These are some recently added linguistics books and ebooks:
The Cambridge Handbook of Language in Context by
For more than a decade, linguistics has moved increasingly away from evaluating language as an autonomous phenomenon, towards analysing it 'in use', and showing how its function within its social and interactional context plays an important role in shaping in its form. Bringing together state-of-the-art research from some of the most influential scholars in linguistics today, this Handbook presents an extensive picture of the study of language as it used 'in context' across a number of key linguistic subfields and frameworks. Organised into five thematic parts, the volume covers a range of theoretical perspectives, with each chapter surveying the latest work from areas as diverse as syntax, pragmatics, psycholinguistics, applied linguistics, conversational analysis, multimodality, and computer-mediated communication. Comprehensive, yet wide-ranging, the Handbook presents a full description of how the theory of context has revolutionised linguistics, and how its renewed study is crucial in an ever-changing world.
The Cradle of Words: Language and Knowledge in the Spanish Empire by
How languages served as archives of local knowledge and a crucial resource for both the human and natural history of the Americas in the Spanish empire. In the sixteenth century, the conquest of the Americas exposed Spanish writers to previously unknown peoples and their many languages. The linguistic multiplicity of the new transatlantic empire presented enormous challenges both in terms of governance and religious conversion. Yet it also became a crucial resource for learning about the new territories' history, both natural and human. In The Cradle of Words, Valeria López Fadul reveals that Spanish scholars, missionaries, and administrators treated the empire's multiple tongues--both at home and abroad--as rich archives of local knowledge. These linguistic resources were exploited alongside the Americas' vast mineral and natural wealth and Indigenous labor. In the process, Spanish scholars made language itself into an object of historical inquiry. Using a wide variety of sources, López Fadul recreates the intellectual networks that crisscrossed Spain's overseas possessions and informed the imperial court's scholars. As linguistic information circulated among different kinds of scholars and local experts in Spain and in Spanish America, the history of language came to serve historical, political, and even legal arguments that were not originally linguistic in nature. By relying on varied methods like the collection of words, etymology, and the elaboration of linguistic genealogies, Spanish writers used the history of language to reconstruct the past, gain knowledge of nature, and explain the profound social transformations of their newly broadened world.
Decolonizing Linguistics by
Decolonizing Linguistics, the companion volume to Inclusion in Linguistics, is designed to uncover and intervene in the history and ongoing legacy of colonization and colonial thinking in linguistics and related fields. Taken together, the two volumes are the first comprehensive, action-oriented, book-length discussions of how to advance social justice in all aspects of the discipline. The introduction to Decolonizing Linguistics theorizes decolonization as the process of centering Black, Native, and Indigenous perspectives, describes the extensive dialogic and collaborative process through which the volume was developed, and lays out key principles for decolonizing linguistic research and teaching. The twenty chapters cover a wide range of languages and linguistic contexts (e.g., Bantu languages, Creoles, Dominican Spanish, Francophone Africa, Zapotec) as well as various disciplines and subfields (applied linguistics, communication, historical linguistics, language documentation and revitalization/reclamation, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, syntax). Contributors address such topics as refusing settler-colonial practices and centering community goals in research on Indigenous languages; decolonizing research partnerships between the Global South and the Global North; and prioritizing Black Diasporic perspectives in linguistics. The volume's conclusion lays out specific actions that linguists can take through research, teaching, and institutional structures to refuse coloniality in linguistics and to move the field toward a decolonized future.
Emoji and Social Media Paralanguage by
Emoji are now ubiquitous in our interactions on social media. But how do we use them to convey meaning? And how do they function in social bonding? This unique book provides a comprehensive framework for analysing how emoji contribute to meaning-making in social media discourse, alongside language. Presenting emoji as a visual paralanguage, it features extensive worked examples of emoji analysis, using corpora derived from social media such as Twitter and TikTok, to explore how emoji interact with their linguistic co-text. It also draws on the author's extensive work on social media affiliation to consider how emoji function in social bonding. The framework for analysing emoji is explained in an accessible way, and a glossary is included, detailing each system and feature from the system networks used as the schemas for undertaking the analysis. It is essential reading for anyone wishing to investigate the role of emoji in digital communication.
