Critical Concepts in Linguistics – serie

This timely collection, for the first time together in one place, gives students and researchers access to the major works of the history of pragmatics and the science of language use. Readers can now critically assess the subject matter, methods, theories and applications that have shaped this exciting area of language study.These important volumes portray the development of pragmatics as a science of language use. The whole spectrum of relevant areas, from theoretical linguistics and philosophy, through psychology and sociology, to neuroscience, speech rehabilitation and computer science is represented.Issues explored include:* presupposition* implicature* discourse* grammar* communication* indexicals* psychology* sociology.This work also provides highly useful references and suggestions for additional papers to be consulted, and has an exceptionally detailed subject and name index to enable easy and immediate access for the reader.

Over the last decade, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) has accrued an exceptional amount of attention across a wide number of academic disciplines within the humanities and social sciences.In almost every field of human activity, we are surrounded by and caught up in a network of texts and discourses. At the same time, a gradual enfranchising of individuals in Western societies tends to make us less inclined to accept those surrounding texts and discourses unquestioningly. It is these twin factors that underpin all studies that appear under the aegis of CDA.This unique, multidisciplinary collection gathers together the most influential writings adopting a CDA approach, along with the most important antecedent essays and articles from the earlier Twentieth Century. The articles that make up this collection are drawn from a wide range of journal sources, including articles critical of the Critical Discourse Analysis approach as well as those that illustrate applications of its principles and methods.A detailed index and new introduction by the editor will help the reader navigate this wealth of diverse material.

This collection covers the fundamental concepts and analytic tools of generative transformational syntax of the last half century, from Chomsky's Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew (1951) to the present day. It makes available, in one place, key published material on important areas such as phrase structure, transformations, and conditions on rules and representations.Presenting articles by leading contributors to the field such as Baltin, Boškovic, Bresnan, Chomsky, Cinque, Emonds, Freidin, Hale, Higginbotham, Huang, Kayne, Lasnik, McCawley, Pollock, Postal, Reinhart, Rizzi, Ross, Stowell, Torrego, Travis, Vergnaud, and Williams, this fascinating collection also includes a general introduction by the editors and an index, thus providing a comprehensive single reference resource for students and researchers alike.

Lexicography is a growing academic specialization, with both a practical and a theoretical branch, numerous perspectives, and interdisciplinary significance. This collection draws together the most important and influential work in the field of lexicography.As well as a new general introduction contextualizing the main themes, each section will be preceded by a smaller introduction by the editor, guiding the reader through the selection of pieces made, and drawing together the thematic threads of the individual pieces. Completed with an extensive index, this collection provides a comprehensive reference point for those working in the field.

Semantics is a key concept in linguistic theory, concerning the analysis and description of the meaning of linguistic expressions. This collection contains a selection of the most important contributions to semantic theory ranging from Gottlob Frege's essay On Sense and Reference written in 1892, to present-day thinkers in the field. The collection is structured around three major themes.

Contact has always been a normal part of the development of languages, from those of ancient empires, those of colonial expansion, and to those of our globalizing planet today. Pidgin and creole studies have merged with the study of other language contact phenomena (adult second-language acquisition, bilingualism, bilingual mixed languages, language shift, partially restructured languages, language attrition, etc.) to form the flourishing field of contact linguistics.This new Routledge Major Work brings together the most important contributions advancing our understanding of language contact phenomena. Beginning fitfully in the mid-nineteenth century and then gathering momentum after 1960, the field of pidgin and creole linguistics has developed from a marginal field associated with the stigma of the languages it studied to a subfield which is now at the centre of linguistic enquiry. As it became clear that contact, far from being bizarre, has always been a normal part of the development of languages, from those of ancient empires to those of colonial expansion to those of our globalising planet today, pidgin and creole studies have merged with the study of other language contact phenomena (adult second language acquisition, bilingualism, bilingual mixed languages, language shift, partially restructured languages, language attrition, etc) to form the new field of contact linguistics. This selection of the most important contributions advancing our understanding of language contact phenomena covers almost two hundred years of scholarship and will provide students with an overview of how insights about the new languages that emerged as a result of European expansion to Africa, Asia, the New World and the Pacific have led to a clearer view of what language is.Articles are arranged chronologically; unusually for a Critical Concepts collection, each individual article is preceded by a short introduction making clear the intellectual context in which it was written, its thematic connection to earlier work, and why it is an important contribution to the field. As well as articles from scholarly journals, there are also some chapters from major books in the field. The collection is indexed for theme and language.

