In this book, Claire Lefebrve offers a coherent picture of research on relabeling over the last 15 years, and replies to the questions that have been directed at the relabeling-based theory of creole genesis presented in Lefebvre (1998) and related work.

This book is about the functional categories of three Caribbean creoles: Saramaccan, Haitian Creole and Papiamentu with two specific goals. The first one is to evaluate the respective contribution of the source languages to the functional categories of these three creoles. The second is to evaluate the degree of similarity/dissimilarity of the functional categories across these creoles. This study is cast within the relabeling-based account of creole genesis. Several lexical items discussed in this book may fulfill more than one grammatical function thus raising the issue of multifuctionality. No such in-depth comparative work of these three creoles with their source languages and of the three creoles among themselves is available elsewhere in the literature. This book is addressed to linguists (including Master and PhD students) interested in syntactic categories and more specifically in functional categories, to creolists and to researchers interested in language contact.

This book launches a new approach to creole studies founded on phylogenetic network analysis. Phylogenetic approaches offer new visualisation techniques and insights into the relationships between creoles and non-creoles, creoles and other contact varieties, and between creoles and lexifier languages. With evidence from creole languages in Africa, Asia, the Americas, and the Pacific, the book provides new perspectives on creole typology, cross-creole comparisons, and creole semantics. The book offers an introduction for newcomers to the fields of creole studies and phylogenetic analysis. Using these methods to analyse a variety of linguistic features, both structural and semantic, the book then turns to explore old and new questions and problems in creole studies. Original case studies explore the differences and similarities between creoles, and propose solutions to the problems of how to classify creoles and how they formed and developed. The book provides a fascinating glimpse into the unity and heterogeneity of creoles and the areal influences on their development. It also provides metalinguistic discussions of the “creole” concept from different perspectives. Finally, the book reflects critically on the findings and methods, and sets new agendas for future studies. Creole Studies has been written for a broad readership of scholars and students in the fields of contact linguistics, biolinguistics, sociolinguistics, language typology, and semantics.

The Portuguese Language Continuum in Africa and Brazil is the first publication in English to offer studies on a whole set of varieties of Portuguese in Africa as well as Brazilian Portuguese. Authored by specialists on varieties of Portuguese in Africa and Brazil, the eleven chapters and the epilogue promote a dialogue between researchers interested in their genesis, sociohistories and linguistic properties. Most chapters directly address the idea of a continuum of Portuguese derived from parallel sociohistorical and linguistic factors in Africa and Brazil, due to the colonial expansion of the language to new multilingual settings. The volume contributes to the understanding of structural properties that are often shared by several varieties in this continuum, and describes the various situations and domains of language use as well as sociocultural contexts where they have emerged and where they are being used. As of 26 July 2021, the ebook edition is Open Access under the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

This volume intends to fill the gap in the grammaticalization studies setting as its goal the systematic description of grammaticalization processes in genealogically and structurally diverse languages. To address the problem of the limitations of the secondary sources for grammaticalization studies, the editors rely on sketches of grammaticalization phenomena from experts in individual languages guided by a typological questionnaire.

Egypt in the early Byzantine period was a bilingual country where Greek and Egyptian (Coptic) were used alongside each other. Historical studies along with linguistic studies of the phonology and lexicon of early Byzantine Greek in Egypt testify to this situation. In order to describe the linguistic traces that the language-contact situation left behind in individuals' linguistic output, Coptic Interference in the Syntax of Greek Letters from Egypt analyses the syntax of early Byzantine Greek texts from Egypt. The primary object of interest is bilingual interference in the syntax of verbs, adverbial phrases, clause linkage as well as in semi-formulaic expressions and formulaic frames. The study is based on a corpus of Greek and Coptic private letters on papyrus, which date from the fourth to mid-seventh centuries, originate from Egypt and belong to bilingual, Greek-Coptic, papyrus archives.

The question of how language emerged is one of the most fascinating and difficult problems in science. In recent years, a strong resurgence of interest in the emergence of language from an evolutionary perspective has been helped by the convergence of approaches, methods, and ideas from several disciplines. The selection of contributions in this volume highlight scenarios of language origin and the prerequisites for a faculty of language based on biological, historical, social, cultural, and paleontological forays into the conditions that brought forth and favored language emergence, augmented by insights from sister disciplines. The chapters all reflect new speculation, discoveries and more refined research methods leading to a more focused understanding of the range of possibilities and how we might choose among them. There is much that we do not yet know, but the outlines of the path ahead are ever clearer.

Tungusic is a small family of languages, many of which are endangered. It encompasses approximately twenty languages located in Siberia and northern China. These languages are distributed over an enormous area that ranges from the Yenisey River and Xinjiang in the west to the Kamchatka Peninsula and Sakhalin in the east. They extend as far north as the Taimyr Peninsula and, for a brief period, could even be found in parts of Central and Southern China. This book is an attempt to bring researchers from different backgrounds together to provide an open-access publication in English that is freely available to all scholars in the field. The contributions cover all branches of Tungusic and a wide range of linguistic features. Topics include synchronic descriptions, typological comparisons, dialectology, language contact, and diachronic reconstruction. Some of the contributions are based on first-hand data collected during fieldwork, in some cases from the last speakers of a given language.

This publication brings together some of the papers presented at the 4th International Conference on Corpus Use and Learning to Translate (CULT), which took place at the University of Alicante on 27–29 May 2015, organised by the University’s Department of Translation and Interpreting. Spanish and international researchers, translator trainers, and trainee and professional translators gathered at the conference in order to further their knowledge of corpus use, translation training and professional practice. The book includes contributions on the use of multilingual corpora in teaching scientific translation; trans-collocations in parallel corpora; teaching and learning the language of tourism as a Language for Specific Purposes (LSP); and a collocational analysis of verb work in a specialised corpus of English non-financial reports, among others.