From Small Talk to Microaggression: A History of Scale by
In this ambitious, wide-ranging book, anthropologist Michael Lempert offers a conceptual history that explores how, why, and with what effects we have come to think of interactions as "scaled." Focusing on the sciences of interaction in midcentury America, Lempert traces how they harnessed diverse tools and media technologies, from dictation machines to 16mm film, to study communication "microscopically." In looking closely, many hoped to transform interaction: to improve efficiency, grow democracy, curb racism, and much else. Yet their descent into a microworld created troubles, with some critics charging that these scientists couldn't see the proverbial forest for the trees. Exploring talk therapy and group dynamics studies, social psychology and management science, conversation analysis, "micropolitics," and more, Lempert shows how scale became a defining problem across the behavioral sciences. Ultimately, he argues, if we learn how our objects of study have been scaled in advance, we can better understand how we think and interact with them--and with each other--across disciplinary and ideological divides. Even as once-fierce debates over micro and macro have largely subsided, Lempert shows how scale lives on and continues to affect the ethics and politics of language and communication today.
A Grammar of Eyak by
Eyak (dAXunhyuuga') is the traditional language of the Copper River Delta region of the Gulf of Alaska. This posthumous publication reflects Michael Krauss's systematic effort to document every aspect of the language, working closely with the last remaining fluent speakers. Adopting a theory-neutral approach, Krauss focuses on detailed description, providing exhaustive exemplification, as well as ample discussion of comparative and conflicting data from the related Tlingit and Dene (Athabaskan) languages, making the work particularly useful for Dene scholars. Non-specialists will find a window into the structure of a highly synthetic and typologically unusual language. This comprehensive work will also serve as a useful reference for the growing dAXunhyuuga' reclamation effort.
The Handbook of Berber Linguistics by
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 of the 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.
Inclusion in Linguistics by
Inclusion in Linguistics, the companion volume to Decolonizing Linguistics, aims to reinvent linguistics as a space of belonging across race, gender, class, disability, geographic region, and more. Taken together, the two volumes are the first comprehensive, action-oriented, book-length discussions of how to advance social justice in all aspects of the discipline. The volume's introduction theorizes inclusion as fundamental to social justice and describes the extensive dialogic and collaborative process through which the volume was developed. Contributors discuss intersectional forms of exclusion in linguistics: researchers' anti-autistic ableism; the exclusion of Deaf Global South researchers of color; the marginalization of Filipino American students and scholars; disciplinary transphobia; and the need for a "big tent" linguistics. The volume goes on to outline intersectional forms of exclusion in linguistics, describes institutional steps toward inclusion, offers examples of how to further educational justice, and shares models of collaborations designed to create an inclusive public-facing linguistics. The volume's conclusion outlines actions that linguists can take through research, teaching, and institutional structures to advance inclusion in linguistics and move the field toward social justice.
The Indigenous Languages of the Americas: History and Classification by
The Indigenous Languages of the Americas takes stock of what is known about the history and classification of these languages and language families. It identifies the gaps in knowledge and puts them into perspective, and it assesses differences of opinion. It also resolves some issues and makes new contributions of its own. The nine chapters of the book deal incisively with the major themes involving these languages: the classification and history of the Indigenous languages of North American, Middle American (Mexico and Central America), and South American; difficulties involving names of the languages; origins of the languages of the New World; unclassified, phantom, fake, and spurious languages in the Americas; recent hypotheses of remote linguistic relationships; the linguistic areas of the Americas; contact languages, including pidgins, lingua francas, and mixed languages; and loanwords and other new words in the native languages of the Americas.
Interfaces of Phonetics by
The role of phonetic detail within the language system and its interplay with other kinds of linguistic information represent a hotly debated territory. In the current volume, different types of phonetic nuances are examined with a particular focus on their relation to phonological, morphological, and semantic/pragmatic phenomena. These three interfaces - the phonetic-phonological, the phonetic-morphological, and the phonetic-semantic/pragmatic one - are investigated from a variety of angles and by consistently taking the rapport between phonetics and phonology into consideration. In doing so, we provide an up-to-date picture of research dealing with the interaction of distinct linguistic areas, and also discuss the question if and when phonology is needed to mediate between phonetics and other linguistic domains.
Language, History, Ideology: The Use and Misuse of Historical-Comparative Linguistics by
This volume presents twelve in-depth case studies that critically examine the ways in which historical linguistics and language change interact with ideology. These varying interactions have been present since the birth of historical-comparative linguistics as a field of study. Work in historical linguistics may be appropriated or rejected for ideological reasons, most notably in the debates surrounding the Indo-European homeland; it can also by influenced by ideological biases, as in the 'alternative' histories that have been proposed for Moldovan and Maltese. The development of linguistically-defined nation states may itself fuel linguistic change, for instance through the suppression of minority languages or the division of existing languages to mirror political divisions, as occurred in the Balkans; or it may lead to the formulation of pseudo-histories designed to give a nation a more prestigious past. The book will be of interest not only to historical linguists but also to anthropologists, historians, and all those interested in language policy.
