication and - by discussing metaphorization and metonymy in figurative language - on cognitive linguistics in general. Case studies contribute first-hand data on embodiment from more than 15 languages and present findings on the body in language in diverse cultures from various continents. Embodiment fundamentally underlies human conceptualization and the present discussions reveal a wide range of target domains in conceptual transfers with the body as the source domain.

Dieser Buchtitel ist Teil des Digitalisierungsprojekts Springer Book Archives mit Publikationen, die seit den Anfängen des Verlags von 1842 erschienen sind. Der Verlag stellt mit diesem Archiv Quellen für die historische wie auch die disziplingeschichtliche Forschung zur Verfügung, die jeweils im historischen Kontext betrachtet werden müssen. Dieser Titel erschien in der Zeit vor 1945 und wird daher in seiner zeittypischen politisch-ideologischen Ausrichtung vom Verlag nicht beworben.

While most research on language acquisition continues to consider the individual primarily in closed-system terms, Ecology of Language Acquisition emphasizes the emergence of linguistic development through children's and learners'interactions with their environment - spatial, social, cultural, educational, and so on - bringing to light commonalities between primary language development, child and adult second-language learning, and language acquisition by robots. Such a situated, context-responsive perspective on acquisition is able to interrelate insights from a variety of paradigms and disciplines while avoiding unjustifiable appeals to normativity. The theoretical and empirical studies presented here challenge a number of dominant ideas in language acquisition theory and mark an important new research orientation. This work should be of interest to language acquisition researchers and professionals in a wide range of specialisms.

BACKGROUND This book focuses on two major issues - vowel glottalization and nasalization - in the phonology and phonetics of Coatzospan Mixtec (henceforth CM). CM is an Otomanguean language currently spoken by roughly 2000 people (Small 1990) in the village of San Juan Coatzospan, which is located in the Sierra Mazateca of northern Oaxaca, Mexico.'Though Mixtec constitutes a major branch of the Otomanguean family, the so-called dialects are most appropriately viewed as distinct languages. According to Josserand (1982), there are at least 22 mutually unintelligible varieties of Mixtec. For its part, CM is among the most isolated. Located in the mountains, the village is surrounded entirely by Mazatec speaking communities. Only two other Mixtec languages exhibit over a 25% rate of mutual intelligibility with CM (Josserand 1982). And though it is not clear how this group of Mixtecs came to settle in what is a Mazatec speaking area, their isolation has given rise to special properties not shared by other varieties of the language. Major elements of both the phonology of vowel glottalization and nasalization under focus in this book are, to my knowledge, unique to CM among the Mixtec languages.

Optimality Theory and Language Change: -discusses many optimization and linguistic issues in great detail; -treats the history of a variety of languages, including English, French, Germanic, Galician/Portuguese, Latin, Russian, and Spanish; -shows that the application of OT allows for innovative and improved analyses; -allows researchers that appeal to OT to see the connections of their (usually synchronic) work with diachronic studies; -contains a complete bibliography on Optimality Theory and language change.This volume may be used as one of the texts in courses on historical phonology or syntax that treat these topics from generative approaches or that give a general survey of various frameworks of research into these areas. Likewise, the volume may serve as a text for courses in phonology, syntax and Optimality Theory that have a component dedicated to extensions of linguistic theory to historical change. It is of interest for historical linguists, researchers into Optimality Theory and linguistic theory, and for phonologists and syntacticians with an interest in historical change.

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION This is one of eight volumes of the Encyclopedia of Language and Educa­ tion published by Kluwer Academic. The publication of this work signals the maturity of the field of'language and education'as an international and interdisciplinary field of significance and cohesion. These volumes confirm that'language and education'is much more than the preserve of any single discipline. In designing these volumes, we have tried to recog­ nise the diversity of the field in our selection of contributors and in our choice of topics. The contributors come from every continent and from more than 40 countries. Their reviews discuss language and education issues affecting every country in the world. We have also tried to recognise the diverse interdisciplinary nature of'language and education'in the selection of the editorial personnel them­ selves. The major academic interests of the volume editors confirm this. As principal volume editor for Volume 1, Ruth Wodak has interests in critical linguistics, sociology of language, and language policy. For Vol­ ume 2, Viv Edwards has interests in policy and practice in multilingual classrooms and the sociology of language. For Volume 3, Bronwyn Davies has interests in the social psychology of language, the sociology of lan­ guage, and interdisciplinary studies. For Volume 4, Richard Tucker has interests in language theory, applied linguistics, and the implementation and evaluation of innovative language education programs.

