Semantic change — how the meanings of words change over time — has preoccupied scholars since well before modern linguistics emerged in the late 19th and early 20th century, ushering in a new methodological turn in the study of language change. Compared to changes in sound and grammar, semantic change is the least understood. Ever since, the study of semantic change has progressed steadily,…
Corpus linguistics has much to offer history, being as both disciplines engage so heavily in analysis of large amounts of textual material.This book demonstrates the opportunities for exploring corpus linguistics as a method in historiography and the humanities and social sciences more generally. Focusing on the topic of prostitution in 17th-century England, it shows how corpus methods can assi…
The Yorùbá Yé Mi textbook, combined with an open access, multi-media website, is an interactive, communicative, introductory Yorùbá program. It provides college/university students with basic listening, speaking, reading and writing skills of language learning in Yorùbá. It exposes the learner not only to Yorùbá language in meaningful situations but also to the culture of the Yorùbá-…
The Francophone Caribbean and the American South are sites born of the plantation, the common matrix for the diverse nations and territories of the circum-Caribbean. This book takes as its premise that the basic configuration of the plantation, in terms of its physical layout and the social relations it created, was largely the same in the Caribbean and the American South. Essays written by lea…
Design Discourse: Composing and Revising Programs in Professional and Technical Writing, edited by David Franke, Alex Reid and Anthony DiRenzo, addresses the complexities of developing professional and technical writing programs. The essays in the collection offer reflections on efforts to bridge two cultures — what the editors characterize as the "art and science of writing" — often by add…
This book is a dictionary and grammar sketch of Ik, one of the three Kuliak (Rub) languages spoken in the beautiful Karamoja region of northeastern Uganda. It is the lexicographic sequel to A grammar of Ik (Icé-tód): Northeast Uganda’s last thriving Kuliak language (Schrock 2014). The present volume includes an Ik-English dictionary with roughly 8,700 entries, followed by a reversed English…
This open access volume constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 27th biennial conference of the German Society for Computational Linguistics and Language Technology, GSCL 2017, held in Berlin, Germany, in September 2017, which focused on language technologies for the digital age. The 16 full papers and 10 short papers included in the proceedings were carefully selected from 36 submissions. …
The book raises semiotic questions of human–animal relations: what is the semiotic character of different species, how humans endow animals with meaning, and how animal sign exchange and communication has coped with environmental change. The book takes a zoosemiotic approach and considers different species as being integrated with the environment via their specific umwelt or subjective percep…
Academic literacy used to be considered a complex set of skills that develop automatically as a by-product of academic socialization. Since the Bologna Reform with its shorter degree programmes, however, it has been realized that these skills need to be fostered actively. Simultaneously, writing skills development at all levels of education has been faced with the challenge of increasingly mult…
This book is the first comprehensive monograph dedicated to Chakali, a Southwestern Grusi language spoken by less than 3500 people in northwest Ghana. The dictionary offers a consistent description of word meaning and provides the basis for future research in the linguistic area. It is also designed to provide an inventory of correspondence with English usage in a reversal index. The concepts u…