This new addition to Routledge’s Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Linguistics, brings together the very best and most influential scholarly research in over half a century of language-acquisition research. The collection represents and reflects the interdisciplinary nature of the field, by highlighting models and methodologies from—and implications for—adjacent fields such as psycholinguistics, developmental psychology, computer science, and comparative cognition. In addition, the collection steers users to the most important, as well as controversial, issues that lie at the frontier of language acquisition research.With a new introduction by the editor, comprehensive index, and a chronological table of the gathered materials, this four-volume collection provides both student and scholar alike with all the key writings on language acquisition in one convenient and authoritative reference resource

At least half of the seven thousand or so languages spoken today are in danger of disappearing during the 21st century. Although languages have always come and gone, the current rate of language extinction is unprecedented, a loss which not only affects individual communities but also diminishes the world's linguistic heritage. This crisis has stimulated a variety of responses from linguists: sociolinguists have been concerned with the study of language revitalisation—how the tendency to shift away from minority languages can be reversed—while general linguists have paid more attention to the structural aspects of language endangerment—how languages change as they fall into disuse. In recent years linguists have been particularly concerned with language documentation—the activity of recording, annotating, translating and archiving audiovisual materials of languages before they are lost. In addition, all linguists working on endangered languages face the ethical question of how much effort they should devote to non-academic activities in support of the communities with whom they work.The study of language endangerment has only really become a concern of mainstream linguistics in the past twenty years, and this four-volume collection is the first of its kind, bringing together research on language endangerment from leading scholars. Theoretical and practical responses by linguists have led to the emergence of the linguistic sub-fields of language documentation and language revitalisation, and most of the publications within them date from just the last ten years. There has however been a veritable flood of books and articles during this time, and an enormous flowering of interest both within academia and in the wider community as well. Twenty years ago an extensive collection on this topic could not have been put together.A general introduction by the editors gives an overview of the history of research on endangered languages and the main issues faced by scholars of language endangerment today, while specific volume introductions detail the research context for the individual articles. Endangered Languages is an essential one-stop work of reference and will be appreciated by researchers and students of language endangerment and related disciplines.

Second-language acquisition was born in the late 1960s as an interdisciplinary enterprise that borrowed equally from the feeder fields of linguistics, language teaching, child language acquisition, and psychology. Since then, it has expanded considerably in scope and methodology to the point that for many, by the end of the twentieth century, it had finally reached its coming of age as an autonomous discipline, a discipline that today is more than ever undergoing change, renovation, and expansion.This six-volume collection, a new title in Routledge’s Critical Concepts in Linguistics series, offers a comprehensive survey of this burgeoning field, its accumulated findings and proposed theories, its developed research paradigms, and its pending questions for the future. Including both classical and cutting-edge research, the collected materials offer a cogent and nuanced panoramic of the past, present, and future of second-language acquisition research.

Historical linguistics is concerned with the way languages change over time, looking both at the distant past and at the present day, and taking as its point of departure the truism that the only constant in language is that it is always changing. This new title from Routledge’s Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Linguistics, assembles in six volumes foundational and canonical pieces, together with the very best cutting-edge research, from this rich and flourishing field.With a full index, together with a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editors, which places the collected material in its intellectual context, Historical Linguistics is an essential work of reference. The collection will be particularly useful as an essential database allowing scattered and often fugitive material to be easily located. It will also be welcomed as a crucial tool permitting rapid access to less familiar—and sometimes overlooked—texts. It is a vital one-stop research and pedagogic resource.

