Research into varieties of Englishes around the world has received much attention from scholars. This book offers a new perspective from a cognitive inter and intra lexemic analysis of prepositional variations in Malaysian English and contrasts them with similar prepositions in New Zealand and British English. Based on corpora data from the three varieties, the author provides usage types analysis of the prepositions at, in and on. The analysis exploits cognitive approaches to prepositional polysemy and gives a motivated account of prepositional variations across varieties.
This is a revised version of Theory Groups and the Study of Language in North America (1994), the post-World-War-II history of the emergence of sociolinguistics in North America that was described in Language in Society as “a heady combination of detailed scholarship, mordant wit, and sustained narrative designed to persuade even the skeptical reader that these myriad, often simultaneously emergent, ways of thinking about language are indeed interrelated. . . .
New Zealand English is currently one of the most researched varieties of English world-wide. This book presents an up-to-date account of all the major aspects of New Zealand English by leading scholars as well as younger specialists in each of the major fields of enquiry. The book is authoritative in its range and represents not only a synopsis of past research, but also new research in many areas of study. It is of interest not just to specialists in regional varieties of English but many of the chapters detail new approaches to the study of dialect phenomena
More than anything else, language is what makes us human. Linguistics, the discipline which studies the structure, function and phenomena of language, has uncovered many surprising and fascinating things about the nature of our human language faculty. This book demystifies the subject, presenting a clear account of what linguists do, how they go about it, and what they have achieved so far.
Linguist Noam Chomsky maintains that the human brain has an innate language faculty, and that part of this biological endowment is a 'universal grammar', a theory of principles common to all languages. Thus, all human languages and the ways in which children learn them are remarkably similar. Chomsky's book Syntactic Structures was a turning-point in 20th-century linguistics, challenging assumptions in many areas such as philosophy, psychology and intellectual history.
