Founding Grammars: How Early America's War Over Words Shaped Today's Language
Who decided not to split infinitives? With whom should we take issue if in fact, we wish to boldly write what no grammarian hath writ before? In Founding Grammars, Rosemarie Ostler delves into the roots of our grammar obsession to answer these questions and many more. Standard grammar and accurate spelling are widely considered hallmarks of a good education, but their exact definitions are much more contentious - capable of inciting a full-blown grammar war at the splice of a comma, battles readily visible in the media and online in the comments of blogs and chat rooms.
This book presents a systematic reconstruction of the Proto-Afrasian phonological system and the regular sound correspondences upon which that reconstruction is based. As will become evident, some of those correspondences are more secure than others — the sibilants, dental affricates, and fricative laterals, in particular, are still not completely certain.
Mediatization characterizes changes in practices and institutions in media-saturated societies, thus denoting transformations of these societies. The volume makes a valuable contribution to the understanding of contemporary processes of social, cultural and political changes. The handbook offers a broad spectrum of different approaches to mediatization of communication and in this way provides the reader with the most current state of research.
"The German Language Today" sets out to show the linguistic variety that exists within the German speech community as well as describing the main systematic linguistic features of the language. In it, Charles Russ covers most of the factors which produce competing forms in German, and describes the sounds, inflectional processes, syntactic structures and different layers of words in language. He seeks to give recognition to the fact that languages are changing. "The German Language Today" is detailed in its coverage of both sociolinguistic and linguistic topics, use of illustrative texts and examples, and the application of modern linguistic concepts to German coverage.
This book demonstrates the contribution that statistics can and should make to linguistic studies. The range of work to which statistical analysis is applicable is vast: including, for example, language acquisition, language variation and many aspects of applied linguistics. The authors give a wide variety of linguistic examples to demonstrate the use of statistics in summarising data in the most appropriate way, and then making helpful inferences from the processed information. The range of techniques introduced by the book will help the reader both to evaluate and make use of literature which employs statistical analysis, and to apply statistics in their own research.
