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.

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.

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.

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.

This volume offers an introduction to cognitive linguistics, written by authors who were engaged in the field from its beginnings. 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.

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 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.

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.

This book examines the language abilities of persons with Down Syndrome who are able to read.

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.

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.

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.