Although scientific studies of the language behaviour of polyglots began to appear in the nineteenth century, it is only in the last fifty years or so that bilingualism and multilingualism have been recognized as crucial areas of linguistic research. This new four-volume collection from Routledge showcases the major achievements in this now vibrant multidisciplinary field.

Serious work using computers to support language teaching and learning began in the 1960s, but it was not until the beginning of the 1980s when microcomputers began to proliferate that groups of practitioners began forming professional groups and a formal identification of the field occurred. Although the early promise of computer-assisted language learning (or ‘CALL’), to revolutionize second-language learning has not been met, the past quarter century has seen a fascinating range of growth. This is not only because of lessons learned from research and practice, but also due to the rapid and continuing shifts in the technology itself.Nominally a branch of applied linguistics, 'CALL' is truly interdisciplinary, drawing its core concepts not only from linguistics, but also from computer science, speech engineering, psychology, sociology, second-language acquisition, and general education.This new four-volume title from Routledge will allow 'CALL' practitioners, researchers, and students to easily access the best and most influential foundational and cutting-edge scholarship. The is also a comprehensive introduction to critical concepts in 'CALL' for applied linguists and language educators interested in the growing role of technology in second-language acquisition.

Semiotics (the study of sign processes—‘semiosis’—and sign systems) embraces linguistics, philosophy, and literary studies, as well as linking to anthropology, art, psychology, and biology.This new Routledge collection helps to make sense of the subject’s huge interdisciplinary corpus of scholarly literature and brings together the best and most influential materials from ‘the first phase’, neo-classics from the institutionalization of semiotics in the 1960s, and contemporary works illustrating the ongoing development of semiotics and its widening applications (for example, in the natural sciences).Volume I (‘Philosophy’) collects pre-modern material showing the genesis of semiotics from Locke to Peirce, along with a range of work from the last thirty years. Volume II (‘Linguistics’) includes key work from recent developments in cognitive linguistics and cognitive semantics, while Volume III focuses on ‘Text and Image’. Finally, Volume IV (‘Logic, Biology, Psychology, Culture, and Anthropology’) gathers the best offerings from other disciplines, and from emerging fields such as ‘biosemiotics’.Fully indexed, and with a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, that places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, this is an essential work destined to be valued by scholars, students, and researchers as a vital one-stop reference resource.

A new title in the Routledge Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Linguistics, Pragmatics II is a four-volume collection of the very best scholarship on pragmatics. It is an essential successor collection to the editor’s Pragmatics (6 vols.) (978-0-415-11734-0), published in 1998 and described by The Linguist List as ‘essential background reading for students of pragmatics and new researchers in the pragmatics of language’.Pragmatics has experienced dramatic growth since its first flourishing early in the twentieth century. Pragmatics (1998) was the first comprehensive collection of the field’s canonical and cutting-edge research, and this new collection now takes full account of the many important developments that have taken place since its appearance. Pragmatics II also includes coverage of areas without the scope of the first collection.With a full index, together with a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Pragmatics II is an indispensable work of reference. It is destined to be valued by scholars, students, and researchers as a vital research resource.

