A dish may be delicious, a painting beautiful, a piece of information justified. Whether the attributed properties "really" hold, seems to depend on somebody like a speaker or a group of people that share standards and background. Relativists and contextualists differ in where they locate the dependency theoretically. This book collects papers that corroborate the contextualist view that the dependency is part of the language.
For thousands of years, the human mind has been shrouded in mystery. Elusive in nature, the subject has prompted an intensive study of several puzzling questions:
Authority and Identity: A Sociolinguistic History of Europe Before the Modern Age
This is a history of Europe unlike any other: a theory-informed history of its language use. The 'rise' and 'fall' of languages are recounted, along with an analysis of why periods of linguistic diversity are followed by hegemony. How did the sociolinguistic past differ from the sociolinguistic present?
This is corpus linguistics with a text linguistic focus. The volume concerns lexical inequality, the fact that some words and phrases share the quality of being key – and thereby reflect or promote important themes – in some textual contexts, while others do not. The patterning of words which differ in their centrality to text meaning is of increasing interest to corpus linguistics.
