First published in 1937, this book supplies a history of the living growth of the English language from Old English to the medieval period. It offers an in-depth study of the growth of vocabulary through literature and social interaction, bringing out the fact that it is chiefly words that foreign influence has affected — leaving sentence structure almost unaltered. Isolative and combinative changes in phonology, the accidence of nouns and plurals, pronouns and adverbs, and verbs are also ...

Covering thinkers from Aristotle to Saussure and Chomsky, "Introducing Linguistics" reveals the rules and beauty that underlie language, our most human skill.

Standard German is spoken by approximately 95 million people worldwide. This book provides an introduction to the linguistic structure of standard German that is rich in descriptive detail and grounded in modern linguistic theory. It describes the main linguistic features: the sounds, structure and formation of words, structure of sentences, and meaning of words and sentences. It surveys the history of the language, the major dialects, German in Austria and Switzerland, as well as sociolin...

The second edition of this hugely successful textbook provides comprehensive coverage of a wide range of topics in theoretical and applied linguistics. Written by leading academics in the field, this text offers a firm grounding in linguistics and includes engaging insights into current research.It covers all the key areas of linguistic analysis, including phonetics, morphology, semantics and pragmatics, and core domains of study, comprising the history of the English language, reg...

The authors explore some of the ways in which standardization, ideology and linguistics are interrelated. Through a number of case studies they show how concepts such as grammaticality and structural change covertly rely on a false conceptualization of language, one that derives ultimately from standardization.

First published in 1993, this book provides clear illustrations of discourse analytic work and empirical critiques of the traditional psychological approaches. Drawing on a range of examples, the contributors argue that identity, deeply felt emotions, prejudice, and attitudes to social issues are created by the language that describes them rather than being intrinsic to the individual. In illustrating the variety of methods available through their studies of punk identity, sexual jealousy,...

This volume showcases recent sociolinguistic research about Wales and offers contributions from scholars working on Welsh, English and other languages spoken in the country. The chapters present a range of frameworks and methodologies used in sociolinguistics and apply them to the Welsh linguistic context. This context is very distinctive compared to the rest of the UK and represents a prime ground to observe different aspects of the interplay between language and society. The structure of...

The highly frequent word items TO and OF are often conceived merely as prepositions, carrying little meaning in themselves. This book disputes that notion by analysing the usage patterns found for OF and TO in different sets of text corpora.

The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology is intended as a companion volume to The Oxford Handbook of Compounding (OUP 2009) Written by distinguished scholars, its 41 chapters aim to provide a comprehensive and thorough overview of the study of derivational morphology. The handbook begins with an overview and a consideration of definitional matters, distinguishing derivation from inflection on the one hand and compounding on the other. From a formal perspect...

This volume is a collection of papers approaching the phenomenon of language from a variety of perspectives. Scholars in phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicology, historical linguistics and translation studies share the results of their research. They invite the reader on a journey into the multifaceted and complex world of human language, moving from the study of sound through the description of structure to the analysis of meaning. The volume has been brought together to honour Professo...

First published in 1936, this book is intended to provide an outline of Anglo-Saxon grammar for beginners, focusing on well-selected, succinctly stated rules rather than giving a detailed survey. It focuses on the West-Saxon dialect as this is best suited to beginners due to its uniformity in phonology and inflection, the fact it forms the basis of Anglo-Saxon grammar, and its prominence in the extant literature. Extracts have been selected from this literature to provide a sufficient basi...

Ideophones have been recognized in modern linguistics at least since 1935, but they still lie far outside the concerns of mainstream (Western) linguistic debate, in part because they are most richly attested in relatively unstudied (often unwritten) languages. The evolution of language, on the other hand, has recently become a fashionable topic, but all speculations so far have been almost totally data-free. Without disputing the tenet that there are no primitive languages, this book argue...