Johannes Kabatek - Böcker

This volume compares the evolution and current status of two of the world's major languages, English and Spanish. Parallel chapters trace the emergence of Global English and Spanish and their current status, covering aspects such as language and dialect contact, language typology, norm development in pluricentric languages, and identity construction. Case studies look into the use of English and Spanish on the internet, investigate mixed and alternating lects, as well as ongoing change in Spanish-speaking minorities in the US. The volume thus contributes to current theoretical debates and provides fresh empirical data. While offering an in-depth treatment of the evolution of English and Spanish to the reader, this book introduces the driving factors and the effects of the emergence of world languages in general and is relevant for researchers and students of sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and typology alike.

This volume compares the evolution and current status of two of the world's major languages, English and Spanish. Parallel chapters trace the emergence of Global English and Spanish and their current status, covering aspects such as language and dialect contact, language typology, norm development in pluricentric languages, and identity construction. Case studies look into the use of English and Spanish on the internet, investigate mixed and alternating lects, as well as ongoing change in Spanish-speaking minorities in the US. The volume thus contributes to current theoretical debates and provides fresh empirical data. While offering an in-depth treatment of the evolution of English and Spanish to the reader, this book introduces the driving factors and the effects of the emergence of world languages in general and is relevant for researchers and students of sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and typology alike.

This manual is the first comprehensive account of Brazilian Portuguese linguistics written in English, offering not only linguists but also historians and social scientists new insights gained from the intensive research carried out over the last decades on the linguistic reality of this vast territory. In the 20 overview chapters, internationally renowned experts give detailed yet concise information on a wide range of language-internal as well as external synchronic and diachronic topics. Most of this information is the fruit of large-scale language documentation and description projects, such as the project on the linguistic norm of educated speakers (NURC), the project “Grammar of spoken Portuguese”, and the project “Towards a History of Brazilian Portuguese” (PHPB), among others. Further chapters of high contemporary interest and relevance include the study of linguistic policies and psycholinguistics. The manual offers theoretical insights of general interest, not least since many chapters present the linguistic data in the light of a combination of formal, functional, generative and sociolinguistic approaches. This rather unique feature of the volume is achieved by the double authorship of some of the relevant chapters, thus bringing together and synthesizing different perspectives.

How and in which direction(s) is research in Ibero-Romance historical linguistics evolving? Now that the initial enthusiasm for the possibilities of digital corpora has worn off, the essays gathered in this volume reflect a more critical approach: corpora are being refined, while researchers discuss not only how reliable and representative they can be, but also ways in which to tackle certain gaps of the discipline.

A world language is a language that is spoken internationally and is learned and spoken by a large number of people as a second language. A world language is characterized not only by the total number of speakers (native and second language speakers), but also by its geographical distribution, as well as use in international organizations and diplomatic relations. The handbook will cover living world languages (English, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish etc), supra-regional languages (Russian, Bengali, Malay etc) and historical world languages (Latin, Sanskrit etc).

After a “first wave” of traditional studies on prepositional accusatives and a “second wave” exploring the typological dimensions of Differential Object Marking in Bossong’s footsteps, a new line of research is currently introducing new methods, deepening the level of analysis, and offering new perspectives on the issue. This volume presents 11 innovative, original contributions representative of this “third wave” of studies on DOM in Romance.

Eugenio Coseriu counts among the most important linguistic scholars of the second half of the 20th century. He is known mainly as a structuralist and a Romance linguist, but his work is in fact far more expansive in scope, including a comprehensive linguistic theory as well as writings on a wide range of issues, from semantics, syntax, typology, variational linguistics, language change, pragmatics and text linguistics to Vulgar Latin, the history of the philosophy of language and the history of Romance linguistics. Coseriu’s thought is founded on solid philosophical principles, and his life brought him into contact with a number of different academic traditions and cultures. However, for a variety of reasons (among which, the languages in which he tended to publish: Spanish, Italian, French and German), knowledge of his thought is rather marginal in the Anglo-American world. This book aims to go some way to addressing this situation by offering an overview in English of Coseriu’s main contributions to linguistics, and indeed to other disciplines. It is of general interest for the study of linguistics, the history of linguistics, and the philosophy of language, as well as for a broader reading public.