Word stress has long presented challenges to phonologists, as they have sought to uncover patterns in its distribution, and devise models to account for its behaviour and formal representation both within single languages and cross-linguistically. In this collection, a team of world-renowned researchers present a variety of viewpoints on the methods and problems involved. Offering fresh perspectives on the topic and its study, this book is specifically concerned with basing theoretical work on broad typological surveys and focuses on the collection, selection and use of data in the analysis of word stress and word rhythm, including their phonetic manifestations.
This book combines ideas about the architecture of grammar and language acquisition, processing, and change to explain why languages show regular patterns when there is so much irregularity in their use and so much complexity when there is such regularity in linguistic phenomena. Peter Culicover argues that the structure of language can be understood and explained in terms of two kinds of complexity: firstly that of the correspondence between form and meaning; secondly in the real-time processes involved in the construction of meanings in linguistic expressions.
There are fewer distinctions in any language than there are distinct things in the universe. If, therefore, languages are ways of representing the universe, a primary function of their elements must be to allow the much more varied kinds of elements out of which the universe is made to be categorized in specific ways. A prototype approach to linguistic categories is a particular way of answering the question of how this categorization operates.
Teachers, politicians, broadcasters, and parents complain of the slang-infested language of today's teenagers. But slang has been around for centuries, always troubling those who take a purist line on the English language. In this entertaining book, Julie Coleman traces the development of slang across the English-speaking world and explores why and how it flourishes. She makes use of a marvellous array of sources, including newly available online records of the Old Bailey, machine-searchable historical newspaper collections, slang users themselves, scholarly works, and the latest tweets. It is a book guaranteed to teach you some new words that you shold never use in polite company.
This book provides a fresh approach to Singapore English, by focusing on its cultural connotations. The author, a native Singaporean, explores a range of aspects of this rich variety of English - including address forms, cultural categories, particles and interjections - and links particular words to particular cultural norms. By using the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) approach, which is free from technical terminology, he explains the relationship between meaning and culture with maximal clarity, and an added strength of this study lies in its use of authentic examples and pictures, which offer a fascinating glimpse of Singaporean life.
