Professor Vinokur (1896-1947) discusses each of the stages in the development of Russian from its Common Slavonic source, and the growing dominance of the dialect of Moscow from the sixteenth century, up to the ninenteenth century when the language had virtually reached its present form and into the twentieth century. Each stage is illustrated by extensive quotation, all examples of Old Russian being translated into English, but examples in modern Russian appearing in the original only. This 1971 text will be of value to students of Russian with a basic linguistic grounding who are beginning their study of the historical development of the language.

The national electoral map has split into warring regional bastions of Republican red and Democratic blue, producing a deep and enduring partisan divide in American politics. In Red Fighting Blue, David A. Hopkins places the current partisan and electoral era in historical context, explains how the increased salience of social issues since the 1980s has redefined the parties' geographic bases of support, and reveals the critical role that American political institutions play in intermediating between the behavior of citizens and the outcome of public policy-making. The widening geographic gap in voters' partisan preferences, as magnified further by winner-take-all electoral rules, has rendered most of the nation safe territory for either Democratic or Republican candidates in both presidential and congressional elections - with significant consequences for party competition, candidate strategy, and the operation of government.

A global history of historical writing, thought and the development of the historical discipline from the ancient world to the present. This is a definitive guide to human efforts to recover, understand and represent the past, bringing together different historical traditions and their social, economic, political and cultural contexts. Daniel Woolf offers clear definitions of different genres and forms of history and addresses key themes such as the interactions between West and East, the conflict of oral, pictographic, and written accounts of the past and the place of history in society and in politics. Numerous textual extracts and illustrations in every chapter capture the historical cultures of past civilizations and demonstrate the different forms that historical consciousness has taken around the world. The book offers unique insights into the interconnections between different historical cultures over 3000 years and relates the rise of history to key themes in world history.

One of the first accounts of social variation in language, this groundbreaking study founded the discipline of sociolinguistics, providing the model on which thousands of studies have been based. In this second edition, Labov looks back on forty years of sociolinguistic research, bringing the reader up to date on its methods, findings and achievements. In over thirty pages of new material, he explores the unforeseen implications of his earlier work, addresses the political issues involved, and evaluates the success of newer approaches to sociolinguistic investigation. In doing so, he reveals the outstanding accomplishments of sociolinguistics since his original study, which laid the foundations for studying language variation, introduced the crucial concept of the linguistic variable, and showed how variation across age groups is an indicator of language change. Bringing Labov's pioneering study into the 21st century, this classic volume will remain the benchmark in the field for years to come.

This book explores the roles of agricultural development and advancing social complexity in the processes of state formation in China. Over a period of about 10,000 years, it follows evolutionary trajectories of society from the last Palaeolithic hunting-gathering groups, through Neolithic farming villages and on to the Bronze Age Shang dynasty in the latter half of the second millennium BC. Li Liu and Xingcan Chen demonstrate that sociopolitical evolution was multicentric and shaped by inter-polity factionalism and competition, as well as by the many material technologies introduced from other parts of the world. The book illustrates how ancient Chinese societies were transformed during this period from simple to complex, tribal to urban, and preliterate to literate.
• Covers major topics including the roles of agricultural development, advancing social complexity and state formation in ancient China • Considers the origins of archaic states in the Yellow River valley • Includes discussion of regional interactions within China and between China and the outside world

The great empires of the vast Eurasian continent have captured the imagination of many. Awe-inspiring names such as ancient Rome, Han and Tang China, Persia, Assyria, the Huns, the Kushans and the Franks have been the subject of countless scholarly books and works of literature. However, very rarely, if at all, have these vast pre-industrial empires been studied holistically from a comparative, interdisciplinary and above all Eurasian perspective. This collection of studies examines the history, literature and archaeology of these empires and others thus far treated separately as a single inter-connected subject of inquiry. It highlights in particular the critical role of Inner Asian empires and peoples in facilitating contacts and exchange across the Eurasian continent in antiquity and the early Middle Ages.

Southeast Asia was the scene of one of the world's major civilisations, that of Angkor, until it was sacked in the early fifteenth century. The origins of Angkor were barely known until recent archaeological excavation and field research began to reveal the region's dynamic development and to raise new questions to serve in its understanding. This important new synthesis focuses on the social world of early mainland Southeast Asia: Thailand, Vietnam, Kampuchea, Laos and adjacent areas. The book begins when the area was occupied 12,000 years ago by hunters and gatherers. The author stresses the importance of sedentism and domestication. These encouraged the spread of coastal communities into the interior valleys. Particular relevance is seen in the exchange of valuables, including bronze, as symbols of status. The origins of civilisation, for long assumed to result from Indian expansion in the region, are seen as rooted in local changes, along with the selective adoption of Indian religious and political ideas within coastal cheifdoms. In bridging the gap between prehistory and history, this book will appeal not only to archaeologists but to those interested in the general history, culture and arts of Asia.

Linguistic typology identifies both how languages vary and what they all have in common. This Handbook provides a state-of-the art survey of the aims and methods of linguistic typology, and the conclusions we can draw from them. Part I covers phonological typology, morphological typology, sociolinguistic typology and the relationships between typology, historical linguistics and grammaticalization. It also addresses typological features of mixed languages, creole languages, sign languages and secret languages. Part II features contributions on the typology of morphological processes, noun categorization devices, negation, frustrative modality, logophoricity, switch reference and motion events. Finally, Part III focuses on typological profiles of the mainland South Asia area, Australia, Quechuan and Aymaran, Eskimo-Aleut, Iroquoian, the Kampa subgroup of Arawak, Omotic, Semitic, Dravidian, the Oceanic subgroup of Austronesian and the Awuyu-Ndumut family (in West Papua). Uniting the expertise of a stellar selection of scholars, this Handbook highlights linguistic typology as a major discipline within the field of linguistics.

