"A Bradford book."OCLC-licensed vendor bibliographic record.
Bringing together a team of leading scholars, this volume forms the first global history of African linguistics as an autonomous academic discipline, covering Africa, America, Asia, Australia, and Europe. Defining African linguistics, the volume describes its emergence from a 'colonial science' at the turn of the twentieth century in Europe, where it was first established mainly in academic ins…
Of all of the African language families, the Chadic languages belonging to the Afroasiatic macro-family are highly internally diverse due to a long history and various scenarios of language contact. This pioneering study explores the development of the sound systems of the 'Central Chadic' languages, a major branch of the Chadic family. Drawing on and comparing field data from about 60 differen…
An argument that agreement and agreementless languages are unified under an expanded view of grammatical features including both phi-features and certain discourse configurational features. Much attention in theoretical linguistics in the generative and Minimalist traditions is concerned with issues directly or indirectly related to movement. The EPP (extended projection principle), introduc…
Making diverse data in linguistics and the language sciences open, distributed, and accessible: perspectives from language/language acquistiion researchers and technical LOD (linked open data) researchers. This volume examines the challenges inherent in making diverse data in linguistics and the language sciences open, distributed, integrated, and accessible, thus fostering wide data sharing…
A human-inspired, linguistically sophisticated model of language understanding for intelligent agent systems. One of the original goals of artificial intelligence research was to endow intelligent agents with human-level natural language capabilities. Recent AI research, however, has focused on applying statistical and machine learning approaches to big data rather than attempting to model w…
A guide to principles and methods for the management, archiving, sharing, and citing of linguistic research data, especially digital data. “Doing language science” depends on collecting, transcribing, annotating, analyzing, storing, and sharing linguistic research data. This volume offers a guide to linguistic data management, engaging with current trends toward the transformation of lin…
An introduction to the the range of current theoretical approaches to the prosody of spoken utterances, with practical applications of those theories. Prosody is an extremely dynamic field, with a rapid pace of theoretical development and a steady expansion of its influence beyond linguistics into such areas as cognitive psychology, neuroscience, computer science, speech technology, and even…
Natural phenomena, including human language, are not just series of events but are organized quasi-periodically; sentences have structure, and that structure matters. Howard Lasnik and Juan Uriagereka “were there” when generative grammar was being developed into the Minimalist Program. In this presentation of the universal aspects of human language as a cognitive phenomenon, they rationa…
Linearization, or the typical sequence of words in a sentence, varies tremendously from language to language. Why, for example, does the English phrase “a white table” need a different word order from the French phrase “une table blanche,” even though both refer to the same object? Guglielmo Cinque challenges the current understanding of word order variation, which assumes that word ord…