This book reveals the important role of linguistics in political theory through an interdisciplinary approach as politics cannot be understood without reference to history. In fact, the analysis would be incomplete without the reference to language, cultural, political anthropology (including various issues of identity), language philosophy, and semiotics of power. It is impossible in the contemporary world with its abundant information about issues from different perspectives to neglect comparison. For this reason, among others, it is important to examine how language and identity are dependent on the political context of the language issues and to better understand their political activities.

Examining identity in relation to globalization and migration, this book uses narratives and memoirs from contemporary authors who have lived'in-between'two or more languages. It explores the human desire to find one's'own place'in new cultural contexts, and looks at the role of language in shaping a sense of belonging in society.

'Ethnolinguistics'is the study of how language relates to culture and ethnicity. This book offers an original approach to ethnolinguistics, discussing how abstract concepts such as truth, love, hate and war are expressed across cultures and ethnicities. James W. Underhill seeks to situate these key cultural concepts within four languages (English, French, Czech and German). Not only do these concepts differ from language to language, but they go on changing over time. The book explores issues such as how far meaning is politically and culturally influenced, how far language shapes the thought of ethnic groups and how far their thought shapes language, and the role of individuals in the consolidation of cultural concepts. It offers a clear and thought-provoking account of how concepts are understood and will be welcomed by those working in the fields of sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, discourse analysis, semantics and pragmatics.

The fascinating question of the origins and evolution of language has been drawing a lot of attention recently, not only from linguists, but also from anthropologists, evolutionary biologists, and brain scientists. This groundbreaking book explores the cultural side of language evolution. It proposes a new overarching framework based on linguistic selection and self-organization and explores it in depth through sophisticated computer simulations and robotic experiments. Each case study investigates how a particular type of language system can emerge in a population of language game playing agents and how it can continue to evolve in order to cope with changes in ecological conditions. Case studies cover on the one hand the emergence of concepts and words for proper names, color terms, names for bodily actions, spatial terms and multi-dimensional words. The second set of experiments focuses on the emergence of grammar, specifically case grammar for expressing argument structure, functional grammar for expressing different uses of spatial relations, internal agreement systems for marking constituent structure, morphological expression of aspect, and quantifiers expressed as articles. The book is ideally suited as study material for an advanced course on language evolution and it will be of interest to anyone who wonders how human languages may have originated.

Chapter 1 - Liberalism in the United States Chapter 2 - Crime in the United States Chapter 3 - Race and Crime in the United States Chapter 4 - Race and Ethnicity in the United States Census Chapter 5 - History of the Race and Intelligence Controversy

This volume investigates sociolinguistic discourses, identity choices and their representations in postcolonial national and social life, and traces them to the impact of colonial contact. The chapters stitch together current voices and identities emerging within both ex-colonized and ex-colonizer communities as each copes with the social, lingual, cultural, and religious mixes triggered by colonialism. These mixes, reflected in the five thematic parts of the book -'postcolonial identities','nationhood discourses','translating the postcolonial','living the postcolonial', and'colonizing the colonizer'- call for deeper investigations of postcolonial communities using emic approaches.

The book provides an introduction into a highly developed, coherent, and extensively tested cognitive linguistic approach to lexical semantics, which is not currently accessible to readers of English. This makes the book important to researchers and students in lexical semantics, in Cognitive Linguistics and beyond. It also strengthens the Cognitive Linguistics enterprise in general, by showing that the main tenets of this approach are not an incidental historical development in a particular corner of the world, but rather are arrived at by scholars working in hugely different contexts independently of each other. The book therefore has an appeal to all researchers in Cognitive Linguistics. Furthermore, the book constitutes a contribution to the intellectual exchange between international academic discourses that mostly develop independently of each other – an exchange that has often provided major impetus for scientific development, as illustrated by the influence of the belated translations of works by Bakhtin, Lotman, Vygotsky, and Luria, among others.

Language is a means we use to communicate feelings; we also reflect emotionally on the language we and others use. James Wilce analyses the signals people use to express emotion, looking at the social, cultural and political functions of emotional language around the world. His book demonstrates that speaking, feeling, reflecting, and identifying are interrelated processes and shows how desire or shame are attached to language. Drawing on nearly one hundred ethnographic case studies, it demonstrates the cultural diversity, historical emergence, and political significance of emotional language. Wilce brings together insights from linguistics and anthropology to survey an extremely broad range of genres, cultural concepts, and social functions of emotional expression.