SpringerBriefs in Linguistics – serie

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 book aims to reconcile the generative considerations of Jackendoff’s Parallel Architecture (PA) with the European structuralist approach to naming. It shows that there are good reasons to single out word formation as a separate component in PA. It demonstrates that it is a drawback not to distinguish word formation, and explains that the function of word formation rules is different from the function of the lexicon and rules of grammar. After making the argument for a separate word formation component, the book sets out to determine which types of rule qualify as part of this component. Traditionally, the boundaries of word formation with inflection and with syntax have been a matter of debate. By focusing on the naming function, the book poses a guiding principle for determining which rules should be in the word formation component. The position of morphology in the architecture of grammar has always been an issue of debate in generative linguistics. Since Chomsky (1970), thisquestion has been framed in terms of the Lexicalist Hypothesis. Compared to Chomsky’s architectures, Jackendoff’s Parallel Architecture places phonetic and conceptual structures at the same level as syntactic structure, i.e. connected by bidirectional linking rules rather than interpretation rules. One of the consequences is that PA does not formally distinguish lexicon entries from rules of grammar. This changes the setting for the question of the autonomy of morphology, because the Lexicalist Hypothesis depends on this distinction.

This book seeks to contribute to the critical applied linguistics by investigating the dynamic role of English on social media, focusing on EFL university students in East Asia – Mongolia and Japan. Drawing on sets of Facebook data, the book primarily emphasizes that the presence of English on social media should be understood as ‘translingual’ not only due to its multiple recombinations of resources, genres, modes, styles, and repertories but also due to its direct connections with a broader socio-cultural, historical and ideological meanings. Secondly, EFL university students metalinguistically claim multiple ideologies of linguistic authenticities in terms of their usage of ‘translingual Englishes’ on social media as opposed to other colliding language ideologies such as linguistic purity and linguistic dystopia. The question of how they reclaim the notion of linguistic authenticity, however, profoundly differs, depending on their own often-diverse criteria, identities, beliefs, andideas. This shows that mixing and mingling at its very core, the existence of ‘translingual Englishes’ on social media provides us with a significant view to accommodate the multiple co-existence and multiple origins of authenticity in the increasingly interconnected world. The book concludes the possibility of applying the ideas of ‘translingual Englishes’ on social media in critical EFL classroom settings, in their careful re-assessment of the complexity of contemporary linguistic experiences and beliefs of their EFL learners.

This book focuses on Portuguese as an additional language and its young learners in threecase studies within the Portuguese-speaking world: Portuguese as a second language inCape Verde, Portuguese as a heritage language in Switzerland and Portuguese as a foreignlanguage in Macao SAR. The term “additional language” is used as an umbrella term for allthree contexts.An analysis of these three case studies is presented, with a focus on the organization of explicit and implicit language policies with regards to population mobility and also motivational issues, language attitudes and language use by the sample population.

This volume offers an introduction to cognitive linguistics, written by authors who were engaged in the field from its beginnings. It starts by reviewing these early studies and provides an overview of the sources and conceptual underpinnings of the theory. This is followed by a description of how cognitive linguistics has been (and continues to be) applied in all subcomponents of language study. From the point of view of the history of Linguistics, it presents the evolution of the theory over time in a range of directions, including its view of the nature of Language itself, as well as how it is acquired. The final chapter provides an overview of relatively new approaches, in particular those which are provoking a significant challenge to the generative account.

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.

This book presents the effects of perceptual training on the perception of English lexical stress in rising intonation by Mandarin-speaking EFL learners in Taiwan, and shows that these effects can be positive as well as negative. The book is of interest to researchers in lexical stress and intonation, or issues related to acquisition of L2 suprasegmentals and native-language impact on this process,  as well as for those designing a training course on lexical stress for EFL learners, particularly those with a tone language background.Learning to perceive non-native sound contrasts can be a formidable task, particularly when learners can’t rely on cues from their native-language experience. A case in point is Mandarin-speaking EFL learners’ perception of lexical stress. They can accurately identify the stress patterns of target words in sentences that have a falling intonation. However, they experience considerable difficulties when the target words are in questions, where the intonation is rising. Where most training studies use only stimuli produced in falling intonation, we implemented a perceptual training program to examine whether Mandarin-speaking EFL learners could learn to perceive English lexical stress in both falling intonation and rising intonation.

