This work consists of an introduction and 11 articles on important aspects of the interpretation of generic expressions. The introduction provides a clear overview of various issues and synthesizes the major analytical approaches to them. Taken together, the papers that follow reflect the current state of the art in the semantics of generics, and afford insight into various generic phenomena.

In this beautifully illustrated study of sculpture, vases, and other cult objects portraying the Goddess, fertility images, and mythical animals, Marija Gimbutas sketches the matrilineal village culture that existed in southeastern Europe between 6500 and 3500 B.C., before it was overwhelmed by the patriarchal Indo-Europeans. The analysis of this rich mythical imagery tells us much about early humanity's concepts of the cosmos, of humans' relations with nature, and of the complementary roles of male and female.

In The Everyday Language of White Racism, Jane H. Hill provides an incisive analysis of everyday language to reveal the underlying racist stereotypes that continue to circulate in American culture. provides a detailed background on the theory of race and racism reveals how racializing discourse—talk and text that produces and reproduces ideas about races and assigns people to them—facilitates a victim-blaming logic integrates a broad and interdisciplinary range of literature from sociology, social psychology, justice studies, critical legal studies, philosophy, literature, and other disciplines that have studied racism, as well as material from anthropology and sociolinguistics Part of the Blackwell Studies in Discourse and Culture Series

This handbook provides a comprehensive account of current research on case and the morphological and syntactic phenomena associated with it. The semantic roles and grammatical relations indicated by case are fundamental to the whole system of language and have long been a central concern of descriptive and theoretical linguistics. The book opens with the editors' synoptic overview of the main lines of research in the field, which sets out the main issues, challenges, and debates. Some sixty scholars from all over the world then report on the state of play in theoretical, typological, diachronic, and psycholinguistic research. They assess cross-linguistic work on case and case-systems and evaluate a variety of theoretical approaches. They examine current issues and debates from historical, areal, socio-linguistic and psycholinguistic perspectives. The final part of the book consists of a set of overviews of case systems representative of some of the world's major language families. The book is fully cross-referenced, referenced, and indexed.It will be of central interest to all scholars and advanced students of syntax and morphology as well as to those working in associated subjects in semantics, typology, and psycholinguistics.

This is a newly expanded and updated edition of one of the best-selling introductions to linguistic morphology - the study and description of word formations in languages - that deals with inflection, derivation, and compounding, the system of word-forming elements and processes in a language. Basic concepts are introduced, with an abundance of examples from a range of familiar and exotic languages, followed by a discussion of, among other topics, the definition of word-form, productivity, inflection versus derivation, and the position of morphology to phonology - the science of speech sounds, especially the history and theory of sound changes in a language. Along with two new chapters discussing morphology and the brain and how morphology arises, changes, and disappears, this new edition includes exercises and a glossary of key terms.

- Collects twelve new papers that explore the syntax of Chinese in comparison with other languages.
- Opens up new avenues of research, connecting studies of Chinese with work being carried out on other languages.
Chinese Syntax in a Cross-linguistic Perspective is a collection of sixteen original papers by leading experts in Chinese syntax. The papers focus on a broad range of topics, demonstrating how the analysis of Chinese can inform our understanding of syntactic phenomena in other languages, and how insights gained in the study of other languages can in turn shed interesting new light on patterns in Chinese. Each chapter compares a specific major phenomenon in Chinese syntax with related patterns in at least one other language from Asia, Europe, North America or Africa, resulting in a series of fresh perspectives on Chinese and what the study of Chinese can offer linguists working on other, genetically unrelated languages.
The volume is divided into three thematic sections, on the nominal domain, the predicate domain, and the C-domain. In addition to chapters on synchronic, adult syntax, the book includes chapters on Chinese diachronic syntax in a comparative perspective and the acquisition of syntax in Chinese, in comparison with that of other languages. The collection is a tribute to Professor C.-T. James Huang's lifelong work on the syntax of Chinese and his attempts to demonstrate how the comparative analysis of Chinese reveals important properties of Universal Grammar. With its broad, cross-linguistic focus and its detailed, new studies of Chinese, this book is essential reading for researchers of all language backgrounds in modern generative syntax.

In Basic Linguistic Theory R. M. W. Dixon provides a new and fundamental characterization of the nature of human languages and a comprehensive guide to their description and analysis. In three clearly written and accessible volumes, he describes how best to go about doing linguistics, the most satisfactory and profitable ways to work, and the pitfalls to avoid. In the first volume he addresses the methodology for recording, analysing, and comparing languages. He argues that grammatical structures and rules should be worked out inductively on the basis of evidence, explaining in detail the steps by which an attested grammar and lexicon can built up from observed utterances. He shows how the grammars and words of one language may be compared to others of the same or different families, explains the methods involved in cross-linguistic parametric analyses, and describes how to interpret the results. Volume 2 and volume 3 (to be published in 2011) offer in-depth tours of underlying principles of grammatical organization, as well as many of the facts of grammatical variation. 'The task of the linguist,' Professor Dixon writes, 'is to explain the nature of human languages - each viewed as an integrated system - together with an explanation of why each language is the way it is, allied to the further scientific pursuits of prediction and evaluation.' Basic Linguistic Theory is the triumphant outcome of a lifetime's thinking about every aspect and manifestation of language and immersion in linguistic fieldwork. It is a one-stop text for undergraduate and graduate students of linguistics, as well as for those in neighbouring disciplines, such as psychology and anthropology.

