With more than two thousand languages spread over its territory, multilingualism is a common reality in Africa. The main official languages of most African countries are Indo-European, in many instances Romance. As they were primarily brought to Africa in the era of colonization, the areas discussed in this volume are thirty-five states that were once ruled by Belgium, France, Italy, Portugal, or Spain, and the African regions still belonging to three of them. Twenty-six states are presented in relation to French, four to Italian, six to Portuguese, and two to Spanish. They are considered in separate chapters according to their sociolinguistic situation, linguistic history, external language policy, linguistic characteristics, and internal language policy. The result is a comprehensive overview of the Romance languages in modern-day Africa. It follows a coherent structure, offers linguistic and sociolinguistic information, and illustrates language contact situations, power relations, as well as the cross-fertilization and mutual enrichment emerging from the interplay of languages and cultures in Africa.

With more than two thousand languages spread over its territory, multilingualism is a common reality in Africa. The main official languages of most African countries are Indo-European, in many instances Romance. As they were primarily brought to Africa in the era of colonization, the areas discussed in this volume are thirty-five states that were once ruled by Belgium, France, Italy, Portugal, or Spain, and the African regions still belonging to three of them. Twenty-six states are presented in relation to French, four to Italian, six to Portuguese, and two to Spanish. They are considered in separate chapters according to their sociolinguistic situation, linguistic history, external language policy, linguistic characteristics, and internal language policy. The result is a comprehensive overview of the Romance languages in modern-day Africa. It follows a coherent structure, offers linguistic and sociolinguistic information, and illustrates language contact situations, power relations, as well as the cross-fertilization and mutual enrichment emerging from the interplay of languages and cultures in Africa.

Deixis as a field of research has generated increased interest in recent years. It is crucial for a number of different subdisciplines: pragmatics, semantics, cognitive and contrastive linguistics, to name just a few. The subject is of particular interest to experts and students, philosophers, teachers, philologists, and psychologists interested in the study of their language or in comparing linguistic structures. The different deictic structures – not only the items themselves, but also the oppositions between them – reflect the fact that neither the notions of space, time, person nor our use of them are identical cross-culturally. This diversity is not restricted to the difference between languages, but also appears among related dialects and language varieties. This volume will provide an overview of the field, focusing on Romance languages, but also reaching beyond this perspective. Chapters on diachronic developments (language change), comparisons with other (non-)European languages, and on interfaces with neighboring fields of interest are also included. The editors and authors hope that readers, regardless of their familiarity with Romance languages, will gain new insights into deixis in general, and into the similarities and differences among deictic structures used in the languages of the world.

Spoken by millions of people on four continents, Portuguese remains a lesser studied language. To help improve the linguistic understanding of this pluricentric language, the present volume brings together ten studies about different grammatical phenomena observed in Portuguese varieties – from suffixation to intercalated temporal clauses and non-concatenative verbal inflection, among other topics. Focusing on two main axes – usage and cognition –, these studies draw on the theoretical frameworks of Functional Linguistics and Cognitive Linguistics, but build a cohesive whole insofar as they all offer usage-based language approaches. By presenting an overview of recent research on Portuguese and its varieties, the book paves the way for the inclusion of Portuguese in the set of Neo-Latin languages best known to the general public.

Language standardization is an ongoing process based on the notions of linguistic correctness and models. This manual contains thirty-six chapters that deal with the theories of linguistic norms and give a comprehensive up-to-date description and analysis of the standardization processes in the Romance languages. The first section presents the essential approaches to the concept of linguistic norm ranging from antiquity to the present, and includes individual chapters on the notion of linguistic norms and correctness in classical grammar and rhetoric, in the Prague School, in the linguistic theory of Eugenio Coseriu, in sociolinguistics as well as in pragmatics, cognitive and discourse linguistics. The second section focuses on the application of these notions with respect to the Romance languages. It examines in detail the normative grammar and the normative dictionary as the reference tools for language codification and modernization of those languages that have a long and well-established written tradition, i.e. Romanian, Italian, French, Catalan, Spanish, and Portuguese. Furthermore, the volume offers a discussion of the key issues regarding the standardization of the ‘minor’ Romance languages as well as Creoles.

The Romance languages offer a particularly fertile ground for the exploration of the relationship between language and society in different social contexts and communities. Focusing on a wide range of Romance languages – from national languages to minoritised varieties – this volume explores questions concerning linguistic diversity and multilingualism, language contact, medium and genre, variation and change. It will interest researchers and policy-makers alike.

What is the origin of the Romance languages and how did they evolve? When and how did they become different from Latin, and from each other? Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of the Romance Languages offers fresh and original reflections on the principal questions and issues in the comparative external histories of the Romance languages. It is organised around the two key themes of influences and institutions, exploring the fundamental influence, of contact with and borrowing from, other languages (including Latin), and the cultural and institutional forces at work in the establishment of standard languages and norms of correctness. A perfect complement to the first volume, it offers an external history of the Romance languages combining data and theory to produce new and revealing perspectives on the shaping of the Romance languages.

The Romance languages offer unique potential for empirical analysis and methodological innovation within the vast field of linguistics, due to the survival of a large body of historical documentation, the rich diversity of dialects and languages, and the exceptional quality of the research undertaken to date. However, these same factors have led to an ever-increasing volume of material available for study, requiring the establishment of a shared canonical knowledge base. This companion offers a balanced overview of the core subjects and the methodology which make up the field of Romance linguistics. It provides a solid foundation in the discipline as well as easy and convenient access to highly-specialised areas of research by means of systematic references to the latest handbooks and encyclopedias. The companion is designed to be read from cover to cover or to be consulted for information on specific topics. Advanced students, early-career researchers, lecturers, specialists of other languages, philologists, and historians alike will all benefit from this accessible and up-to-date reference work, as it enables readers to contextualise any knowledge of the discipline they may already possess.

What is a Romance language? How is one Romance language related to others? How did they all evolve? And what can they tell us about language in general? In this comprehensive survey Rebecca Posner, a distinguished Romance specialist, examines this group of languages from a wide variety of perspectives. Her analysis combines philological expertise with insights drawn from modern theoretical linguistics, both synchronic and diachronic. She relates linguistic features to historical and sociological factors, and teases out those elements which can be attributed to divergence from a common source and those which indicate convergence towards a common aim. Her discussion is extensively illustrated with new and original data, and an up-to-date and comprehensive bibliography is included. This volume will be an invaluable and authoritative guide for students and specialists alike.

Thoroughly revised and updated with some 500 new entries-including the addition of pertinent Internet sites-this is the only bibliographic guide to information sources for linguistics. Coverage spans from 1957, the publication date of Chomsky's seminal work, to the present, with emphasis on English-language resources. DeMiller's detailed citations describe and evaluate each work, often offering comparisons to similar titles. Its broad coverage and in-depth reviews make this work essential to the research and study of general or theoretical linguistics. The book is also indispensable in the related areas of anthropological linguistics, applied linguistics, mathematical and computation linguistics, psycholinguistics, semiotics, and sociolinguistics, which are all treated in separate chapters, as well as the study of language and languages from a linguistic perspective. A must for any library supporting the study of linguistics or its related fields, this is a valuable reference and research tool. It i