Springer Handbooks in Languages and Linguistics – serie

This book is the first of its kind to provide a comprehensive engagement with Persian discourse analysis in the Western hemisphere, addressing the shadowy borders that exist between culture, language, linguistics, and historicity, which are often overlooked in cultural linguistics and pragmatics more broadly. The theoretical foundations of this book are deeply rooted in culture, mannerism, language (both official and idiomatic), and pragmatics of language use. The first section sets the theoretical foundation with a thorough overview of critical discourse analysis and the application of this theory in analyzing speech, text and emotions. The subsequent four sections conduct investigations into a wide array of genres, namely academic contexts, politics, media, literature and music, respectively and describe the relevant corpora with their specific components from the viewpoints of terminology and lexicography. The sixth section looks at discourse and translation, offering an in-depth excavation of discourse-analytical frameworks applicable to translation studies. The seventh demarcates discourse and educational settings unpacking what discourse analysis can do to inform teachers and students. The section on identity and globalization explores these concepts as defined by linguistic approaches. The second last section on discourse markers tackles language, meaning, and context, and employs ‘discourse marker’ as an umbrella term for linguistic devices that signal communicative intention, categorizing them and their functions in Persian conversational and language learning contexts. The final part of the work looks at discourse and its interface with pragmatics, grammar and/or intonation, defining grammatical and intonational constructions as a form-meaning pair so as to illustrate how they can be utilized to signal different functions. Relevant to cultural and theoretical linguistics, and specialists in Persian language studies, specifically, this one-stop text is a sweeping compendium to Persian discourse studies.

This handbook presents a comprehensive and up-to-date survey of phonetic and phonological research on Iranian languages and dialects. Iranian languages — spoken by tens of millions across a wide geographical area extending from the Middle East to Central and South Asia, and diaspora communities — exhibit considerable variation in phonetic detail and phonological structure. Bringing together leading scholars from around the world, this handbook provides original empirical findings, theoretical insights, and experimental results that explore various aspects of sound systems of Iranian languages and dialects. Until now, much of the scholarly work on Iranian languages has focused on historical and comparative linguistics of Persian, or the pedagogical aspects of mainly Persian. This handbook takes as its central focus the systematic study of phonological processes and sound systems across a wide range of Iranian languages in order to highlight the unexplored phonetic and phonological details of contemporary Iranian languages. The book fills that critical gap, offering a thematic and typologically informed approach. The handbook also responds to a growing demand for interdisciplinary work. Contributions bridge traditional phonological theory with applied domains such as first / second language acquisition, speech therapy, and poetic meter. It serves multiple audiences that include theoretical linguists, speech clinicians, language educators, and typologists interested in the sound systems of Iranian languages and dialects. In doing so, this book stimulates future research, promotes cross-linguistic comparison, and fosters greater attention to the sound systems of Iranian languages in academic, clinical, and educational settings.

This handbook showcases North America's indigenous languages, showing them to be numerous, diverse, complex, culturally significant, and valuable to the study of human language as a whole. The chapters run the gamut by covering those that are no longer spoken, to those that serve as a daily medium of communication. The work shows how, historically, they have suffered from the erasure efforts of genocidal outsiders, and been the subject of intense internal struggles to remain vital. The study, and maintenance, of these languages is, in a word, important. The Handbook of North American Indigenous Languages and Linguistics serves as a detailed, sweeping overview of the current trends and future directions of scholarship into the indigenous languages of North America. The volume brings together both established and emerging voices, while also showcasing the work of scholars representing their own indigenous communities. In both scope and in tone, it serves as a landmark reference for scholars and students who research this vibrant branch of linguistic study, work, and practice.

This collection explores relevant pedagogical and sociolinguistic topics in the teaching and learning of Persian as a foreign and second language. Owing to the dearth of research in many areas pertaining to the teaching and learning of Persian, this handbook provides empirically-supported insights into various aspects of these areas. While the literature on teaching and learning Persian is growing, the field lacks a cohesive collection on Persian as a foreign/second language. The book addresses issues pertaining to the standardization and validation of teaching and assessment methods, which remain under-explored in the contexts of teaching and learning Persian. It also covers the teaching of Persian pragmatics, the use of corpora, as well as a range of different areas within linguistics, including phonetics, prosody, and historical linguistics. This comprehensive collection contributes substantially to the scientific study of many aspects of teaching and learning Persian which have been neglected for decades. A must-have text in Persian language pedagogy and Persian sociolinguistics, it an essential book for those in teaching and learning in Persian language programs worldwide.