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.

This book examines the language abilities of persons with Down Syndrome who are able to read. The text defends the ‘delayed but not deviant view’ of linguistic abilities by examining a range of syntactic phenomena that develop at different points for typically developing children, and for which a similar overall pattern is found for persons with Down Syndrome. The volume also defends the ‘delayed but not deviant view’ against challenges arising from studies of the comprehension of definite pronouns. The study fits within a picture of linguistic abilities that is modular:  skills with language do not emerge from other cognitive functions.  It is an important source of information for readers in the departments of linguistics, speech and language therapy, and cognitive science.

The development of pragmatics has been shaped by thought experiments without which it could not have become an autonomous subfield of linguistics. However, their nature and their impact on current trends in pragmatics has not yet been made subject to systematic scrutiny. The book addresses that gap by confronting a central puzzle: How can thought experiments in pragmatics yield new experiential information about communication when they take place entirely within the researcher’s imagination. The volume offers a clear and original answer by showing that their power lies not in invention or speculation, but in a disciplined process of argumentative re evaluation of existing experiential knowledge.The book is unique in at least two respects. First, it presents carefully elaborated case studies on Searle’s and Grice’s seminal thought experiments, which yield an original solution to the paradox. The key idea of the solution is that thought experiments in pragmatics neither generate new experiential information per se, nor are they mere speculations on imaginary situations. Rather, their novelty is rooted in the plausible argumentation process during which they cyclically and prismatically re-evaluate experiential information. Second, through this solution, the book contributes to the controversies on the semantics–pragmatics interface in particular as well as the methodological foundations of pragmatic research in general.Written with conceptual clarity and supported by extensive engagement with current scholarship, this volume is of vital interest to researchers and advanced students in pragmatics, cognitive linguistics as well as the history and philosophy of linguistics.

This volume offers an in-depth description and discussion of research design for a large-scale investigation of bilingual development. It introduces and justifies a range of theoretical and methodological innovations, discusses some of the problems that come with these and proposes practical solutions. The present volume introduces a research design intended to capture a wide range of linguistic data, elicited by means of behavioral tasks, neuroimageing data and free speech from both second language learners and first language attriters of two languages (Dutch and German) representing a wide range of language combinations and ages of onset. Gathering and analyzing such a range of data comes with a multiplicity of problems, many of them linked to the fact that similar tests have to be designed across a range of languages and measurements will have to occur in various locations. The current volume presents a research design appropriate to these questions, discussing the methodological challenges of such a study. It offers advice on how to construct experimental materials which are parallel across different languages set up a protocol for additional measures which can be applied across a wide range of participants combine data from different labs when using different ERP equipment and different eyetrackers.

This book responds to recent criticisms that the research and theorization of multilingualism on the part of applied linguists are in collusion with neoliberal policies and economic interests.  While acknowledging that neoliberal agencies can appropriate diverse languages and language practices, including resources and dispositions theorized by scholars of multilingualism, it argues that a distinction must be made between the different language ideologies informing communicative practices. Those of neoliberal agencies are motivated by distinct ideological orientations that diverge from the theorization of multilingual practices by critical applied linguists. In addressing this issue, the book draws on the author’s empirical research on skilled migration to demonstrate how sub-Saharan African professionals in English-dominant workplaces in the UK, USA, Australia, and South Africa resist the neoliberal communicative expectations and employ alternate practices informed by critical dispositions. These practices have the potential to transform neoliberal orientations on material development. The book labels the latter as informed by a postcolonial language ideology, to distinguish them from those of neoliberalism. While neoliberal agencies approach languages as being instrumental for profit-making purposes, the author’s informants focus on the synergy between languages to generate new meanings and norms, which are strategically negotiated in pursuit of ethical interests, inclusive interactions, and holistic ecological development. As such, the book clearly illustrates that the way critical scholars and multilinguals relate to language diversity is different from the way neoliberal policies and agencies use multilingualism for their own purposes.