Language, Society and Ideologies in Multilingual Egypt: Arabic and Berber in the Siwa Oasis by
The book explores the change over time in language-society relations in a multilingual periphery of Egypt. It examines the role of language ideologies in the construction and negotiation of social identities in the processes of contact, maintenance and shift typical of multilingualism. Based on extensive fieldwork and interviews, it is the first of its kind to portray the inventory of linguistic and accompanying non-linguistic behaviors observed within and between different ethnolinguistic groups in the Siwa Oasis. It provides first-hand information about the linguistic habits of Siwan women, an aspect which is generally difficult to access in this gender-segregated community. The book sheds light on Berber-Arabic contact at the core of the Arab world and at a critical time when individual linguistic repertoires are expanding and Arabic is emerging as a powerful resource.
Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York by
From the co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, a captivating portrait of contemporary New York City through six speakers of little-known and overlooked languages, diving into the incredible history of the most linguistically diverse place ever to have existed on the planet Half of all 7,000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century and--because many have never been recorded--when they're gone, it will be forever. Ross Perlin, a linguist and co-director of the Manhattan-based non-profit Endangered Language Alliance, is racing against time to map little-known languages across the most linguistically diverse city in history: contemporary New York. In Language City, Perlin recounts the unique history of immigration that shaped the city, and follows six remarkable yet ordinary speakers of endangered languages deep into their communities to learn how they are maintaining and reviving their languages against overwhelming odds. Perlin also dives deep into their languages, taking us on a fascinating tour of unusual grammars, rare sounds, and powerful cultural histories from all around the world. Seke is spoken by 700 people from five ancestral villages in Nepal, a hundred of whom have lived in a single Brooklyn apartment building. N'ko is a radical new West African writing system now going global in Harlem and the Bronx. After centuries of colonization and displacement, Lenape, the city's original Indigenous language and the source of the name Manhattan ("the place where we get bows"), has just one fluent native speaker, bolstered by a small band of revivalists. Also profiled in the book are speakers of the Indigenous Mexican language Nahuatl, the Central Asian minority language Wakhi, and the former lingua franca of the Lower East Side, Yiddish. A century after the anti-immigration Johnson-Reed Act closed America's doors for decades and on the 400th anniversary of New York's colonial founding, Perlin raises the alarm about growing political threats and the onslaught of "killer languages" like English and Spanish. Both remarkable social history and testament to the importance of linguistic diversity, Language City is a joyful and illuminating exploration of a city and the world that made it.
Language Matters in Contemporary Zimbabwe by
Speaking to a broader global preoccupation with the state of languages and language development, this book considers issues surrounding the diverse languages, linguistic communities, and cultures of Zimbabwe.
The Languages and Linguistics of Mexico and Northern Central America: A Comprehensive Guide by
The handbook provides a thorough survey of the languages pertaining to the Mesoamerican culture region, including a wealth of new research on synchronic structures and historical linguistics of lesser known languages, also including sign languages. The volume moreover features overviews of recent research on topics such as language acquisition and the expression of spatial orientation across languages of the region.
The Languages and Linguistics of Northern Asia (2 vols.) by
The Languages and Linguistics of Northern Asia: A Comprehensive Guide surveys the indigenous languages of Asia's North Pacific Rim, Siberia, and adjacent portions of Inner Eurasia. It provides in-depth descriptions of every first-order family of this vast area, with special emphasis on family-internal subdivision and dialectal differentiation. Individual chapters trace the origins and expansion of the region's widespread pastoral-based language groups as well as the microfamilies and isolates spoken by northern Asia's surviving hunter-gatherers. Separate chapters cover sparsely recorded languages of early Inner Eurasia that defy precise classification and the various pidgins and creoles spread over the region. Other chapters investigate the typology of salient linguistic features of the area, including vowel harmony, noun inflection, verb indexing (also known as agreement), complex morphologies, and the syntax of complex predicates. Issues relating to genealogical ancestry, areal contact and language endangerment receive equal attention. With historical connections both to Eurasia's pastoral-based empires as well as to ancient population movements into the Americas, the steppes, taiga forests, tundra and coastal fringes of northern Asia offer a complex and fascinating object of linguistic investigation.