People of European descent form the bulk of the population in most of the temperate zones of the world--North America, Australia and New Zealand. The military successes of European imperialism are easy to explain because in many cases they were achieved by using firearms against spears. Alfred Crosby, however, explains that the Europeans' displacement and replacement of the native peoples in the temperate zones was more a matter of biology than of military conquest. Now in a new edition with a new preface, Crosby revisits his classic work and again evaluates the ecological reasons for European expansion. Alfred W. Crosby is the author of the widely popular and ground-breaking books,The Measure of Reality (Cambridge, 1996), and America's Forgotten Pandemic (Cambridge, 1990). His books have received the Ralph Waldo Emerson Prize, the Medical Writers Association Prize and been named by the Los Angeles Times as among the best books of the year. He taught at the University of Texas, Austin for over 20 years. First Edition Hb (1986): 0-521-32009-7 First Edition Pb (1987): 0-521-33613-9

A concise but unusually comprehensive handbook for the students of Old French. Based on Dr Einhorn's very successful introductory lecture course for undergraduates, this book describes the phonology, morphology and syntax of standard Old French, paying attention also to the main dialect forms. There are numerous examples in the text; the book also gives representative passages of some length, and a glossary. Students taking university courses and scholars teaching themselves should find in this book an ideal combination of features in a handy format.

How did the biological, brain and behavioural structures underlying human language evolve? When, why and where did our ancestors become linguistic animals, and what has happened since? This book provides a clear, comprehensive but lively introduction to these interdisciplinary debates. Written in an approachable style, it cuts through the complex, sometimes contradictory and often obscure technical languages used in the different scientific disciplines involved in the study of linguistic evolution. Assuming no background knowledge in these disciplines, the book outlines the physical and neurological structures underlying language systems, and the limits of our knowledge concerning their evolution. Discussion questions and further reading lists encourage students to explore the primary literature further, and the final chapter demonstrates that while many questions still remain unanswered, there is a growing consensus as to how modern human languages have arisen as systems by the interplay of evolved structures and cultural transmission.

A large body of knowledge has accumulated on the cognitive processes and brain mechanisms underlying language. Much of this knowledge has come from studies of Indo-European languages, in particular English. Chinese, spoken by one-fifth of the world's population, differs significantly from most Indo-European languages in its grammar, its lexicon, and its written and spoken forms - features which have profound implications for the learning, representation and processing of language. This handbook, first published in 2006 as the first in a three-volume set on East Asian psycholinguistics, presents a discussion of the psycholinguistic study of Chinese. With contributions by over fifty leading scholars, it covers topics in first- and second-language acquisition, language processing and reading, language disorders in children and adults, and the relationships between language, brain, culture, and cognition. It will be invaluable to all scholars and students interested in the Chinese language, as well as cognitive psychologists, linguists, and neuroscientists.

Evolution has not typically been recognised by linguists as a constraining factor when developing linguistic theories. This book demonstrates that our theories of language must reflect the fact that language has evolved. It critiques a currently dominant framework in the field of linguistics - the Minimalist Program - by showing how it fails to take evolution into account. It approaches the question of the evolution of human language in a novel way by applying findings from the field of evolutionary biology to language. Key properties associated with typically evolving systems are identified in language, and the shortcomings of the Minimalist Program in its outright rejection of these features are exposed. The book will be of interest to individual researchers and advanced students in linguistics, psychology, biology, anthropology and cognitive science.

In early modern England, housewives, clergymen, bloodletters, herb women, and patients told authoritative tales about the body. By the end of the eighteenth century, however, medicine had begun to drown out these voices. This book uses patients' perspectives to argue that changes in the relationship between rich and poor underlay this rise in medicine's authority. In a detailed examination of health, healing, and poor relief in eighteenth-century Bristol, the author shows how the experiences of the hospitalized urban poor laid the foundations for modern doctor-patient encounters. Within the hospital, charity patients were denied the power to interpret their own illnesses, as control of the institution shifted from lay patrons to surgeons. Outside the hospital, reforms of popular culture stigmatized ordinary people's ideas about their own bodies. Popular medicine became working-class medicine, associated with superstition and political unrest.

The work reported in this monograph was begun in the winter of 1967 in a graduate seminar at Berkeley. Many of the basic data were gathered by members of the seminar and the theoretical framework presented here was initially developed in the context of the seminar discussions. Much has been discovered since 1969, the date of original publication, regarding the psychophysical and neurophysical determinants of universal, cross-linguistic constraints on the shape of basic color lexicons, and something, albeit less, can now also be said with some confidence regarding the constraining effects of these language-independent processes of color perception and conceptualization on the direction of evolution of basic color term lexicons.

The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages is the first comprehensive reference work treating all of the languages of antiquity. Clear and systematic in its approach, the Encyclopedia combines full linguistic coverage of all the well documented ancient languages, representing numerous language families from around the globe. Each chapter of the work focuses on an individual language or, in some instances, a set of closely related varieties of a language. Providing a full descriptive presentation, each of these chapters examines the writing system(s), phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon of that language, and places the language within its proper linguistic and historical context. The Encyclopedia brings together an international array of scholars, each a leading specialist in ancient language study. While designed primarily for linguistic professionals and students, this work will prove invaluable to all whose studies take them into the realm of ancient language.