This open access book reports on research carried out as part of the European Union co-funded C.O.N.T.A.C.T. project which targeted hate speech and hate crime across a number of EU member states. It showcases the bearing that discourse analytic research can have on our understanding of this phenomenon that is a growing global cause for concern.Although ‘hate speech’ is often incorporated in legal and policy documents, there is no universally accepted definition, which in itself warrants research into how hatred is both expressed and perceived. The research project synthesises discourse analytic and corpus linguistics techniques, and presents its key findings here. The focus is especially on online comments posted in reaction to news items that could trigger discrimination, as well as on the folk perception of online hate speech as revealed through semi-structured interviews with young individuals across the various partner countries.

This book makes an original contribution to the fields of sociolinguistics, language planning policy and Chinese language studies. It examines the effectiveness of the Singapore’s Speak Mandarin Campaign in changing the language use of dialect speakers towards Mandarin.Singapore may be only “a small red dot” and barely visible on the world’s map. However, its complex and dynamic linguistic diversity and its quadrilingual educational system make it a unique and fascinating research site for examining deliberate language planning on the part of governmental authorities. 2017 marks the 38th anniversary of the Speak Mandarin Campaign, a focused language-planning policy aimed at changing the deeply entrenched sociolinguistic habits of Chinese Singaporeans who are used to speaking Chinese dialects.  This book provides a revealing update on dialect speakers’ attitudes towards the campaign by including discussions and other related issues such as the recent call for the revitalisation of Chinese dialects by younger dialect speakers, Chinese students’ attitude towards learning Mandarin in schools, the encroachment of English in the home environment, the spread and dominance of English in the local linguistic landscape, and the challenges of maintaining Mandarin as a language of use and preference.

This book, one of the few English language publications on indigenous languages spoken in East Africa, highlights theoretical contributions on understudied East Cushitic languages, based on extensive data. It introduces readers to important fields such as the OT phonology and morphology of Dhaasanac and discusses the syntax of negation, semantics of focus, negation and context shift. It then examines negative polarity items and context sensitivity in the Rendille, Burji, Somali and Afar languages to offer broader insights into these phenomena. Given its focus, the book will appeal to researchers and students who are interested in formal semantics, pragmatics and indigenous studies around the globe, especially those wanting to learn about East Cushitic linguistics.

This book explored interpreters’ role when interpreting for Chinese government press conference and discovered the role deviation of conference interpreters in Chinese–English conference interpreting, by taking corpus-based approach to analyze hedges in interpreting discourse. So far, the discovery of role deviation for conference interpreters  in this book is relevantly fresh in conceptual, empirical, and methodological aspects, against the background that conference interpreters are traditionally assumed to be invisible and passive “non-person.” Arguably, this  book revisited and renewed the concept of interpreters’ role,  offered a role theory-based theoretical framework in some potential issues in future studies, designed a novel empirical route by using hedges as the intervening points to  gain insight into interpreters’ role, and applied Python-a new natural language processing programming in data extraction. Thus, this book is believed to contribute some new conceptual, theoretical as well as methodological significance to the future studies on interpreters’ role and performance. This book is intended to act as a useful reference for scholars, practitioners, interpreters, graduate and advanced undergraduate students, and anyone who shows interest in interpreters’ role and performance, corpus-based interpreting product.

This book presents multilingualism as a social phenomenon, which arises when speakers of a different language move to a new society and learn to speak the dominant language of the society. It offers case studies of Hokkien migrating families when they encounter new languages in Burma, Macao and San Francisco, showing how a family changes across generations from monolingual to bilingual/multilingual and back to monolingual. In the process language shift occurs as a result of transitional bilingualism. The dynamic status of Hokkien is also attested at the societal level in Singapore, Taiwan and south Fujian, the homeland of Hokkien.

This book considers the specific features of forced migration research, which pose unique challenges when analysing data, and offers a range of analysis tools from discourse analysis. Drawing on real-world case studies from around the world, but particularly from the Global South, this book guides researchers from all disciplines on how to leverage on linguistic tools and approaches that can enhance their forced migration researchers. It provides researchers, students, and teachers with an overview of forced migration research approaches and methods. It then covers concepts from discourse analysis in combination with other disciplines to study complex migration experiences. It presents a unique focus on the peculiarities of analysing forced migration in the Global South, with practical guidance on using discourse analysis to examine forced migrant identities and representations in variety of social situations and text types. Each chapter features a specific discourse analytic approach that is used on a migration-related data set and includes a range of examples and guided activities. This book provides essential reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as migration researchers interested in expanding their data analysis repertoire.