This handbook addresses the interrelatedness of nationalism, identity, language, linguistics, and multilingualism in an African context. It covers multilingualism, language and identity, language endangerment, language shift, language maintenance, language contact, diglossia, language decline, language death, language vitality, and much more in, linguistically, one of the richest regions on earth. The variety of alphabets and oral traditions immersed in folklore, made more linguistically complex through issues of inter-borders, and the long history of foreign intrusions and colonialism, has meant a collision of identities and linguistic peculiarities. This book considers these facets in relation to language endangerment in numerous geographies within the African continent. It confronts these questions under the rubric of multilingualism, linguistic geography, and a panoply of other sub-studies. By investigating a multitude of topics around the themes of multilingualism, identity, and language endangerment in Africa, this volume brings together these dimensions to showcase interdisciplinary research in studies of African languages and linguistics. Relevant to applied linguists, socio-linguists, cultural linguistics, language teachers, anthropologists, and scholars in African cultural studies more broadly, this is a vital, urgent text challenging language, and identity, endangerment.

Bringing together a wide selection of work on cultural linguistics and pragmatics, this comprehensive handbook offers global, comparative insights into the field. Diversity does not always imply differences, but it also offers insights into surprising similarities and parallels when it comes to expressions. By the same token, this collection shows that when we see that linguistic differences, when they exist, stem from not merely language, but from the cultural and historical context that cultivates and nurtures them. Within that paradigm, then, this handbook locates the importance of philosophy, religion (or even the lack thereof), political affiliations, and so on, in forming expressions. In addition, comparisons with other models of cultural linguistics are undertaken. These trends provide readers with a comprehensive introduction to issues in cultural linguistics, addressing the peculiarities of the field under the rubric of localized studies, and speaking to the possibilities that exist in interpretation of what metaphors are. The book highlights the complexities that are so tightly interwoven into the fabric of every word and a sentence, across cultures and linguistic traditions. A must-have collection for anthropologists, philosophers, linguists, philologists, theoreticians, rhetoricians, and scholars of poetics, this is the one-stop reference in cultural linguistics.

This handbook is the largest and most comprehensive publication on Berber linguistics to date, covering the variety of Berber dialects and related linguistics trends. Extensive and diverse at thematic and theoretical levels, with the aim of deepening students and scholars' understanding of the workings of Berber as a linguistic phenomenon, it explores a multitude of angles through which the diachronic and synchronic intricacies of Berber varieties can be examined. It enables a better understanding of the issues in the various components of North African languages, as well as their theoretical and typological significance and implications. The work covers phonology and phonetics, morphology and syntax, semantics and pragmatics, socio-linguistics and dialectology, language teaching and psycholinguistics, lexicology, language contact and comparative linguistics, historical linguistics and etymology. Sub-themes explored include prosody, ideophones (and expressive language in general), morpho-syntactic categories, sociolinguistic variation and several other seminal interdisciplinary explorations. The chapters reflect the diversity of Berber varieties and include up-to-date scholarship by leading Berberists, with varieties including Figuig, Kabyle, Senhaja, Siwa, Standard Moroccan Amazigh, Tamazight, Tarifit, Tashlhit, Touareg, Tunisian Berber, Znaga, as well as Proto-Berber. A large geographical territory is covered, including Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Mali, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia. With contributions from these Berber-speaking countries and their diaspora, there are also chapters from prominent Berber scholars from America, Australia and Europe. To this end, the volume includes perspectives and theories from different schools of linguistics. In including original French contributions and English translations of research from top scholars in the field, the book includes another vital dimension in terms ofthe resources, and sources. As a comprehensive reference, this work is of interest to North Africanists from various disciplines, including anthropologists, linguists, and sociologists, but particularly linguists interested in endangered languages, and those working on the historical and comparative study of the Afroasiatic language phylum.