This volume examines relationships between native languages and Yiddish. It highlights the historical and sociolinguistic development of Turkic, Iranian, South Asian, Slavic, Greek, Balkan, Judezmo, Armenian, Georgian, and Basque languages. One of the main focuses is on the adopted post-medieval and pre-modern Yiddish-speaking Ashkenazi homelands of Eastern Europe. The book emphasizes the role of ludic or playful modifications of a language's structures at the colloquial level as sources of linguistic change. And, it goes further to say that expressive language, linguistic iconicity, and etymological analysis can all complement and enrich each other.

The title of our volume on interdisciplinary semiotics is situated in a geographical metaphor and points to the possibility of uncovering meanings through shifting perspectives as well as to the possibility of understanding how these various modes of meaning are articulated and framed in particular cultural instances. Regardless of medium, semiotic rotations permit play between the surface and underlying levels of a communication, reveal the relationship between open and closed systems of signification, and modulate shades of meaning caught between the visible and invisible. Readerly play in these sets of apparent oppositions reveals that the less each pairing is held to be a coupling of oppositions and the more they are observed through perspectives gained by semiotic rotations, then the more complex and rich the modes of meaning may become.

This volume examines the concept of 'word' in its many guises and across many languages. 'Word' is a cornerstone for the understanding of any language: it is a pronounceable phonological unit; it has a meaning and a morphological structure and syntactic function; and it exists as a dictionary entry and an orthographic item. Speakers also understand 'word' as a psychological reality: they can talk about the meaning of a word and its suitability in certain social contexts. However, the relationship between the phonological word and grammatical word can be more complex, in that a phonological word can consist of more than one grammatical word, or vice versa. Following an introduction outlining the parameters of variation for phonological word and grammatical word, the chapters in this volume explore how the concept of 'word' can be applied to languages of diverse typological make-up, from the highly synthetic to highly analytic. The data are drawn from languages of Australia and the Pacific (Fijian, Yalaku, Yidiñ), the Americas (Chamacoco, Murui, Jarawara), Asia (Hmong, Japanese, Lao), and Africa (Makary Kotoko), with a final chapter that investigates the properties of 'word' from a cross-linguistic perspective. The volume advances our understanding of what constitutes a word, and will be a valuable resource for scholars and students of typology, linguistic anthropology, phonology, and grammar.

Though “pejoration” is an important notion for linguistic analysis and theory, there is still a lack of theoretical understanding and sound descriptive analysis. In this timely collection, the phenomenon of pejoration is studied from a number of angles. It contains studies from phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics, and deals with diverse languages and their variants. The collection will appeal to all those linguists with a genuine interest in locating pejoration at the grammar-pragmatics interface.

Historical linguistic theory and practice consist of a large number of chronological "layers" that have been accepted in the course of time and have acquired a permanence of their own. These range from neogrammarian conceptualizations of sound change, analogy, and borrowing, to prosodic, lexical, morphological, and syntactic change, and to present-day views on rule change and the effects of language contact. To get a full grasp of the principles of historical linguistics it is therefore necessary to understand the nature of each of these "layers". This book is a major revision and reorganization of the earlier editions and adds entirely new chapters on morphological change and lexical change, as well as a detailed discussion of linguistic palaeontology and ideological responses to the findings of historical linguistics to this landmark publication.