Throughout most of the history of linguistics, the primacy of the spoken word over the written word has been virtually axiomatic. Scholars working at what is perceived as the core of linguistic science, on grammar, sociolinguistics, phonetics, phonology, have generally perceived the written word as merely the means of representing the true matter of linguistics, spoken language, with varying degrees of efficiency. Yet the written word has demonstrably shaped the course of languages, been the means of their maintenance or, under different circumstances, their downfall. Written language has been the means of holding speech communities together. Speech communities have become writing communities and, in doing so, gained hegemony over their less literate neighbours.Because writing has for so long and so often been treated as the poor relation of speech, the serious study of writing as a discipline itself has been relegated to disparate parts of the linguistic domain. It is only in the last fifty years that scripts and writing systems, their evolution and impact, have been the subject of scholarly works. Writing Systems aims at the widest possible sweep in collecting materials on the subject of written language and presents not only the latest research findings, but also anthologises writings on particular themes under each of these headings, both journal articles and longer works, extending over a long period of time. It provides an extensive bibliographical resource for scholars interested in pursuing the connections between the social, linguistic, historical, pedagogical, legal, and economic aspects of writing.

Viewing language as a dynamic semiotic system that shapes and is shaped by cultural, social, and cognitive factors alike, the materials gathered in this new Major Work collection from Routledge explore how people in communities worldwide think about language, talk about language, use language, and change language. The collected works illustrate the ways in which language practices—spoken, written, and signed—are resources that participants use for creating social worlds and accomplishing a wide range of activities within those worlds. Furthermore, they demonstrate how analysts use linguistic and cultural practices, and the ideologies that shape them, to provide insights into the complexities of everyday, as well as less commonly occurring, social encounters.Theoretical essays are complemented with readings that illustrate, integrate, and often advance these frameworks. Focus is on work that emphasizes the importance of cultural contexts in analysing the linguistic practices in which they are embedded; the role talk-in-interaction in establishing, maintaining, or transforming social realities; and the linguistic and communicative resources and strategies that speakers use in conforming others to their point of view. Selections range from investigations, for example, of how speakers create and assert identities in particular kinds of face-to-face interactions; how political institutions, including language academies and experts, attempt to regiment the language practices of particular communities, and how such attempts are resisted; and how various technologies and media, including literacy, radio, television, cellular telephones, and computers, are transforming communicative landscapes at local, national, transnational, and global levels.Primarily drawing on the work of linguistic anthropologists, the collection will be of interest to those working in Social and Cultural Anthropology, the Sociology of Language, Sociolinguistics, Communications, Discourse Analysis, Language and Education, Rhetoric, and other fields in which scholars and students explore how language use creates and shapes social worlds.

This new addition to Routledge’s Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Linguistics, brings together the very best and most influential scholarly research on cognitive linguistics. Cognitive Linguistics is a broad approach to language that places psychological reality at the top of the list of theoretical desiderata. Both experimental and theoretical work will be included in each volume. The fact that language is a system of communication is emphasized, so that explanations that rely on the functions of linguistic elements are preferred over purely syntactic accounts. The label, "Cognitive Linguistics," arose in the 1980s with Langacker, Lakoff, Fillmore, and Talmy laying the semantic/pragmatic foundations for the approach. Volume I will be dedicated to key works by these authors and others. Volume II further explores semantic foundations with papers on metaphor, blending and embodiment. Cognitive Linguistics encompasses approaches to phonology, morphology, grammar, and discourse, but the emphasis has been on morphology and grammar. Work has coalesced around the idea that form-function pairings (constructions, schemata) are the basic units of language. Volumes III and IV include seminal works in this area. A strength of Cognitive Linguistics is that it interfaces naturally with a great deal of work in language acquisition, language evolution, and language change. Selected papers from these topics that make explicit use of key ideas in Cognitive Linguistics will be included in Volume V. With a new introduction by the editor and a comprehensive index, this five volume collection will be a convenient and authoritative reference resource on cognitive linguistics for both student and scholar.