It is commonly agreed by linguists and anthropologists that the majority of languages spoken now around the globe will likely disappear within our lifetime. The phenomenon known as language death has started to accelerate as the world has grown smaller. This extinction of languages, and the knowledge therein, has no parallel in human history. K. David Harrison's book is the first to focus on the essential question, what is lost when a language dies? What forms of knowledge are embedded in a language's structure and vocabulary? And how harmful is it to humanity that such knowledge is lost forever? Harrison spans the globe from Siberia, to North America, to the Himalayas and elsewhere, to look at the human knowledge that is slowly being lost as the languages that express it fade from sight. He uses fascinating anecdotes and portraits of some of these languages' last remaining speakers, in order to demonstrate that this knowledge about ourselves and the world is inherently precious and once gone, will be lost forever. This knowledge is not only our cultural heritage (oral histories, poetry, stories, etc.) but very useful knowledge about plants, animals, the seasons, and other aspects of the natural world--not to mention our understanding of the capacities of the human mind.Harrison's book is a testament not only to the pressing issue of language death, but to the remarkable span of human knowledge and ingenuity. It will fascinate linguists, anthropologists, and general readers.

Seit etwa zehn Jahren sind in der linguistischen Literatur immer häufiger Veröffentlichungen zum Themenbereich Sprache und Kognition anzutreffen. Sie erheben den Anspruch, einen alternativen Weg zur herkömmlichen Linguistik aufzeigen zu wollen und artikulieren ihre Kritik an der verengten Perspektive der gegenwärtigen Sprachtheorie. Der Autor möchte mit den Grundpositionen dieser alternativen Aufsätze bekannt machen, über die Kritik informieren, den wissenschaftsgeschichtlichen Hintergrund für eine "ganzheitlichere Linguistik" aufdecken, Möglichkeiten ihrer Methodik erörtern und Konsequenzen für den Relevanzbereich Sprache und Kommunikation aufzeigen.

This study of word frequency effects on sound change provides a resolution of the Neogrammarian controversy, which for over a century has pitted phonetically exceptionless change against lexically gradual change. Combining evidence from historical linguistics, sociology and psycholinguistics, Betty S. Phillips discusses the implications for phonology and historical linguistics of certain types of change affecting the most frequent words first and other types of change affecting the least frequent words first.

How are relationships established between the world's languages? This is one of the most topical and most controversial questions in contemporary linguistics. The central aims of this 2008 book are to answer this question, to cut through the controversies, and to contribute to research in distant genetic relationships. In doing this the authors aim to: (1) show how the methods have been employed; (2) reveal which methods, techniques, and strategies have proven successful and which ones have proven ineffective; (3) determine how particular language families were established; (4) evaluate several of the most prominent and more controversial proposals of distant genetic relationship (such as Amerind, Nostratic, Eurasiatic, Proto-World, and others); and (5) make recommendations for practice in future research. This book will contribute significantly to understanding language classification in general.

Geert Booij's popular textbook on the structure of words has been revised and updated in a third edition. The book covers every aspect of morphological theory and the analysis of words. It is the only introductory text to explore the role of morphology in language processing and language change, and also deals with the relation between morphology and other modules of grammar. The book includes a full glossary and exercises with answers.
- revised and updated
- with a glossary of terms
- exercises and suggestions for further reading
- the clearest and most readable text on the market

《东往东来：近代中日之间的语词概念/学科知识与近代中国研究书系》第一编“西学东渐再东渐”着眼于19世纪英华字典以及《博物新编》《万国公法》和江南制造局的西学新书在日本的影响；第二编“东学激起千层浪”则看20世纪日本是如何影响中国的，通过分析梁启超《和文汉读法》、政治小说《雪中梅》以及《共产党宣言》的翻译问题，认识汉语欧化过程中的日语因素，以及辞典是如何应对日语新词的；第三编“语词概念定尘埃”则具体描述“民主”“共和”“主义”“优胜劣败，适者生存”“金字塔”等概念形成的过程。

" The Way We Think is a dazzling tour of the complexities of human imagination."--George Lakoff, co-author of Philosophy in the Flesh and Where Mathematics Comes From . In its first two decades, much of cognitive science focused on such mental functions as memory, learning, symbolic thought, and language acquisition--the functions in which the human mind most closely resembles a computer. But humans are more than computers, and the cutting-edge research in cognitive science is increasingly focused on the more mysterious, creative aspects of the mind. The Way We Think is a landmark synthesis that exemplifies this new direction. The theory of conceptual blending is already widely known in laboratories throughout the world; this book is its definitive statement. Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner argue that all learning and all thinking consist of blends of metaphors based on simple bodily experiences. These blends are then themselves blended together into an increasingly rich structure that makes up our mental functioning in modern society. A child's entire development consists of learning and navigating these blends. The Way We Think shows how this blending operates; how it is affected by (and gives rise to) language, identity, and concept of category; and the rules by which we use blends to understand ideas that are new to us. The result is a bold, exciting, and accessible new view of how the mind works.

This is the 2nd edition of "Speech and Language Processing, 2000" (http://www.douban.com/subject/1810715/).
An explosion of Web-based language techniques, merging of distinct fields, availability of phone-based dialogue systems, and much more make this an exciting time in speech and language processing. The first of its kind to thoroughly cover language technology – at all levels and with all modern technologies – this book takes an empirical approach to the subject, based on applying statistical and other machine-learning algorithms to large corporations. Builds each chapter around one or more worked examples demonstrating the main idea of the chapter, usingthe examples to illustrate the relative strengths and weaknesses of various approaches. Adds coverage of statistical sequence labeling, information extraction, question answering and summarization, advanced topics in speech recognition, speech synthesis. Revises coverage of language modeling, formal grammars, statistical parsing, machine translation, and dialog processing. A useful reference for professionals in any of the areas of speech and language processing.

Paul Lloyd presents an historical grammar of Spanish that includes twentieth-century research on Romance and Spanish languages. He offers a synthesis of the research that has illuminaated much of the phonetic and morphological development of Spanish.