The Life Cycle of Language: Past, Present, and Future by
This volume brings together an international group of linguists from a diverse range of research backgrounds to explore the cycles of change in the world's languages. Historical linguistics does not solely focus on reconstructing a language's linguistic past and exploring the mechanisms underlying previous language changes; it also addresses broader questions concerning the development and ongoing evolution of language. The chapters in this book draw on data both from languages from the distant past, such as Hittite, Proto-Turkic, and Proto-Bantu, and from present-day languages including Akan, Cantonese, Kuuk Thaayorre, Selis-Ql'ispé, Nivaclé, and Spanish. The contributions showcase current research in historical linguistics and exemplify the dynamism and inherently interdisciplinary nature of the field.
Morphosyntactic Variation in Bantu by
This volume explores the rich and complex pattern of morphosyntactic variation in the Bantu languages, providing a comprehensive overview of the wealth of empirical and conceptual work in the field. The chapters discuss data from some 80 Bantu languages as well as drawing on a wider comparative set of more than 200 languages from across Central, Eastern and Southern Africa: some studies focus on one specific language in a comparative context; some investigate fine-grained variation among a close-knit group of languages; and others present large-scale comparative studies spanning the whole of the Bantu-speaking area. The contributors address a range of topics from a micro-variation perspective, primarily in the areas of nominal and verbal morphology and syntax and information structure. The volume highlights key aspects of contemporary research in Bantu morphosyntax and outlines distinct and novel approaches to prominent questions; it combines the most recent thinking on morphosyntactic variation in Bantu with different theoretical and methodological approaches and novel empirical data from a wide range of languages.
The Oxford Handbook of Vowel Harmony by
This handbook provides a detailed account of the phenomenon of vowel harmony, a pattern according to which all vowels within a word must agree for some phonological property or properties. Vowel harmony has been central in the development of phonological theories thanks to its cluster of remarkable properties, notably its typically 'unbounded' character and its non-locality, and because it forms part of the phonology of most world languages. The five parts of this volume cover all aspects of vowel harmony from a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives. Part I outlines the types of vowel harmony and some unusual cases, before Part II explores structural issues such as vowel inventories, the interaction of vowel harmony and morphological structure, and locality. The chapters in Part III provide an overview of the various theoretical accounts of the phenomenon, as well as bringing in insights from language acquisition and psycholinguistics, while Part IV focuses on the historical life cycle of vowel harmony, looking at topics such as phonetic factors and the effect of language contact. The final part contains 31 chapters that present data and analysis of vowel harmony across all major language families as well as several isolates, constituting the broadest coverage of the phenomenon to date.
Predication in African Languages by
This book discusses patterns of predication and their grammatical and semantic implications in a variety of African languages. It covers several prominent topics about predication in the languages, including locative predication, expressions of tense, aspect, and mood in relation to verbal complexes and verb serialisation, verb semantics, and nominalization of predicates. The chapters take inspiration from Felix Ameka's approach to the study of language according to which the main task of a linguist is to collaborate with language users to understand communicative practices in different contexts and to uncover how these practices impact grammatical and semantic aspects of the language. Accordingly, the descriptions and analyses in this book serve to understand language variation in different ecologies, rather than to impose pre-established descriptive frames on less described languages. Together, the chapters in the book represent a bird's eye view of predication strategies in various African languages and can therefore serve as readings for both introductory and advanced level courses on predication from a typological or comparative perspective.
Studies in Vietnamese Historical Linguistics: Southeast and East Asian Contexts by
This book facilitates constructive interdisciplinary dialogue among linguistics and philology specialists concerning various languages in Vietnam, East Asia, and Southeast Asia. The book's principal objective is to investigate the interdisciplinary nature of language change, with a particular focus on analyzing the structural and socio-cultural components of the evolution of specific linguistic phenomena over time. The book concentrates on the five primary language families in the East and Southeast Asian linguistic arena, namely Austroasiatic, Tai-Kadai, Sino-Tibetan, Austronesian, and Hmong-Mien. In doing so, it develops understanding of the extent to which language change is the result of language-internal mechanisms, prolonged contact with other languages within the same linguistic area, and the surrounding socio-cultural milieu. Given that Vietnam presents a linguistic microcosm of the East and Southeast Asia region, the book is divided into two sections. The first centers on historical linguistics relating to major languages based in Vietnam, including Vietnamese and its significant neighbors, Tay and Nung. The subsequent section examines the transformations observable in other languages prevalent across East and Southeast Asia that are historically, typologically, and geographically related to languages from Vietnam, including Chinese, Formosan, and Philippine languages, as well as Hmongic languages. A product of a workshop sponsored by the Harvard Yenching Institute held at the Institute of Sino-Nom Studies, this book encompasses a significant contribution to the field of Vietnamese historical linguistics, which has been notably underexplored in academic research. It is relevant to linguists, philologists, historians, anthropologists, and cultural scholars interested in Vietnam in particular, and the Southeast and East Asian cultural and linguistic landscape at large.