The Sino-Tibetan languages form the largest language family in the world in terms of native speakers, of whom there are some 1.4 billion spread across East Asia, Southeast Asia and parts of South Asia. The family consists of two branches: Sinitic, consisting of the Chinese languages (including Cantonese and Hakka), and Tibeto-Burman, which as well as Tibetan and Burmese includes several hundred further languages spoken from the Tibetan plateau in the north to the Malay peninsula in the south, and from northern Pakistan in the west to northeastern Vietnam in the east.This four-volume collection focuses on journal articles, with a small selection of seminal contributions from the book literature. Although the majority of the material is drawn from sources published in the past thirty years, some classic pieces are included; for example, a paper on Tibetan initials by F. K. Li which was published in 1933 and has never been surpassed.This new Major Work from Routledge is a set which someone new to the field of Sino-Tibetan studies could go to in order to get a general idea of the development and current state of the art of the subject, as aside from the seminal articles, there are introductions by the Editor that contextualise the articles and also cite relevant literature that built on the seminal articles. A veteran could also go to these volumes as an easy source for the most frequently cited articles in the field.

What educational approaches best serve language-minority children? What policies, programmes, and circumstances encourage or contribute to minority-language maintenance? How do we make sense of the ecology of language development and socialization in non-traditional settings? And what is the relationship of language, learning, and technology?These are the kinds of dizzying questions addressed by those working in educational linguistics. The subdiscipline first came to prominence in the 1970s, and in recent decades it has expanded rapidly. It is now a well-established field of teaching and scholarly research.As serious academic thinking about and around educational linguistics continues to flourish and develop, this new title in the Routledge Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Linguistics, meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of the subject’s vast literature and the continuing explosion in research output. Edited by Nancy H. Hornberger, Goldie Anna Professor of Education and Director of the Educational Linguistics Program at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, this Routledge Major Work is a six-volume collection of foundational and cutting-edge contributions.With a comprehensive introduction, newly written by the editor, which places the collected material in its historical and intellectual context, Educational Linguistics is an essential work of reference. It is destined to be valued by specialists and scholars working in the area—as well as by educational policy-makers and professionals—as a vital one-stop research tool.

A new title from Routledge’s Critical Concepts in Linguistics series, History of the English Language is a four-volume collection covering the main linguistic issues in the phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and sociolinguistics of the history of English.

This new four-volume collection, part of Routledge’s Critical Concepts in Linguistics series, assembles the most important scholarly writings concerning the biological evolution of language, particularly those incorporating a Darwinian view of evolution. Including excerpts from ancient sources such as the Bible, Plato, and Aristotle, along with classical sources like Condillac, Rousseau, and Herder, Language Evolution provides an overview of the intensive debate on language evolution following the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species.It also outlines each of the major conceptions of protolanguage and examines the evolution of our human capacity for speech, as well as focusing on the modern (mostly post-1990) literature attempting to reconcile the Chomskyean approach to linguistics with a Darwinian evolutionary viewpoint. In addition, it incorporates the new insights and approaches based on computer modelling, which have played a growing role in the recent literature.This is an important resource for those scholars interested in possessing a deeper, historically informed overview of the immense literature on this topic. The collection will also, of course, provide unified and ready access to a selection of the most important papers from the 1990s onward. It is supplemented with a full index, and includes an introduction to each volume, newly written by the editors, which places the assembled materials in their historical and intellectual context.

Most scholars consider the birth of modern language testing as a field of study to be the year 1961 with the publication of Robert Lado’s book Language Testing and John Carroll’s chapter ‘Fundamental Considerations in Language Testing’. In the decades since it has grown in scope into a deeper and wider theoretical and intellectual field of study. The intellectual growth has come with the birth of psychometrics, specifically, in using statistical analyses for test development and research; with ideas from linguistics, in developing language tests that are communicatively oriented; with ideas from ethics, specifically, in developing qualities, codes, and standards so that tests are fair and just. This has been coupled with the growth of the field into a billion-dollar worldwide enterprise partly fuelled by the practical need to assess the English language ability of test-takers who want to study at English-medium universities or work in offices that mainly use English for communication.This new four-volume collection from Routledge captures this burgeoning field by offering a cogent and comprehensive state-of-the-art coverage of the very best material. The volumes have been conceptualized both as a scholarly contribution in terms of theories and research as well as a practical guide in terms of test development in the field of language testing and assessment.

