Any theory of phonology must be able to account for the acquisition and development of a phonological system, and studying acquisition often leads to reciprocal advances in the theory. This volume explores the link between phonological theory and linguistic development from a variety of angles, including phonological representation, individual differences, and cross-linguistic approaches. Chapters touch on the full spectrum of phonological development, from childhood to adult second-language learning, and from developing dialects to language death.

This volume focuses on how English, through false Anglicisms, influences several European languages, including Italian, Spanish, French, German, Danish and Norwegian. Studies on false Gallicisms are also included, thus showing how English may be affected by false borrowings.

The volume takes on the much-needed task of describing and explaining the nature of the relations and interactions between mind, language and action in defining mentality. Papers by renowned philosophers unravel what is increasingly acknowledged to be the enacted nature of the mind, memory and language-acquisition, whilst also calling attention to Wittgenstein's contribution. The volume offers unprecedented insight, clarity, scope, and currency.

English has long been suspected to be a vowel-shifting language. This hypothesis, often only adumbrated in previous work, is closely investigated in this book. Framed within a novel framework combining evolutionary linguistics and optimality theory, the account proposed here argues that the replacement of duration by quality as the primary cue to signaling vowel oppositions has resulted in the 'shiftiness' of many post-medieval English varieties.

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the 8th International Conference of Middle English, held in Spain at the University of Murcia in 2013. The contributions embrace a variety of research topics and approaches, with a particular interest in multilingualism, multidialectalism and language contact in medieval England, together with other more linguistically-oriented approaches on the phonology, syntax, morphology, semantics and pragmatics of Middle English.