A discussion of the problems encountered translating the Bible into many different languages.

Written as diversionary pieces to be performed between the main acts of a play, these eight interludes are comic glimpses of a world far removed from courtly elegance or military heroism.

This book focusses on computer methodologies as a way of investigating language and character in literary texts. Both theoretical and practical, it surveys investigations into characterization in literary linguistics and personality in social psychology, before carrying out a computational analysis of Virginia Woolf’s experimental novel The Waves. Frequencies of grammatical and semantic categories in the language of the six speaking characters are analyzed using Wmatrix software developed by UCREL at Lancaster University. The quantitative analysis is supplemented by a qualitative analysis into recurring patterns of metaphor. The author concludes that these analyses successfully differentiate all six characters, both synchronically and diachronically, and claims that this methodology is also applicable to the study of personality in non-literary language. The book, written in a clear and accessible style, will be of interest to post-graduate students and academics in linguistics, stylistics, literary studies, psychology and also computational approaches.

In Basic Linguistic Theory R. M. W. Dixon provides a comprehensive guide to the nature of human languages and their description and analysis. The books are a one-stop text for undergraduate and graduate students, the triumphant outcome of a lifetime's immersion in every aspect of language, and a lasting monument to innovative scholarship.

No detailed description available for "History of Linguistics, Vol. 2".

The stories of Hagar, Dinah, and Tamar stand out as strangers in the ancestral narrative. They deviate from the main plot and draw attention to the interests and fates of characters who are not a part of the ancestral family. Readers have traditionally domesticated these strange stories. They have made them "familiar"--all about the ancestral family. Thus Hagar's story becomes a drama of deselection, Shechem and the Hivites become emblematic for ancestral conflict with the people of the land, and Tamar becomes a lens by which to read providence in the story of Joseph. This study resurrects the question of these stories' strangeness. Rather than allow the ancestral narrative to determine their significance, it attends to each interlude's particularity and detects ironic gestures made toward the ancestral narrative. These stories contain within them the potential to defamiliarize key themes of ancestral identity: the ancestral-divine relationship, ancestral relations to the land and its inhabitants, and ancestral self-identity. Perhaps the ancestral family are not the only privileged partners of God, the only heirs to the land, or the only bloodline fit to bear the next generation.

Portrait of Linguists is the standard biographical work in the history and theory of linguistics and a resource for all scholars of 18th, 19th and early 20th-century Western linguistics. Edited by Thomas A. Sebeok, this text contains articles by eminent scholars in English, French and German. Ninety-one biographies are featured, including Wilhelm von Humboldt, Jacob Grimm, Franz Bopp, Sir William Jones and Max Muller. They constitute a mass of information on the leading figures in linguistics, and include bibliographical information in addition to revealing the authors' thoughts on the various schools of linguistics. Arranged chronologically by subjects' year of birth, this two-volume work is also indexed at the end of volume 2 and is a valuable storehouse of information on the seminal figures in the mainstream of Western linguistics.

In some languages words tend to be rather short but in others they may be dauntingly long. In this book, a distinguished international group of scholars discuss the concept 'word' and its applicability in a range of typologically diverse languages. An introductory chapter sets the parameters of variation for 'word'. The nine chapters that follow then study the character of 'word' in individual languages, including Amazonian, Australian Aboriginal, Eskimo, Native North American, West African, Balkan and Caucasian languages, and Indo-Pakistani Sign Language. These languages exhibit a huge range of phonological and grammatical characteristics, the close study of which enables the contributors to refine our understanding of what can constitute a 'word'. An epilogue explores the status and cross-linguistic properties of 'word'. The book will be an invaluable resource for scholars of linguistic typology and of morphology and phonology.

The Contributions to the Sociology of Language series features publications dealing with sociolinguistic theory, methods, findings and applications. It addresses the study of language in society in its broadest sense, as a truly international and interdisciplinary field in which various approaches – theoretical and empirical – supplement and complement each other. The series invites the attention of scholars interested in language in society from a broad range of disciplines – anthropology, education, history, linguistics, political science, and sociology. To discuss your book idea or submit a proposal, please contact Natalie Fecher.