English for Academic Purposes (EAP) focuses on the types of English learners encounter and use in academic or study situations, usually in higher education contexts, and on the teaching and learning of academic English. It also focuses on the types of English and forms of communication used by academics in research settings.This new 4 volume collection from Routledge will highlight key research, thinking and developments in pedagogy and document the concepts and debates that have impacted on EAP over the last three and a half decades. The selection of articles will enable readers to follow the developments and to understand how contemporary perspectives and research interests have emerged. The volumes will include key material that has been influential and represents the diversity of research interests and thinking in the area. Fully indexed, and with a new introduction to each volume by the editor, this collection will be a valuable research resource.

The field of language policy and planning has evolved over the past half century into a flourishing field of academic inquiry, with identifiable research agendas, methods, and findings. Edited by Thomas Ricento, alongside an editorial advisory group of five leading scholars, this new Routledge collection features all the key articles published, both foundational and critical scholarship, to provide a comprehensive documentary record of a vibrant academic area.

This new five-volume anthology of major works has been produced in consultation with an editorial advisory board of distinguished scholars. It brings together the key texts of language variation and change to provide a comprehensive collection that represents the field's development and showcases the diverse communities that have been the subjects of investigation.

Systemic Functional Linguistics is a functional model of language inspired by the work of Saussure, Hjelmslev, Whorf, and Firth. SFL was developed by Michael Halliday and his colleagues in the 1960s and has grown into a widely studied and research field, with growing interest in China, Latin America, and North America. This new five-volume collection from Routledge focuses on the foundational papers underlying SFL theory and practice and illustrative papers that have inspired succeeding work.

The scope and nature of the connections between the Transeurasian languages are among the most disputed issues in comparative historical linguistics. This four-volume collection will assemble the most important scholarly writings concerning the historical relationship between these languages, particularly those discussing areal and genealogical correlations.

This new four-volume collection from Routledge brings together the major works of scholarship concerned with the ‘language isolates’ of the world. ‘Isolated’ languages are languages without any known relatives, languages which are not demonstrably part of any ‘language family’, with Etruscan, Basque, and Ainu being arguably some of the best-known examples of such ‘linguistic orphans’. The language-specific materials collected here are arranged geographically, and each language-chapter is preceded by a short introduction to the linguistic situation of the language(es) involved and, if not given in anthologized works themselves, to the current state of research and past and present scholarly debates. The volumes are preceded by a problem-oriented general introduction, which deals with the basic concepts and methodological principles of language classification, the present state and the nature of ongoing controversies, an epistemiological typology of language families, and, in the light of this, a theoretical justification of the concept of isolates as well as the choice of languages covered in the volumes.Some of the gathered works are general introductions to their object language (in terms of sociolinguistics, attestation, documentation, history of scholarship, guides to published studies, overviews of linguistic characteristics), others highlight and discuss particularly salient and interesting typological characteristics of an isolate (some of them are breakthrough studies for the understanding of a particular language), and others focus on the very status of the language under discussion as an isolate in the first place. Some isolated languages are still very much alive; at least one of them, Korean, is a major national language. The majority of the languages and small families covered here are endangered, and some will certainly cease to be used during the coming decades. Thus, isolated languages are particularly interesting objects for students of language endangerment, but they are also prime research objects for linguistic descriptionists, for, when they are gone, not only will another of the 6,000 or so human languages have disappeared, but, in those cases, whole linguistic lineages (and their ways of coping with the world) will be gone forever.

This new four volume collection on Linguistic Typology will be an essential source of reference for linguists of all theoretical convictions. It will provide a state-of-the-art overview of work on linguistic typology, its history, its methodology, theoretical foundations and major achievements. It will also examine the directions of current research and show how these reflect and inform work on linguistic theory, as well as related fields such as historical linguistics, language acquisition and language documentation.