Studies on Indigenous Signed and Spoken Languages in Africa by
This volume is an important exploration of Africa's rich linguistic diversity. The chapters delve into the complexities of linguistic research, preservation, and cultural understanding, with a regional focus covering indigenous African languages. It honours often-overlooked sign languages, making it a trailblazing work in its combination of signed and spoken languages within the African environment. This book is a must-have for anybody interested in African languages, providing new perspectives on language preservation, cultural identity, and the lasting spirit of linguistic diversity. The individual chapters present an invitation to discover, appreciate, and preserve Africa's indigenous languages. This volume, intended for linguists, policy makers, and graduate and undergraduate students, presents a practical approach to deciphering the complexity of indigenous African languages, both signed and spoken.
The Timucua Language by
The Timucua Language is a comprehensive reference grammar of Timucua, the Native language of much of northern Florida during the Spanish colonial period. Though the Timucua language is no longer spoken, written Timucua was extensively used as a medium of Franciscan evangelism in the seventeenth century; indeed, the Timucua catechisms from 1612 are the earliest written records in any Native language of the land that is now the United States. Two secular letters in the language also survive from that period. As a whole, the Timucua written corpus gives us incomparable insight into the Indigenous culture and history of early Florida. This grammar is based on a thorough study of the extant printed and handwritten documents and on careful philological and comparative analysis of the corpus. Because the content of printed Timucua material often varies considerably from the Spanish text printed in parallel with it, careful study of Timucua grammar enables linguists, anthropologists, and historians to begin to read these critical texts in Florida and southeastern U.S. history.
Tone Evolution: The Uni- and Multi-Phonational Tone Systems on the Jianghan Plain by
This book provides a start of defining the uni- and multi-phonational tone systems of geographically connected dialects under a phonation-pitch tonal model. It also demonstrates an interpretation of the contemporary ongoing tonal variations and varieties from the perspective of language evolution. Acoustic data are collected from five adjacent counties on the Jianghan Plain in China, where two varieties of Southwestern Mandarin and one variety of Gan Dialect are spoken. Falsetto and breathy phonations are applied in this area for phonological distinction, and thus the modal-only dialects co-occur with the di-phonational (falsetto and modal) and tri-phonational (falsetto, modal, and breathy) ones. The acoustic and perceptual analyses are conducted to define tones under the Multi-Register Four-Level Tonal Model, a frame considering both pitch and phonation for the definition of tones. The synchronic variations and varieties within and across speakers/dialects are interpreted in the dynamic interplay of tones mainly governed by phonetic and phonological reasons. The inner-system tonal differences of individual dialectal varieties together with the general distributive patterns of tones in this area are evaluated to determine the paths of tone evolution. Fresh for it exploring the definition and linguistic meaning of the dynamic modal- and non-modal tones, the book benefits researchers with data, research methods, and insight and helps the language teachers and learners understand and learn tones with what the lexical tones really are. The book is also written for the readers curious of tones and tone languages.
Undoing Modernity: Linguistics, Higher Education, and Indigeneity in Yucatan by
An ethnography of the decolonization of Maya-ness. On the Yucatan Peninsula today, undergraduates are inventing a new sense of being Maya by studying linguistics and culture in their own language: Maya. In this bold theoretical intervention informed by ethnographic research, Catherine Rhodes argues that these students are undoing the category of modernity itself. Created through colonization of the Americas, modernity is the counterpart to coloniality; the students, Rhodes suggests, are creating decoloniality's companion: "demodernity." Disciplines like linguistics, anthropology, history, and archaeology invented "the Maya" as an essentialized ethnos in a colonial, modern mold. Undoing Modernity follows students and their teachers as they upset the seemingly stable ethnic definition of Maya, with its reliance on a firm dichotomy of Maya and modern. Maya linguistics does not prove that Maya is modern but instead rejects the Maya-ness that modernity built, while also fostering within the university an intellectual space in which students articulate identity on their own terms. An erudite and ultimately hopeful work of interdisciplinary scholarship that brings linguistic anthropology, Mesoamerican studies, and critical Indigenous studies into the conversation, Undoing Modernity dares to imagine the world on the other side of colonial/modern ideals of Indigeneity.