Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
365,961
result(s) for
"Linguistics and Language"
Sort by:
The secret life of language : discover the origins of global communication
Like its companion titles, The Secret Life of Language uses quirky illustrations, helpful diagrams and clear text to unlock the fascinating workings behind the development of the world's languages. Readers will gain insight into the extraordinary underlying stories and facts about the language (or languages) they speak, as well as those that they perhaps would like to learn. Six chapters cover all of the world's language groups from their historic origins to today as well as the physical mechanics of speech. Language is essential to us all -- spoken, heard, written, read -- no matter which we use. Today, cultures move and meld across the globe in waves of migration taking their languages with them. The Secret Life of Language is sure to pique the interest of all general readers, language learners and those curious about the future of language.
Book
The Computational Nature of Language Learning and Evolution
The introduction of a mathematical and computational framework within which to analyze the interplay between language learning and language evolution.
The nature of the interplay between language learning and the evolution of a language over generational time is subtle. We can observe the learning of language by children and marvel at the phenomenon of language acquisition; the evolution of a language, however, is not so directly experienced. Language learning by children is robust and reliable, but it cannot be perfect or languages would never change—and English, for example, would not have evolved from the language of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. In this book Partha Niyogi introduces a framework for analyzing the precise nature of the relationship between learning by the individual and evolution of the population.
Learning is the mechanism by which language is transferred from old speakers to new. Niyogi shows that the evolution of language over time will depend upon the learning procedure—that different learning algorithms may have different evolutionary consequences. He finds that the dynamics of language evolution are typically nonlinear, with bifurcations that can be seen as the natural explanatory construct for the dramatic patterns of change observed in historical linguistics. Niyogi investigates the roles of natural selection, communicative efficiency, and learning in the origin and evolution of language—in particular, whether natural selection is necessary for the emergence of shared languages.
Over the years, historical linguists have postulated several accounts of documented language change. Additionally, biologists have postulated accounts of the evolution of communication systems in the animal world. This book creates a mathematical and computational framework within which to embed those accounts, offering a research tool to aid analysis in an area in which data is often sparse and speculation often plentiful.
eBook
Spatial, occupational, and age-related effects on reported variation in colloquial German
While dialectal variation is often investigated from a geographical angle, there exists substantial variation both within the community and individual. The aim of the present article is to investigate the extent to which spatial, occupational, and age-related factors are associated with the diversity of linguistic variants reported per informant at a given locality. Drawing on colloquial language data from the Atlas zur deutschen Alltagssprache ‘Atlas of Colloquial German,’ we found that informants from southeastern Germany and Austria reported familiarity with more variants. Moreover, we multifactorially operationalize occupational complexity, a variable that can capture the effects of different communicative, technical, and physical skills required in a job (via the Dictionary of Occupational Titles). Bayesian multilevel modeling revealed that informants in occupations involving physical precision work and communicative complexity reported less familiarity with variants, and that younger informants were familiar with a wider range of variants.
Journal Article
The wonders of language : or How to make noises and influence people
\"Ian Roberts offers a stimulating introduction to our greatest gift as a species: our capacity for articulate language. We are mostly as blissfully unaware of the intricacies of the structure of language as fish are of the water they swim in. We live in a mental ocean of nouns, verbs, quantifiers, morphemes, vowels and other rich, strange and deeply fascinating linguistic objects. This book introduces the reader to this amazing world. Offering a thought-provoking and accessible introduction to the main discoveries and theories about language, the book is aimed at general readers and undergraduates who are curious about linguistics and language. Written in a lively and direct style, technical terms are carefully introduced and explained and the book includes a full glossary. The book covers all the central areas of linguistics, including phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics, as well as historical linguistics, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
From engl-isc to whatever-ish: a corpus-based investigation of -ish derivation in the history of English
Drawing on a wide array of historical and contemporary corpora, this article provides one of the first empirical analyses of the intricately related functional changes that -ish underwent in the course of English language history. By investigating the distribution of -ish formations, the analysis sheds light on the productivity of the suffix, which does not only become evident in the numerous hapax legomena, but also in the trajectory of change itself in which -ish occurs with ever new base categories and new functions. Moreover, the article revisits theoretical claims made in the literature about the diachronic development and synchronic properties of -ish and reassesses them in the light of the corpus-based observations.
Journal Article
The handbook of language emergence
\"This book explores the latest integrated theory for understanding human language. The authors focus on the ways in which the learning, processing, and structure of language emerge from a competing set of cognitive, communicative, and biological constraints. In addition, the book examine forces on widely divergent time scales, from instantaneous neurolinguistic processing to historical changes and language evolution. Key theoretical, empirical, and methodological issues are also addressed\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Exploring accessibility in direct object constructions in Santomean Portuguese
Null and pronominal direct objects have been extensively studied in both European Portuguese (EP) and Brazilian Portuguese (BP). We aim to characterize the properties and distribution of null/pronominal objects in STP, by comparing them with those of EP/BP. We assume that accessibility can be determined by the syntactic role, animacy and explicitness of the antecedent, as well as by the presence of other potential antecedents. The study, based on the PALMA-STP spoken corpus, shows that there are fewer pronominal objects than null objects in islands and non-islands. Regarding the syntactic function of the antecedent, structural parallelism is more relevant for null than for pronominal objects. In this respect, STP seems to be closer to BP than to EP. As for overtness of the antecedent and intervention effects, STP is less restrictive than EP/BP, allowing referential chains with several intervening null objects. Moreover, there appears to be a trend towards an extension of the null object along the Referential Hierarchy, as it may be less constrained by animacy than EP/BP. Hence, null objects in STP exhibit high productivity and are subject to fewer syntactic and semantic restrictions than in other varieties of Portuguese.
Journal Article
Course in general linguistics
\"An influence on a wide-range of thinkers from Derrida and Lacan to Chomsky, Saussure's major work is now available in the Bloomsbury Revelations series\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Goal and DOM datives
In a range of Indo-European languages (Romance, Albanian, Iranian, Indo-Aryan), the same oblique case ('dative') is associated with indirect objects and with animate/definite direct objects, independently of the particular morphology employed to spell out the oblique (inflectional or pre/postpositional). We argue that there is a syntactic category dative coinciding with the morphological one and encompassing both goal dative and definiteness/animacy dative. We provide a characterization of goal dative as an elementary predicate introducing a part-whole (i.e. possession) relation, arguing that the definiteness/animacy dative is an instance of this elementary predicate. Evidence sometimes used against the unification proposed (e.g. passives, agreement) admits of, or requires, other explanations.
Journal Article