This book reconstructs what the earliest grammars might have been and shows how they could have led to the languages of modern humankind.
Like other biological phenomena, language cannot be fully understood without reference to its evolution, whether proven or hypothesized," wrote Talmy Givon in 2002. As the languages spoken 8,000 years ago were typologically much the same as they are today and as no direct evidence exists for languages before then, evolutionary linguists are at a disadvantage compared to their counterparts in biology. Bernd Heine and Tania Kuteva seek to overcome this obstacle by combining grammaticalization theory, one of the main methods of historical linguistics, with work in animal communication and human evolution. The questions they address include: do the modern languages derive from one ancestral language or from more than one? What was the structure of language like when it first evolved? And how did the properties associated with modern human languages arise, in particular syntax and the recursive use of language structures? The authors proceed on the assumption that if language evolution is the result of language change then the reconstruction of the former can be explored by deploying the processes involved in the latter. Their measured arguments and crystal-clear exposition will appeal to all those interested in the evolution of language, from advanced undergraduates to linguists, cognitive scientists, human biologists, and archaeologists.

The Learning Languages programme is for all language learners who are studying for leisure or work, or for those who are considering learning a language. It is comprised of a compilation of extracts from a range of programmes about language learning and learners, illustrates some of the issues involved and offers guidelines on how to learn a language more effectively.

There are approximately six thousand languages on Earth today, each a descendant of the tongue first spoken by Homo sapiens some 150,000 years ago. While laying out how languages mix and mutate over time, linguistics professor John McWhorter reminds us of the variety within the species that speaks them, and argues that, contrary to popular perception, language is not immutable and hidebound, but a living, dynamic entity that adapts itself to an ever-changing human environment.

Full of humor and imaginative insight, The Power of Babel draws its illustrative examples from languages around the world, including pidgins, Creoles, and nonstandard dialects.

Contrastive Topology of the English and Ukrainian Languages
by Ilko V. Korunets'.

(Introduction - in Ukrainian, full text -  in English)

Typology as a branch of linguistics comes from "type" or "typical",
hence, it aims at establishing similar general linguistic categories
serving as a basis for the classification of languages of different types,
irrespective of their genealogical relationship.

Contrastive typology, as the notion itself
reveals it, represents a linguistic subject of typology based on the
method of comparison or contrasting. Like typology proper, which has
hitherto been practised, contrastive typology also aims at establishing
the most general structural types of languages on the basis of their
dominant or common phonetical/phonetic, morphological, lexical and
syntactic features. Apart from this contrastive typology may equally
treat dominant or common features only, as well as divergent features/
phenomena only, which are found both in languages of the same
structural type (synthetic, analytical, agglutinative, etc.) as well as in
languages of different structural types (synthetic and analytical, agglutinative
and incorporative, etc.)

The last word on careers in ESL!
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