This BBC Radio 4 series is written and presented by Bill Bryson and based on his best-selling book “Mother Tongue”. In it he romps through the history of Britain to reveal how English became such an infuriatingly complex – but ultimately world-beating – language. The subject areas covered in the course of the programme (which…
Proposing a new account of the nature of language, founded upon an original interpretation of Wittgenstein, Patricia Hanna and Bernard Harrison deny the existence of a direct referential relationship between words and things. Their provocative re-examination of the interrelations of language and social practice will interest not only philosophers of language but also linguists, psycholinguists,…
Signed languages are the naturally-evolved visual-gestural languages of deaf communities. The realization that they are true languages is one of the great discoveries of the last thirty years of linguistic research. This book examines the linguistic properties of many, including detailed case studies of Hong Kong, British, Mexican and German signed languages. The contributors focus…
Preposition placement, the competition between preposition stranding (What is he talking about?) and pied-piping (About what is he talking?), is one of the most interesting areas of syntactic variation in English. This is the first book to investigate preposition placement across all types of clauses that license it, such as questions, exclamations and wh-clauses, and…
Word grammar is a theory of language structure and is based on the assumption that language, and indeed the whole of knowledge, is a network, and that virtually all of knowledge is learned. It combines the psychological insights of cognitive linguistics with the rigour of more formal theories. This textbook spans a broad range of…