English Lexicogenesis investigates the processes by which novel words are coined in English, and how they are variously discarded or adopted, and frequently then adapted. Gary Miller looks at the roles of affixation, compounding, clipping, and blending in the history of lexicogenesis, including processes taking place right now. The first four chapters consider English morphology and the recent types of word formation in English: the first introduces the morphological terminology used in the work and the book's theoretical perspectives; chapter 2 discusses productivity and constraints on derivations; chapter 3 describes the basic typology of English compounds; and chapter 4 considers the role of particles in word formation and recent construct types specific to English. Chapters 5 and 6 focus respectively on analogical and imaginative aspects of neologistic creation and the roles of metaphor and metonymy. In chapters 7 and 8 the author considers the influence of folk etymology and tabu, and the cycle of loss of expressivity and its renewal. After outlining the phonological structure of words and its role in word abridgements, he examines the acoustic and perceptual motivation of word forms. He then devotes four chapters to aspects and functions of truncation and to reduplicative and conjunctive formations. In the final chapter he looks at the relationship between core and expressive morphology and the role of punning and other forms of language play, before summarizing his arguments and findings and setting out avenues for future research.

This book explores the role of phonological templates in early language use from the perspective of usage-based phonology and exemplar models and within the larger developmental framework of Dynamic Systems Theory. After analysing children's first words and their adult targets, Vihman sets out procedures for establishing the children's later prosodic structures and templates, drawing on data from American and British English, Estonian, Finnish, French, Italian, and Welsh; she also provides briefer longitudinal accounts of template use in Arabic and Brazilian Portuguese. The children are found to begin with simple word forms that match their selected adult targets; this is followed by the production of more challenging words, adapted to fit the child's existing patterns. Early accuracy is replaced by later recourse to an 'inner model'--a template--of a favoured word shape. The book also examines the timing, fading, quantification, and function of child phonological templates. In addition, two chapters focus on the use of templates in adult language, in the core grammar and in the more creative morphology of colloquial 'short forms' and hypocoristics in French and Estonian and of English rhyming compounds. The idea of templates is traced back to its origins in Prosodic Morphology, but its uses are most in evidence in the informal settings of adult language 'at play'. Throughout the volume, the discussion returns to the issues of emergent systematicity, the roles of articulatory and memory challenges for children, and the similarities and differences in the function of templates for adults as compared with children.

In this fascinating history of the influences on English during the first thousand years of its formation the author shows when and why the Anglo-Saxons began to borrow words from Latin and Greek and the effects of contact with the Vikings, Celts, and French. A book of enduring value to everyone interested in the history of English.

This book addresses the topic of linguistic categorization from a novel perspective. While most of the early research has focused on how linguistic systems reflect some pre-existing ways of categorizing experience, the contributions included in this volume seek to understand how linguistic resources of various nature (prosodic cues, affixes, constructions, discourse markers, ...) can be ‘put to work’ in order to actively build categories in discourse and in interaction, to achieve social goals. This question is addressed in different ways by researchers from different subfields of linguistics, including psycholinguistics, conversation analysis, linguistic typology and discourse pragmatics, and a major point of innovation is represented in fact by the interdisciplinary nature of the volume and in the systematic search for converging evidence.

The second edition of the definitive reference on contact studies and linguistic change—provides extensive new research and original case studies Language contact is a dynamic area of contemporary linguistic research that studies how language changes when speakers of different languages interact. Accessibly structured into three sections, The Handbook of Language Contact explores the role of contact studies within the field of linguistics, the value of contact studies for language change research, and the relevance of language contact for sociolinguistics. This authoritative volume presents original findings and fresh research directions from an international team of prominent experts. Thirty-seven specially-commissioned chapters cover a broad range of topics and case studies of contact from around the world. Now in its second edition, this valuable reference has been extensively updated with new chapters on topics including globalization, language acquisition, creolization, code-switching, and genetic classification. Fresh case studies examine Romance, Indo-European, African, Mayan, and many other languages in both the past and the present. Addressing the major issues in the field of language contact studies, this volume: Includes a representative sample of individual studies which re-evaluate the role of language contact in the broader context of language and society Offers 23 new chapters written by leading scholars Examines language contact in different societies, including many in Africa and Asia Provides a cross-section of case studies drawing on languages across the world The Handbook of Language Contact, Second Edition is an indispensable resource for researchers, scholars, and students involved in language contact, language variation and change, sociolinguistics, bilingualism, and language theory.